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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] rainy end to market season

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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] rainy end to market season
  • Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2010 20:53:23 -0600


We're not growing any shell beans due to being a very small, highly intensive
operation (less than 1/4 acre with no tiller needed). We focus on what will
bring higher returns for the space they take up (and still sell). People here
expect to get dried beans in bulk and very cheap. Pintos and bolitas here are
field grown and mechanically harvested and cleaned at low profit. And nobody
is bringing dried beans to market.

Barb tells me they might be called borlotti beans which has great bean
flavor. Our pole green beans have been a small seller but we need to use
narrow fence beds for beans. We've stuck with the Italian Romanos for flavor.
People keep coming back to praise our best sellers but we do several crops
that sell less to supplement the best sellers. It'd be easier to just do the
best sellers, but for customers who don't want our finest varieties of
tomatoes, sweet peppers, or winter squash we need other things that appeal to
enough customers to raise total sales. There are intangible rewards but it
takes year round work and planning just to break even for most market
growers. Bottom line: if it doesn't even pay for itself then market customers
simply won't have markets to grow fresh and local for them. Along with the
spread of home growing, market growing must be worth doing for local food
security. These are the twin issues that are about to loom very large in this
country.

As long as dried beans that store indefinitely are available in bulk at low
cost people should buy them.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

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

On 10/21/2010 at 1:02 PM pbunch@cox.net wrote:

>This encoded message has been converted to an attachment.
>
>Do you grow cranberry beans? These are the mainstay here and they are
>really good. I don't recall seeing them on the market in Southern
>California





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