For more than 30 years John Jeavons has been preaching the benefits of small-scale, sustainable farming. Now, on a farm just outside Willits, Jeavons operates the nonprofit Ecology Action and teaches his methods to gardeners from as far away as Siberia, Africa and Latin America.

It takes about 15,000 to 30,000 square feet of land to feed one person the average U.S. diet,” he says. “I’ve figured out how to get it down to 4,000 square feet. How? I focus on growing soil, not crops.

In 1972, John Jeavons formed Ecology Action and started farming nearly four acres in Palo Alto. Alan Chadwick, pioneer of the French intensive/biodynamic method of farming, came up from Santa Cruz to teach classes. The first edition of “How to Grow More Vegetables” was published two years later. At last, Jeavons was finding answers to the question he’d been asking farmers for years.

He took the best of Chadwick’s intensive farming techniques, including double-digging, composting and closely-spaced planting, and added a few ideas of his own. An organic farm should be a closed system, he reasoned. Off-the-farm inputs like manure, bagged compost, alfalfa meal and liquid kelp all require additional land, water and resources to produce. That, in Jeavon’s view, is hardly sustainable agriculture.

8 steps to grow more vegetables via biointensive gardening

• Double-dug, raised beds.

Loosening the soil to a depth of 24 inches allows roots to penetrate more deeply and creates a raised bed effect. Sounds like hard work? John Jeavons’ video “Dig It” demonstrates an Aikido-style movement that makes double-digging almost effortless.

• Composting. A healthy compost pile is key to replenishing the soil.
• Intensive planting.

“Ignore the spacing instructions that come with your seeds,” Jeavons says “Plant seedlings so close that when they are mature, the leaves touch. This keeps soil moist and prevents weeds from sprouting.

• Companion planting.

Green beans love strawberries, corn provides shade to cucumbers, and fast-maturing radishes grow well in between slower-growing carrots.

• Carbon farming.

Corn, millet and oats, along with other seed and grain crops, make up an important part of the diet and provide plenty of high-carbon additions to the compost pile.

• Calorie farming.

Growing a year’s food supply means focusing on high- calorie, space-efficient foods like potatoes and parsnips.

• Open-pollinated seeds.

Special hybrids aren’t needed in healthy soil, Jeavons says. Using open-pollinated seeds like the ones offered in his Bountiful Gardens Catalog helps preserve genetic diversity.

• Use the whole method.

Jeavons emphasizes that high yields come from using all Grow Biointensive components together.

So there we have a system which enables anybody to grow more vegetables on less land, as long as you do the whole thing .

So I had in my vegetable racks and fridge:

Two sacks of lovely potatoes.

Two enormous cauliflowers

Enough broccoli to sink a battleship

Just the right amount of onions, probably

Half a field of carrots

Lots of lovely lovely leeks

A couple of nice dark green cabbages

I may have forgotten something but if so, I’m sure it was delicious

Now then, Riverford claim about the roots and greens box “The veg has a good shelf life, so if you’re feeling extra thrifty try a fortnightly delivery.”  which is what I effectively had to cope with. I chose to cook one of the cauliflowers first, grated some carrots for a salad and started to munch my way through the broccoli. Potatoes keep for weeks in the dark so I didn’t worry about them too much.  After the end of teh first week I could see an of the two boxes end in sight. The second cauliflower had developed a mouldy patch but only in one isolated segment, the rest was fine. The carrots were in extraordinarily good condition. Supermarket carrots go limp after a couple of days when kept out in a room with variable temperature but these were still crisp and juicy. The leeks lasted well two. No need to peel away several layers of yellow leaves, just trim the ends a little bit.

The controversy has been raised: is it better to keep the bunched carrots with the green feathery top foliage intact or cut them off?

I think the greens help to transpose moisture away from the carrot roots so they dry out more quickly but Linda thinks keeping the greens on will mean they last longer. Probably we’ll eat them with a couple of days anyway but it’s important to know what is really the best way to keep these special vegetables in tip top condition for even a short time.

What do you think is best and what do you do with bunched carrots from your organic vegetable boxes?

Louise Fresco presents at a TED talk on the subject of “Feeding the Whole World” in praise of technology, science and mass produced industrial food.

“Never before has our food been made by so few of us. And never before has it been taken so much for granted.”

( Hat tip to Josien Kapma for the video )

Louise Fresco, Dutch Academic, tells the Californians that holding a preference for wholemeal organic bread and despising mass produced white bread is a luxury for the rich, and not practical for the third world’s poor workers and farmers. So does she have a point?

The opposite happened to me though. I thought I’d been efficient and cancelled my regular vegetable box for the week I was away recently, and when I got back the next week’s box of vegetables arrived exactly when it was suppose to, but the week after that I was left without. So make sure you understand the difference between a future order and a recurring order before you cancel organic boxes.

Supermarkets now sell more than 70 per cent of organic produce in the UK — but, having done well in the organic boom, they are now bearing the brunt of the decline. According to Soil Association surveys, it is “barcode” sales of organic that are falling. Farmers’ markets, farm shops and box schemes are still all doing OK.

* Green chillies : Don’t put the raw green chillies straight in the fridge. To keep them fresh for a long time remove the stems and put them in a ziplock bag or in some storage box.
* Carrots: Cover the carrots with a damp cloth and put them in fridge. They can keep for a whole week like that instead of going soft and limp in a few days.
* Herbs: Bunches of coriander have to be one of the common one to go bad before you get to use it all. To keep them fresh I store them in a salad container so the leaves don’t touch the icy wall at the back and get frostbite. You can use the same tip for greens too.
* Brocoli: When you store brocoli look for dark green buds with no yellowish color. And store them in a airtight container or in a sealed bag and it will last up to a week. Don’t store more than a week.
* cucumbers: Pick the ones that have no soft spots or visible bruises. It should be dark green and firm, So it will last longer in the fridge when you store it in the air tight bag. It will stay fresh up to 5 days, but really it’s probably better to take it out of the plastic wrap and use it sooner rather than later.

When you are stocking organic vegetables in your refrigerator, make a list of them and stick it in your fridge door. That way when you are trying to make up your mind on what to cook you can quickly decide on what to use first and avoid wasting vegetables that go bad faster. I hope these tips are useful for making the best use of your precious vegetables from the organic vegetable boxes.

Ethical Superstore have recently introduced a system to provide a small range of local organic veg box schemes as a trial, with an additional national vegetable delivery scheme to cover most of the remaining areas of the mainland UK.

We at Organic Boxes blog would be interested to hear from customers who tried this method, whether by registering for a regular organic vegetable box scheme or ordering a one off hamper.