I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree

In the front yard of the house I rent in Los Angeles there is an empty barrel standing between two handsome cacti. The barrel has been empty as long as we’ve lived here – we have no idea what it was used for before – and with the recent rainy season we’ve been living through, the barrel is now threatening to become a breeding ground for mosquitoes.

To combat this threat, I got the idea of filling the barrel up with soil and planting vegetables in it. This idea came surprisingly from the anthropologist James C. Scott, who wrote in Seeing Like A State about how the imposition of “modern” agricultural techniques, like monoculture sowing, by the British on Kenyan farms led to widespread crop failures. What had worked for millenia prior was the locally developed system of intensive agriculture that crossplanted complementary crops in the same rows. This fended off pests and helped fix nitrogen in the soil.

I would like to try my own hand at complementary gardening, as the veggie bloggers today call it. It is mid-March and so we are hitting the late spring growing season’s stride. What plants best today, according to Gardening in LA, are tubers like carrots and beets and big leafy bushes like lettuce and chard. It’s also important to plant herbs. Because my barrel is small but deep we will emphasize “deep root” herbs, so primarily basil and parsley.

The plan then is to plant lettuce and carrots in an inner and outer ring roughly in the shape of the roots of unity.

Basil and parsley will be added where space allows. After the spring season ends, we will transplant tomatoes and cucumbers.

The goal is yield maximization – I want to make this small barrel the most productive 3 cubic feet of earth in the county. To that end, we’ll water and fertilize and hopefully reap the benefits of complementary gardening.

I will report back!