Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

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