Swidden or midden?

by Annabel Strate-Friesen and Mary Strate  (August 2014)

Last week we had to burn a brush pile after felling some trees for lumber. Although fire is fun for flammable children, I was wary. (As an asthmatic I am the family canary for air pollutants such as smoke, methane, and aerosols.) I gently reminded Mum that she was contributing to global warming and ruining my future. She was a swiddener, slashing and burning our forest to make way for crops. I would rather she was a middener, sludging and trudging our garden over a dunghill.

True, wood ash helps Mary’s garden grow but did she ever wonder why Hemmingford farmers have such nice black earth? Does anyone remember the poem? Instead of swiddens, they have middens.

A midden is a dunghill or refuse heap consisting of animal manure, vegetable discards, shells, and other organic domestic waste. There is geoarchaeological evidence of Neolithic farmers in Great Britain preferentially plowing into Mesolithic middens to sow crops (Guttmann 2005). Who would have thought that the best real estate in Britain consists of cavemen coprolites? Would Matthew’s father see real estate prices rise with this news? It is true; the best soil to raise crops in is that which has been decorated with dung.

Our neighbours sow their crops in Montérégie’s ‘black muck’ and work aged manure into the fields. The black muck is primarily peat moss, which is organic matter that has composted for a long time. In fact, it accumulates at a rate of about one millimetre per year making a sack of peat moss even older that my father. (That said, one lady in town spoils her horses and hardly ever has hoof issues thanks to peat moss.)

Black muck mixed with manure is an elixir that gardeners find tantalising as it is black gold for organic gardeners. The godfather of organic gardening, George Washington Carver, was one of the first to see value in this nifty alchemy in a manure filled midden. Carver demonstrated on an experimental farm that families would save money that would have been spent on costly fertilizers by composting discarded vegetable matter and animal manure. This midden then fertilized their fields. Farmers saved money and witnessed higher crop yields.

No one, not even Guttmann (2005) was able to pinpoint the first civilisation that realised that old cow pats and road apples are valuable but our farmers know it now. We are slowly making our own midden to enrich our garden following a practice that we learned from our neighbours.

If you ate today, thank a farmer.