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livingontheland - [Livingontheland] the learning curve

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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: [Livingontheland] the learning curve
  • Date: Sat, 20 Nov 2010 20:46:57 -0700


In the eight years since we started this list, growing more food on space
available has turned mainstream. Even urban growing has sprouted from Detroit
to Richmond, CA and many other places. Obviously, as the need grows and the
economy tightens it's essential to make the best use of the space, the labor
and inputs. What I've learned is, for most of us, there's a hard learning
curve to get the most from that space. If it's going to take time then some
people need to start years ago.

And I'm not there yet with growing for market. My use of one-sixth of an acre
has hit maybe 60-70% efficient use of the space, and the bottleneck seems to
be in the crop planning. For example, I expanded sweet peppers and snow peas
but miscalculated stagger timing on snow peas and wasted a few beds on things
that didn't sell much. Grasshoppers ruined our first try at kale and chard so
I'll forget that and expand beets, kohlrabi, snow peas, and better onion
varieties, for more continuous harvest and sale. Other crops worked better
than planned. It's not as simple as it sounds and so far I haven't seen a
book or even an article on this exact subject to help. There's more on
growing for home use. Either way it means growing what you'll use or preserve
at home, or what you can reasonably expect to sell without much loss. It
involves planning crop times on the ground, what can be grown before or after
another crop, guessing maturity times and staggering certain plantings for
continuous harvest to use or sell, and more depending on weather and other
committments. But, either way biointensive or some variation with permanent
beds and aisles seems so far to be far and away the most efficient use of
space, labor, water, mulch, and amendments.

There is an urgency to this and not just for us. You don't make a lot of
money at it but it has other advantages and plenty of people can do it and be
better off for it. Esp when living costs keep rising and there's one job
opening for every five unemployed. There should be a billion dollar crash
program for local, healthier food run by a lot of people who are better at
this than I am.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net







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