Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[yarrow@sfo.com]

Title: Re: [Livingontheland] Market gardening

At 7:25 PM -0500 5/22/07, Laurie Ann Powell wrote:

One family in our community experimented with market gardening last year, and it was going pretty well, though certainly not a living. It meant getting up at four a.m. to have the freshest possible produce, racing to the market, having only one day a week to sell it, and then having questions asked because her produce looked weird because it was healthy. Why are those cucumbers so big? Why are those tomatoes so red?

Then came the spinach scare and people wanted to know, "Are you fertilizing with manure?!"  Well... yeah! Hellooooo??

//

These are all opportunities for education. People who are used to buying plastic-wrapped and plastic-tasting produce will *of course* be taken aback by nonuniform, intensely flavorful food! Of course they will have questions. Human beings are curious creatures. You can't expect them to change their habits or pay more or even taste it without some education. Write articles for your local weekly, or invite a reporter to come and taste. If you explain why it's better and better for you, people will be curious, at least, to try, and some of them may even want to seek out better food. Don't have time to write or look for a place to get it published? You can offer a one-time trade of a box of produce for an article about what you grow. Or even an article about the difference between using well-composted manure, and postharvest hygiene (which, IIRC, is what happened with the spinach -- postharvest contamination with fecal matter had nothing to do with what the crop was fertilized with).

A lot of books are coming out on the market about local eating and fresh flavorful produce, and some of these are making best-seller lists, so potential customers who read books will be looking for local sources of organically grown produce.