Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Wonderful. A "meet and greet" that will include a seed and plant exchange
is just the kind of local community building that we need everywhere. That
can be the takeoff point for co-ops and other ways of working together or
sharing knowledge and techniques.

We caught a yearly seed exchange a while back that drew maybe 200 people.
The variety and good organization was amazing. Downside was, they hold it
about two hours drive north of us in the Dixon neighborhood on the northern
Rio Grande. There every house seems to have an apple orchard, and everybody
knows everybody else. And since yuppifying it's too expensive to buy into. 

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 8/19/2007 at 5:30 PM DK wrote:

>Thanks for the replies.
>
>Rhoda, I am in Spring Hill, on the west central coast.
>
>Mitch, I did read that a few months ago, and was glad to see some 
>suggestions for "what to do", although I can't remember if that was the
>book 
>that said "Surely we can bury the nuclear waste deeply enough in the earth

>that it can't cause any problems," but most books I read, I don't agree
>with 
>absolutely everything they write, although the general tenets may be true.

>Thank you for the suggestion, I have found so many new books on this list.
>
>I am enjoying "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, A Year of Food Life" by Barbara

>Kingsolver in which their family strives to eat only food from the local 
>area for one year. I enjoy her writing style, and it's a nice read for
>those 
>interested in local food. I also loved "Real Food, What to Eat and Why" by

>Nina Planck. I was inspired by her starting farmer's markets where there 
>were none, and would like to have some specific information on how to go 
>about doing something like that.
>
>> That's fascinating - a local farm foods group to help others find some
of
>> the info you've spent months searching for.
>
>There is a large co-op about 30 miles from us, but there are a few of us 
>that want to organize closer to home. I didn't really want to start a
>group, 
>but felt that if we were ever going to be able to coordinate for co-ops, 
>someone had to start something. My hope has really been that someone more 
>knowledgeable and with more free time would shore up some of my 
>shortcomings. Another focus of the group is to have listings of local
>u-pick 
>farms (they are never all on Local Harvest) and farms that sell their 
>harvest directly to the public. And still another of my fave topics to 
>promote is edible landscaping, so the group has several focal points.
>Maybe 
>that's too wide, but they all sort of fit well together. The co-ops are
>not 
>all local-based (although much of the produce is FL-based, and our milk 
>comes from north FL), so I feel those are more of a starting point for 
>getting people together. In the next couple of months or so, I am planning
>a 
>"meet and greet" that will include a seed and plant exchange. We are a
>yahoo 
>group, but it feels important to create actual social contacts with real 
>people for all this.
>
>For so many years, I used to read about growing and buy seeds and let them

>sit. I let composting and planting become a very complex and difficult
>thing 
>in my mind, and it held me back from actually doing something. Finally
>after 
>Katrina, it occured to me that there could be a "food crisis" in the
>future. 
>I laugh at my naivete now, because there already was a food crisis, and
>had 
>been for years before I was even born.
>
>I don't always get to read as many of the posts here as I would like, but
>I 
>enjoy reading everyone's first hand stories and discussions.
>
>Bye for now, and thanks again!
>Diane
>