Week 4: On Cultivation

2/22/08

Update to last week's blogpost: Sakina Bush emailed me regarding my reference to the Noyo Food Forest's use of coconut husks instead of peat in the potting mixture. She had this to say:

"About the coconut husk stuff. (JUST COIR is the brand we use) I just thought I'd mention a couple things. While it is true that peat is a precursor to fossil fuels, I think that my main concern about using it is that it is a mined and nonrenewable resource. (Unless you wait a very very long long time.) I am concerned about the environmental and ecological impacts associated with mining peat. I don't know too much about it, but I know most of the peat in Europe has been mined but not much of Canada's. Recycling coconut fiber is better than not using it, but it is shipped long distances from tropical places using fossil fuels, so it isn't environmentally friendly in that sense. Huge quantities of these wonderful potting mediums are used every day in the nursery and gardening industry and I am seeking an alternative we could use in the Learning Garden. I think we might be able to use worms and high heat composting to make a substitute. John Jeavons uses garden compost and soil which is fine if you don't need a weed free medium."

I wanted to note this information as a reminder that sometimes what may seem environmentally friendly, may not actually be in reality, when the impact of transportation and other hidden factors are calculated in.

Today in the greenhouse, I transferred some of the lettuce starts into a bed that I helped prepare. First, an old bed had to be "fluffed up" and prepared for planting. Susan taught me the "Arabesque" method of forking a bed. You step straight down on the fork, press forward and then pull back, gently lifting the packed dirt so it is light and loose. (If you wish to extend one foot out behind while you press forward, be sure to point your toes and watch your turn-out.) After the bed was completely forked, I added a healthy amount of fresh compost and some organic fertilizer blend and worked them into the soil. The bed also had to be built up, meaning raised higher than the pathway and evened out so water would not pool in low spots. The starts were retrieved from their containers by use of a six-inch metal implement that pulled them gently out of their temporary beds. Incidentally, the container for the starts is an ingenious design that prevents the new sprouts from becoming rootbound. Nevertheless, some of the lettuce starts were not healthy enough to be transplanted, so I took the ones that looked most likely to survive and planted them in the bed in three rows, about two hand-widths apart. Altogether I planted 32 new lettuce plants.

Here is a link to a slideshow of the day's work:
http://home-and-garden.webshots.com/slideshow/562646860FURkbc

After the planting, I sat down with Sakina and asked her the SL Journal Lead Question of the week: What are the long term goals of your Service Placement organization? How do they hope to help shape our future? Sakina said:

"Our long term goal is to ‘cultivate’ a healthy local food system. 'Healthy' meaning sustainable, affordable and accessible; 'local' being the key. We try to create all the conditions so it will grow by itself. The three approaches to healthy cultivation of a food system are: (1) Opportunities for education, so people can learn how to garden and grow food; (2) Enterprise, so that somehow
while we are doing all this we manage to make a living; and (3) Community involvement through volunteer work, celebrations and events. "

The Noyo Food Forest tries to hook up people who want to buy food with people who want to grow it and to connect people up with land they can farm. Cultivating this kind of future for our community will make us healthier and stronger as well as being kinder to the environment.