Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

Of course Pasadena is frost free all year so they can crop without a break 12 
mos a year. And the whole family gets in on the work. As I recall they do all 
raised beds (a no-brainer to me of course). I've never managed to get info on 
their growing soil, how it's amended etc.

With enough season extension techniques others could approach those numbers 
in less temperate climates. It takes more investment and labor but it pays 
off. Plus if it's for selling you need the markets and time to sell.

We expanded our raised beds this winter but this week we're in a record deep 
freeze so no outside. Immediate bottleneck is locating more hay mulch and 
hauling aged horse manure for amending new beds.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

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

On 2/1/2011 at 6:08 AM Ken Hargesheimer wrote:

>Pasadena’s ‘Urban Homestead’ family sets record harvestLinked
>by Michael LevenstonThe Dervaes harvested 7,030 pounds of organic produce
>on 1/10th acre in 2010 – a record since they started keeping track 10
>years agoExcerpt from the Urban Homestead site:These last few days, I too
>have been anxiously waiting the final harvest tally from Justin who’s
>been going through the invoice books to tally the herbs and edible flower
>boxes that we harvested and sold (which came to 117 lbs for the year).On a
>side note, we just couldn’t figure out how to calculate the weight of
>100 plus flats of wheat grass that we grew last year, so we just left them
>out of the final tally. Oh well.The extremely wet and cold December
>affected our harvest numbers, and of course there are still loads of
>oranges on the trees but it wouldn’t be right to strip the trees clean
>just to bump up the tally. We were tempted though!So the numbers are
>in!From our 1/10 acre growing
> grounds: Jan 130 lbs, Feb 139 lbs, Mar 396 lbs, Apr 555 lbs, May 590 lbs,
>Jun 730 lbs, Jul 1110 lbs, Aug 1228 lbs, Sep 638 lbs, Oct 388 lbs, Nov 492
>lbs plus 117# herb and flower sales