Healthy Soil, Healthy People
You have to slip into four-wheel-drive to negotiate the descent from
the mesa top to Ashokola Gardens and Peacefield, the remote garden, homestead, and sustainable-living center where Kim Howell-Costion lives with her husband, Joseph Costion, in the high piٌon-juniper country east of Snowflake, Arizona. It’s worth every bump to get a glimpse of a place where this pioneering couple has honed the crafts of sustainability to a high art, one that inspires not only them, but numerous neighbors too.
Kim came to this place seventeen years ago and began caretaking a one-room cabin without plumbing or electricity. The path down off the mesa was impassable for cars. Everything, at times even water, had to be carried down in five-gallon buckets. Digging by hand, she planted garden beds irrigated with rainwater she had collected off her roof. In the early days a pick would practically bounce off the hard clay. Kim added compost – lots of compost.
Determined and independent, Kim hitchhiked into Snowflake for supplies now and again. Kim’s sister introduced her to Joe. He was taken with this maker of soil, master gardener, wonderful cook. “She was committed to the land,” Joe says now. “She had a dream and was gonna make it work.” When he proposed to her, he promised he’d never ask her to leave the land.
Joe is the director of the Industrial Technologies Program at Coconino Community College in Flagstaff. He served on a nuclear submarine during the oil crisis of the early 1970s, an experience that fostered his undying dedication to the cause of renewable energy. Joe wanted to build an energy-efficient home in order to put his principles into practice. “Buildings use 50 percent of our energy supplies,” he points out. “We could have an impact on 50 percent of our energy use by teaching energy efficiency in building construction.”
Kim, wanting to keep things simple, was resistant at first. Joe won her over by offering to build a root cellar. The two-story home is built in southwestern style, with wide porches and exposed vigas. Joe built the place using passive solar design principles. He used concrete blocks, grouted solid and covered on the outside with rigid insulation, for the exterior walls. The outer insulation layer allows the inner thermal mass of the concrete walls to store up the sun’s warmth in the winter and coolness in summer. Roof overhangs shade out summer sun. Natural light from carefully placed windows reduces the need for artificial lighting. Solar panels power lights and a few appliances; solar heaters warm water for washing and bathing. A “Watson Wick” graywater system recycles precious water.
The south side of the house is an 800-square-foot solar greenhouse that serves both to heat the house in winter and to get Kim’s seedlings started. She starts some thirty thousand seedlings a year. Half are sold through a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program in which subscribers sign up to receive a shipment of seedlings once a month in spring and summer. She plants the other half in her own one-acre garden. The greenhouse pays for itself in CSA income, and in reduced heating costs for the household.
After years of intensive work, the soil at Ashokola Gardens is rich and lush. “These high desert soils can seem really challenging, but you really can grow bounty out of them, and they continue for a long time,” Kim says. She has experimented with various ways of building soil, but often uses the so-called lasagna method. She plants a green manure crop, then turns the crop into the soil and puts a layer of waterlogged corrugated cardboard on it. Then she adds a thick layer of leaves, a thinner layer of manure, and a thin layer of pine needles. A bed layered in this manner in the fall is ready for planting in spring. To plant, Kim digs a hole in the cardboard and plants seedlings in the soil.
Kim estimates that she composts twenty to thirty tons of organic material each year. She is on the lookout for appropriate material such as leaves and pine needles all the time. She puts it in piles eight feet wide, some twenty feet long, and four to five feet high. Its breakdown is fueled by appropriate amounts of water and by copious numbers of worms; Kim regularly checks the temperature to make sure each pile is right for the worms.
Along with making good soil, Kim manages microclimates in her garden. She plants corn, squash, and beans in clusters in which plants shield one another from sun and wind. She shades rhubarb from the intense sun with grape vines that thrive in the new, deep soil. Fences between beds stop both animals and wind and support berry crops. Leaky dams built of leaves, pine needles, twigs, and branches slow the flow of water in washes, stopping erosion and
allowing sediments and nutrients to enrich the soil. She and Joe have built retaining walls that soak up solar radiation and give it off slowly at night, buffering plants from the day-night temperature extremes typical of their arid climate and 5,600-foot elevation.
The house, outbuildings, and gardens demand continuous work, but Kim and Joe also devote a great deal of energy to teaching. Joe teaches courses in passive solar design, innovative building methods, solar greenhouse construction, and other energy-efficiency alternatives. He teaches his students how to calculate heat transfer and insulation and thermal mass values, but he also teaches the importance of aesthetics: the beauty and comfort of good buildings. For Joe, efficiency, elegance, and concern for what ordinary people can afford go hand-in-hand.
Kim, for her part, teaches a series of gardening classes in Snowflake and Flagstaff and classes specific to growing and cooking with such crops as onions, garlic, chilis, tomatoes, and basil. She’s helped hundreds of people learn how to cope with the often difficult conditions of the high desert. “Healthy soil,” she says, “leads to healthy plants, which leads to healthy people.”
If Joe the builder and Kim the gardener and cook are any indication, it’s certainly possible to craft a healthy life in the high desert very much in keeping with the principles of simplicity and stewardship for the land.
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