Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Liz <liz@allslash.org>]

At 10:34 PM 4/26/2008, you wrote:

> HIGH YIELDS AND HIGHER HOPES
> http://www.motherearthnews.com/Organic-Gardening/1976-05-01/High-Yields-Higher-Hopes.aspx
> Biodynamic/French intensive agriculture:

<snip>

> Current estimates based on test results indicate 
> that widespread use of b/F intensive techniques 
> could conceivably allow 3%—6% of a population to 
> grow all of a country's food. A family of four, 
> working a total of 56 hours per week (that's two 
> hours a day for each individual) on a little 
> less than two acres, should be able to 
> raise—within a six-month growing season—enough 
> food (grains, vegetables, fruits, and fodder for 
> dairy animals) to supply a complete 
> 2,379-calories-per-day annual diet for 32 people!
>
> Wholesale market value (50% of retail) of such a 
> harvest, based on current U.S. food prices, 
> would be around $9,600 . . . and, if inexpensive 
> mini-greenhouses were used to extend the growing 
> season year round, that output (and the 
> resulting cash income) could be doubled!
>
> On a smaller scale, a family of the same size 
> working toward food self-sufficiency alone could 
> use b/F intensive techniques to raise their 
> entire annual food needs on just 10,000 square 
> feet of soil—less than a quarter of an acre—by 
> working just one or two hours a day during a six-month season!

I read this when it was first printed, along with 
a lot of other info about the French Intensive 
gardening. It's all true, of course, but 
statements like the preceding paragraphs gave a 
lot of people the idea that gardening and being 
self-sufficient was "easy." As most of us know, 
it isn't easy at all. It's doable, but it isn't 
easy as defined by most people--picking food out 
of their garden with the same lack of effort as 
picking it up off a supermarket shelf. I know 
many people who jumped into growing their own in 
the 70's, made more or less of an effort to 
continue, and gave it up as too much trouble. The 
difference now, of course, is that we may not be 
able to fall back on the supermarket, as people 
did in the 70's when they realized that growing 
enough food to feed themselves meant a lot more 
than buying starts at the local garden center, 
sticking them in the ground and waiting for the bounty.

And of course the article says nothing about what 
is required to keep that food available for the 
next six months--root cellaring, canning, 
dehydrating, pickling, etc. You want hard--that 
part of it is often harder than the growing!

Off to build another raised bed...

Liz in SW VA
http://life-as-a-spectator-sport.com