Mission: food self-sufficiency

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.

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:

"How to Grow More Vegetables" by John Jeavons
"Staying Healthy Through the Seasons" by Elson Haas.
"Designing Your Edible Landscape Naturally" by Kourik and Creasy
"How to Store Your Garden Produce" by Piers Warren

Susan Harris is a Master Gardener and gardening coach (see TheGardeningCoach.com). Her how-to-garden website is Sustainable-Gardening.com.

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