Mission:
food self-sufficiency
Susan Harris - reporter
Takoma Publishing
A Purple Mountain Organics
Feature
Photos:
Julie Wiatt
Dr.
Nazirahk Amen and his family are in the forefront of the
movement
to eat locally
Maybe
you know Dr. Nazirahk Amen and his family as the Purple People
who live in a bright purple house on Carroll Avenue in Takoma
Park. Or you know the good doctor as the practitioner of naturopathy,
acupuncture and other healing arts, or as the teacher of meditation
and vegan cooking. But what you may not know is they’re
in the forefront of the growing movement to eat locally, popularized
by Michael Pollan in his bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
Food that is merely organic makes way for the growing legions
of “locavores,” and what’s more local than growing
your own food? That’s exactly what the Amens do, though
not because they read Pollan’s book. It’s all part
of their spiritual quest to live sustainable, holistic lives.
The
Gardens
To
learn the secrets of their sustainable food operation, my first
stop was behind that purple house on Carroll Avenue, where I found
raised 2-foot-tall vegetable-growing beds filled with compost
(9 years’ worth) and coconut coir. And everywhere are containers
of all types planted with food-to-be, many of them discards from
Whole Foods (“Wasteful!”). An 85-gallon compost tea
brewer is nearby and inside the house is a kitchen compost bin
and worm composting operation. Nothing is wasted.
Next, it’s only a five-minute drive to the community garden
on Blair Road, where the largest part of their farming operation
is located - a 50 x 30-foot plot bursting with sweet potatoes,
okra, tomatoes, eggplant, pepper, okra, cucumber, corn, summer
& winter squash when I visited in September. (They pay only
$30 a year for this double plot, which generously covers the water
used all season. Incredibly, plots go unused. Call Howard Williams
at 202/529-3683 to reserve one for next year.)
Biointensive
gardening
Edibles
grown in containers are part of the effcient practicality of holistic
life
According to Dr. Amen, a family of four can be fed on a quarter-acre
lot or a 30x30-foot plot, with enough space to rotate the crops.
What makes it work are the techniques of biointensive gardening,
which produce maximum yields on a minimum of land while leaving
the soil better off. (See Growbiointensive.org and PolyfaceFarms.com.)
The raised beds are intensively planted at the ground level, belowground
and in the air. Okra is grown on top of sweet potatoes, cukes
underneath corn. Different crops are grown in the same spot at
different times of the season, as well. The plants grown include
good compost crops, too, so that the gardens produce their own
fertilizer. Using these and other techniques of biointensive gardening,
the Amens grew over 700 pounds of sweet potatoes alone this year.
Foraging
for dinner
I
love this part. Turns out there’s plenty of free food around
town for the picking, like persimmons, berries, figs and apples,
so the Amens supplement their gardening by foraging for it. Even
bamboo shoots are good eating, stir-fried. Those messy droppings
from mulberry trees that everyone complains about are sweet and
great for pies and muffins; just get them before they drop. And
speaking of freebies, the Amens estimate that half the greens
they eat are either weeds or volunteers, like the squash and tomatoes
that grow from seeds in their compost. The weed amaranth (aka
pigweed) is a grain that’s complete protein and a popular
food in the Caribbean, “like spinach but more nutritious”.
So the Purple People will tell you they’re not just gardeners
but “gleaners” or “freegans.”
The
Results
The
Amens grew over 700 lbs. of sweet potatoes this year. From June
through October the Amens feed their family (equivalent to four
or five adults) entirely from the garden. Winter is trickier but
greens can be grown all winter using a high tunnel or a greenhouse.
Other winter crops include squash and sweet potatoes plus everything
they’ve canned, dried, frozen or stored from the previous
season. So the key to eating in winter is “intensive kitchen
prep”, like drying herbs and sun-dried tomatoes, making
and freezing gumbo, making and canning tomato sauce. Carrots and
beets are simply stored for eating during the winter. Year-round,
the family grows about 85 percent of the foods they eat, with
items like oils, nuts, flour, peanut butter, and sweeteners remaining
to be bought. Their diet is vegan, primarily whole grains, with
seasoning making up for the lack of meat taste.
Not
bad for suburbanites. At their monastic headquarters in the Ozarks,
even greater success toward sustainability is achieved through
practices like “extreme conservation”. For more information
visit ThePurplePeople.org
and News from
Nahziryah Monastic Community .
Teaching
Healthier Eating
Fortunately,
Dr. Amen isn’t satisfied with having the healthiest family
on the block. His mission includes setting an example for others,
especially his patients. They come to him as individuals with
problems like arthritis or obesity and leave with 3-week detox
diets that he hopes become lifetime diets for their whole families.
“It’s hard to change in isolation, so whole families
have to change,” he says.
Judging
from my own brief exposure to the biointensive, vegan lifestyle
of the Amen family, I can report that it’s hard not to be
swept away by the sheer groundedness of it all. The sweet potatoes
and sweet potato greens that they cunningly sent me home with
tasted so much better than I expected that they infiltrated my
own thinking about food, even about how I garden (which for me
is a bigger deal than how I eat). The upshot is that I’ve
decided to rip out my front lawn and turn that patch of unproductive
monoculture into an edible landscape. I’d long been reading
other gardenbloggers’ stories of the joys of growing their
own food (especially TheSlowCook.com in D.C.) but spending an
afternoon with the Purple People sent me right over the edge.
For
more information about growing and preparing foods, Dr. Amen recommends:
"The Vegetable Growers Handbook"
by Frank Tozer
"The Permaculture Garden"
by Graham Bell
"Designing Your Edible
Landscape Naturally" by Kourik and Creasy
"The New Organic Grower"
by Eliot Coleman
