Adirondack Erratic

While looking up info about tents, I happened upon this site documenting a couple’s (Michelle Ferrarese and Marty Heller) bike trip in Michigan in 2006 visiting CSAs around the state. They visited 31 farms ranging from 4 to 250 shares each. The photo blog, and the documentary they made (you can see the short version here) give an idea of the variety of ways that people are growing food for themselves and their neighbors. There’s plenty of inspiration here for growers and eaters!

…’Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ Keats

And sometimes it can be found in the garden… Hard to remember this in the intense flurry of planting everything, building stuff, and getting the market display ready. But the garden is beginning to fill up with green, as well as other colors, which truly does bring joy when I take my evening stroll. I’ll be posting batches on the photo page periodically; for an early season look click here.

Some of the pictures in this batch are of the hoophouse, which is so far living up to my expectation of an inspiring and challenging experiment. Melons that have been planted and watered with drip irrigation already have flower buds! On the other hand, the sides must be rolled up when the sun comes out or the air temps will get too hot. And I’m not sure how many years the plastic will last if it is constantly being folded and unfolded.

This is the hoophouse in all its glory:

and these are the end walls before assembly:

Here’s Rich working on the boards that go along the edges:

and this is inside the area before covering:

There will be more pictures of vegetables in the next few days. Next year, during the winter months, these posts will help to remind me what was happening in the garden, and when.

Lots of things are going on in my garden, including the construction of my first hoop house (yay!), but I’ve left my camera in Massachusetts and can’t take any pictures. So here are a few very interesting factoids about food and growing:

Giving up one day per week of eating red meat will lessen your carbon footprint as much as eating locally all year. This calculation is based on the intrinsic greenhouse gases released by cows in the form of methane and nitrous oxide.

According to a UC Davis study, organically grown tomatoes have considerably more flavonoids (antioxidants) than conventionally grown tomatoes. Grass fed and grass finished beef have a higher percentage of omega 3 fatty acids, healthful fats which are scarce in the American diet, than grain fed beef.

World food prices have increased dramatically, by almost 60 percent on average since March of last year, according to the index compiled by the World Food and Agricultural Organization, and there’s no sign yet that they’re going to substantially fall back in the near future.

Some of that increase is due to US policies turning food into fuel in the form of ethanol. Yet both Democratic candidates are in South Dakota today touting their support of ethanol subsidies.

How do our food choices affect climate change, land use, local economies, world trade? A movement is emerging to connect people more directly with the foods they buy, an ethic that looks at the hidden costs of our current food system. (A similar discussion about the hidden costs of our material culture has yet to reach mass consciousness , but that’s another topic.) Two recent articles add to the accumulating wisdom that says buy whole foods, buy local, go organic, and cut down on meat.

Last fall, Cornell researchers compared the amount of land needed to maintain various diets based on New York agriculture.

“A person following a low-fat vegetarian diet, for example, will need less than half (0.44) an acre per person per year to produce their food,” said Christian Peters, M.S. ‘02, Ph.D. ‘07, a Cornell postdoctoral associate in crop and soil sciences and lead author of the research. “A high-fat diet with a lot of meat, on the other hand, needs 2.11 acres.”

Surprisingly, however, a vegetarian diet is not necessarily the most efficient in terms of land use.

According to the findings, supplementing a mostly plant based diet with small amounts of meat uses less prime agricultural land, because animals can be pastured on more marginal acreage. For more info, read here.

The second article comes from the North Country Kitchen column in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise by Yvona Fast who maintains a website at wordsaremyworld.com. This article, written for Earth Day sums up a commonsense approach to eating “green.” As she says,

By reducing waste, recycling, using fewer resources, and buying locally raised, pastured meat and organically grown vegetables at farmer’s markets, you can honor the earth’s bounty and sustain natural resources. Waste less food, produce less greenhouse gas, and consider how your food choices affect the rest of the world.

You can read the rest of her article here.

Sunday was one of the best days skiing at Whiteface - soft snow, crazy spirits, beautiful views. I returned home to see bare ground peeking out from the snow edges, enticing me to pull my first weeds. The growing season begins!

Last week I stoked my enthusiasm for expanding my gardens by attending a workshop on high tunnel growing in Saranac Lake, sponsored by the Cornell Cooperative Extension.
Various presenters, including farmers and researchers, talked about the pros and cons of growing under plastic (mostly the pros) and showed a number of different types of structures that could be used. Investment costs range from over $10,000 to grow raspberries to a few hundred dollars for low tunnels, such as the ones built by Eliot Coleman as a demonstration for the Common Ground Fair in Maine.

(to be continued…)

The first 2008 newsletter from GardenShare has a provocative article about workers’ rights and large scale organic farming. GardenShare focuses on hunger, community and local food in St. Lawrence county.

Elizabeth Henderson from the Agricultural Justice Project writes, that although the growth of large-scale organic farms

…still carries with it the benefit of reducing pesticide use in agriculture, these new organic farms often perpetuate the injustices present in agriculture in general -inadequate income for small-scale farmers and exploitative working conditions for farmworkers.

The article goes on to refer to a number of workers’ rights lawsuits against organic producers on the West coast. As Henderson points out, the organic label covers growing practices, not labor conditions. Yet another reason to buy from your local farmer, rather than Del Monte!

I am just beginning to put together some gear for the garden and market this year. Trying not to spend too much, but also trying not foolishly disadvantage myself. These three items (bought used) are winging their way to my house via the magic of Ebay.

First up, a few planting trays with inserts for 72 plugs each. I could have purchased trays of 128 or even 512 plugs, but I don’t have room to transplant very many plants (thinking of lettuce starts) and weather for planting out might not come along predictably enough before the plants outgrow the smaller slots.

Also en route is an Earthway seeder, an inexpensive walk-behind planter. I’m hoping it will cut down on the need for thinning, especially with veggies that will be seeded many times during the season. I also plan to use it for small scale cover cropping, reasoning that I’ll get better germination if I plant more consistently.

Finally, I’ve picked up a price computing scale for selling at the market this year. I’d like to let customers pick out their produce for themselves, and it should cut down on my pre-market prep time. The scale I’m buying has an adding function built in: you can enter a price, weigh the item, press add, and then enter a second price for a different item. This should help me keep a running total of a customer’s purchases.

The NY times published an article yesterday by Minnesota farmer Jack Hedin who ran afoul of the Agriculture Department’s commodity farm program. After renting some land on local farms, he found that he was going to pay dearly for growing vegetables on “corn base” land:

The commodity farm program effectively forbids farmers who usually grow corn or the other four federally subsidized commodity crops (soybeans, rice, wheat and cotton) from trying fruit and vegetables. Because my watermelons and tomatoes had been planted on “corn base” acres, the Farm Service said, my landlords were out of compliance with the commodity program.

I’ve discovered that typically, a farmer who grows the forbidden fruits and vegetables on corn acreage not only has to give up his subsidy for the year on that acreage, he is also penalized the market value of the illicit crop, and runs the risk that those acres will be permanently ineligible for any subsidies in the future. (The penalties apply only to fruits and vegetables — if the farmer decides to grow another commodity crop, or even nothing at all, there’s no problem.)

At a time when consumers are looking for locally grown produce, US agriculture policy makes it difficult for growers to meet demand. The not-quite-finished 2007 Farm Billwill direct national farm policy for the next five years. I will be researching this complex bill and providing links over the next few weeks.

Sunwarm Gardens is my kitchen-garden-turned-market-garden. A small grower in Canada at Tiny Farm Blog calls his 2 acre farm a “micro farm.” By this standard, I have a “nano farm.” However, it does produce enough food to keep my family in fresh produce from May through November AND sell a portion at our farmers’ market.

I am located in an area that might be thought of as transitional to Zone 4: we do occasionally have temps fall below -30 F, but that is becoming rarer. Our last frost might happen during the first week of June; our first frost during the first week of October. I’ve found from conversations with other local growers that my hillside, south-facing site gives me an advantage in keeping frost away.

The soil here is acidic, sandy and rocky. My garden sits on a mix of glacial till, with rocks from pebble to watermelon in size cropping up continually. There is good drainage; that, and the generally low humidity and cold winters might help with disease. With a few exceptions (potato beetles come to mind) insect damage is usually not too much of a problem here. That is, if you don’t count the damage to the gardener from black flies and sweat bees!