Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[mtncats@planetcomm.net]

Hello everybody,

We certainly didn't pick our mountaintop location for market growing.  Top 
soil just about doesn't exist in the woods here.  When I buried the house, I 
used what I had, subsoil that was decomposed schist.

For the raised beds, I went to the bottom of the mountain and dug the best 
dirt I could find.  It wasn't great.  Fast forward a decade, while importing 
tons of manure (rather than livestock).  The raised bed soil is fantastic but 
even that subsoil that barely grew weeds the first year is looking pretty 
good, entirely from benign neglect (no manure or compost).  From the second 
year on it's had a great crop of something.  Berry bushes are now pretty well 
established there, partly to discourage tree growth.  The roof's an 
inauspicious place for an 80' tree.  The berries are happy in the shadier 
part where I didn't make beds.

My big surprise was how well, and quickly, the weeds managed to transform 
decomposed stone into a hospitable growth medium.  Clearly not an arid SW 
climate here in Virginia.  We get rain, frequently.  I left whatever grew, 
along with the large quantities of leaves that blew in.  There's been a 
succession of unidentified weed crops here.

Paul's point about cost accounting is apt.  Something I considered for 
shiitake production, which was about the only commercial prospect here, other 
than the trees.  After talking with a couple of medium-sized growers, I 
concluded the return wasn't worth it to me.  That's a very personal 
conclusion, relying in large part on ones other choices and inclinations.  We 
still happily grow mushrooms and take delight in our raised bed produce, but 
selling isn't part of the picture.  We do trade surplus occasionally for what 
we don't grow.

I've been friends with several small-scale market growers here, some retail, 
some wholesale.  None have lasted very long.  Not that there wasn't a fair 
return on investment, just that for the labor involved it wasn't adequate.  
CSAs make it immensely more attractive.

Fortunately for the community, there seem to be a steady stream of new 
growers wanting to get their feet muddy.  Like all new businesses, many will 
fail.

Laura says "not all of us have a choice as to where we live", but I certainly 
don't see that.  Clearly, some choices are easier than others, but it's 
always a matter of priorities.  Our choice to live where the soil was poor 
was due to other priorities.  We made the correct decision.

Tom (loving having greens under glass on this 17º morning- thanks for the 
prod Harvey)


On 12/8/06 at 12:25 AM TradingPostPaul <tradingpost@riseup.net> wrote:

>
>Very true. As Ken stated you can make productive soil anywhere, and he
>knows.  I think everybody should grow something wherever they are. You can
>do it on bad land if you're just growing for yourself, or if you're in a
>country where labor and land is almost free.
>
>But growing for market is a special problem, like that Kim's CSA. If you're
>growing for market, in this country, you simply won't survive as a business
>if you have to spend too many years and too much money making good soil out
>of dead dirt. Why not? Because most market growers work on a slim profit
>margin to begin with. Starting with dead dirt is two strikes before you
>start. It's bad business. I keep repeating, if we don't treat market
>growing as a business we'll be out of business. Then who'll provide the
>fresh, local, organic produce?
>
>And while we're on the subject, how many growers have any clue about cost
>accounting? How many don't even realize they're losing money on it? How
>many know all the best practices to raise marketable production per unit of
>land, to control costs, to reduce labor, water use, and losses to pests?
>
>We recognize that not all land, not every part of the country can support
>local market growing. In some places, the soil can't produce profitably for
>the grower at a price most people can afford to pay. Try it if you've got
>money to burn. Otherwise, just improve your own soil to grow for yourself.
>And add to our knowledge base, as Laura put it.
>
>paul tradingpost@lobo.net