Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Read that same MEN article back then but I was too skeptical to try it. 
Skeptical no more! Even had that 1906 reprint, Intensive Culture of 
Vegetables on the French System, but sold it to a fellow raised bed gardener 
at a market conference in Santa Fe. Got it at http://www.bookfinder.com/ .

So true, what people think of as easy. And at today's prices, those starter 
plants plus all the garden center crapola people think they need make home 
grown more expensive than buying at the grocery. Soil test kits, moisture 
meters, geez. Gallon tomato pots at $4.50!  Maybe it's the oil that goes into 
the plastic to make the pots ... I saw a book titled The $64 Tomato.

Yes, preserving the harvest is half the work. And the biggest payoff for any 
garden is initial soil building but few have a clue as to what's needed and 
why. So many of our customers said they started squash but the bugs got it. 
What do we spray with? Uhhh... nothing. We build up healthy soil to begin 
with. And don't have to keep doing it over every year. And water just once a 
week after it's all mulched, in an area where we haven't had enough rain to 
wet the ground since November. More to it than just buying starters (horrors) 
and sticking them in the ground, but still not rocket science.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

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

On 4/27/2008 at 11:38 AM Liz wrote:

>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
>
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