What is the true cost of small-scale food production?

I just read an article on Ethicurian questioning the high costs of sustainable, organic, local and ethical foods. And one section in particular struck me:

What I do not believe is that farmers should get to this income level by charging extortionate prices. The small-scale local farming model should be based on a maximum average profit margin of 30%, not 130%! Which, as far as businesses go, is a very good profit margin. I know a lot of businesses that would love to have such a margin.

My mini-CSA program this year is less than half the price of any other CSA in Portland, and is over $500 less than the most expensive CSA. This is for two reasons. One is that this is my first year, so subscribers should expect an occasional hiccup, along with an intentionally limited selection of produce (no corn, eggplants, peppers, cabbage, broc, cauliflower, etc). But the second, and possibly more sustainable reason is that I believe most CSAs charge artificially high prices.


Many CSA and SOLE food (sustainable, organic, local and ethical) consumers expect high prices. We acknowledge that SOLE producers have higher costs than industrial producers, but how much of this is rightly attributed by having no "hidden costs" via pollution and subsidies, and how much is improperly attributed to artificially-small economies of scale. Is it fair to assume that every farmer, no matter how much land they use, no matter what their volume is, is it fair that they make a good living? Or are some operations too small to make economic sense?

Obviously, it's too much to expect that I could replace the full-time income I made as a 10-year veteran software developer by working 1/10th of an acre for a few hours a week. But at what point am I entitled to "make a living" as opposed to doing it for a hobby, or just to recoup my costs? Is it really "better" to buy more-expensive produce from a CSA as opposed to regional and organic at New Seasons Market?

Picture by Manjith Kainickara, Creative Commons

My guest post over at The Slow Cook

Today I have a guest post on Ed Bruske's The Slow Cook blog. Earlier this year, I made a comment on a post he wrote ("Are Community Gardens Obsolete?") and Ed asked me to elaborate on my experience of community garden wait lists and the eventual creation of my new market garden. I was more than happy to oblige. Thanks Ed!

How to make a planting calendar (Part 1)

This is the first in a multi-part series on how I developed a comprehensive planting calendar. Read part two here.

Why a Planting Calendar?

At the beginning of this year, I started planning my new garden. This is my first year there, and my biggest garden yet, so I couldn't apply the same principles I've used in years past on my smaller gardens. Also, I wanted to maximize productivity - get plants in sooner, and never leave a bed empty. And of course there's the CSA. I need to provide veggies to the paying subscribers in a quantity and regularity they expect.

The first thing I did was develop a list of crops I wanted to grow during the year. My first list had about 40 crops and zillions of varieties. The seed catalogs all looked too good! But I repeatedly whittled down the list with encouragement from Dan. I went from ten lettuce varieties to four, and from close to a dozen tomatoes to five. I got rid of broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and corn altogether due to space limitations and productivity requirements. Eventually I had my crops and varieties.

I knew a bit about yields from years past, and I knew how much my family could eat, so it was simple enough to count up the number of beds I would need for the year's worth of growing. Even with the slimmed-down list, I figured that I would need over twice the number of beds that I had. I knew I could fix some of the problem by succession planting, but it was a daunting task to line up crops one after another because I was not confident in the number of days from "seed in the ground" to "harvested and bare earth". What I needed to do was figure out these numbers for every variety of every crop, and then stack them up in succession throughout the growing season. To complicate things, plants take longer to get going earlier in the season and they bolt faster later in the season.



After doing a bit of research and talking with Dan, I concluded that I needed to put together a spreadsheet with beds down the side (rows) and dates along the top (columns). Simple enough, at least in principle.

The hard part was doing it. And that begins in Part 2. Stay tuned!

Growing crazy carrots

Last year, I inadvertently grew a few really crazy carrots. Many of them were twisted amongst each other like this:



Twisted carrots usually result from improper thinning. That is, the carrots are growing too closely, so they compete for nutrients and water. And then there were those that were multiple-rooted:



Multiple or forked roots indicate that the carrot encountered an obstruction. Sometimes the carrot will just bend around the obstruction, but occasionally it forks around it. Both forking and twisting reduce potential yields because the carrot has to either compete with its neighbors (twisting), or divert resources to multiple tips (forking).

That being said, I absolutely love that super-forked purple carrot, and it made me wonder if I could try some techniques to grow forked specimens. Maybe carefully placing a pebble a couple inches directly beneath each carrot seed? Maybe sowing three seeds in a group but not thinning them? Maybe growing them on a centrifuge?

People pay extra for yellow and purple carrots, orange cauliflower and purple broccoli, but I don't know if the "newness" factor can extend into creative shapes.

Today I planted peas, mustards, raab, spinach, lettuces and carrots

Actually, I got the peas planted on Saturday. We've had a weird mix of sun and rain for the last couple weeks. Every day there's been some sun, and some clouds, some rain and some wind. Or so it seems. I jumped at the chance to plant peas on Saturday, and got another bed in (bringing the total to 3 beds, 2 more to go), but the rain came in and shut me down for the rest of the crops. My new Earthway seeder is a little finicky in the rain, and when the soil is too wet, it makes a mess.



Also this weekend, I got some help from my visiting friend Wayne. We both got most of the beds weeded, which was good timing because the grass is starting to come up in some places, along with lots and lots of hyacinth bulbs. (Anybody want a bunch of hyacinth bulbs?)



And then this morning, we had some more good weather, so I planted the mustards, raab, spinach, lettuces (all four varieties I'm growing this year) and early carrots. Afterwards, Patrick G came over and we got another load of wood chips, and then spread them on the remaining paths and in between the rows. Looks good, huh?

Of course it's raining now, hard. But I'm not planting again for another 10 days, or until the potatoes arrive.

New front retaining wall

Yesterday I finished building a retaining wall for the front stretch of the garden, along the sidewalk. I really didn't NEED to do this job, but I have a masochistic fondness for digging and lifting rocks. Sort of the like the Stonehenge druids or the Pyramid builders. Something like that.



Tony and I spent a day collecting concrete and laying the first two rows, then I came back and built the rest very quickly. It's all made from reused concrete from a few places. When people replace sidewalks or rip out driveways (see depave.org), the concrete is usually thrown away.



Most builders take the pieces to concrete-specific drop sites, but I am skeptical of how it is reused. Regardless, the most-green thing to do with this concrete is reuse it nearby. The pieces are generally uniform in shape and thickness, and vary from almost too large to pick up to very small. In this case, I found a crew working about four blocks away who had removed a large portion of sidewalk and a driveway. I helped them load the pieces I wanted, and they delivered them all to the garden in their huge trailer.

A victory garden on the White House lawn

According to the New York Times:

On Friday, Michelle Obama will begin digging up a patch of White House lawn to plant a vegetable garden, the first since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden in World War II. There will be no beets (the president doesn’t like them) but arugula will make the cut.

It's a pretty healthy-sized garden too: 1100 square feet and includes berries and some bees. There has been quite a buzz in the sustainable food blogosphere wondering if and hoping that the Obamas would put in a vegetable garden, and it appears to finally be coming true. What's just as interesting is that the nytimes.com article spins it as a project of the first lady. I hope we see more from her in the coming years, unlike her roll-over-and-play-dead predecessor.

I do wonder how much food could be grown on the White House grounds if they really tried...

2009 Shares Sold Out

For the 2009 main season, all available shares have been sold out. This is a mini-CSA, so I've sold six full shares. Because payments are due in four-week intervals, it is possible that I may have extra shares available as time goes on, or (-gasp-) may need to reduce the number of shares I can support. If you'd like to get on the waiting list, please send me an email.

Crop List 2009

I've finalized the crop list for this year, with a lot of help from Dan. Here it is, broken down into four sections. The first section "All Season" is produce that will be available just about every week, give or take. The second through fourth sections will be seasonally-available produce, Spring through Fall.

All Season:
salad greens, both baby leaves and whole heads
cooking greens, varying throughout the year
carrots, radishes, beets
scallions (green onions)
broccoli raab (not every week), parsley (not every week)

Spring:
peas!
cilantro

Summer:
potatoes, sweet potatoes
tomatoes, summer squash, zucchini, cucumbers
pole beans
basil, cilantro
onions

Fall:
hopefully more peas
rutabagas

I'll have two crops that I'm growing for all-you-can eat, in-person only, and under age 10 only. They'll be peas in the spring and cherry tomatoes in the summer. Bring the kiddos over and Lily will show them how to pick ripe fruit.

Today I planted onions

This morning, Dan and Tony and I planted about 60 feet of onions, which came out to one bed of three rows. It was a little overkill having three people planting a single bed at once. We planted them in little clusters of about four onions every 6 inches or so.



There were about 200 plants of each variety: Copra, a classic yellow cooking and storage onion; Walla Walla, a northwest specialty sweet onion which can grow very big; and Mars, a simple red onion. I've never grown onions from sets before, so it was exciting to see the little baby plants go in the ground and about 10 minutes later - poof - there are the onions! In years past, I've only grown leeks and scallions, both from seed.



After they all got planted, I covered the bed with straw. This will keep the soil a bit fluffy (which onions like), and will slow down the weeds. I'm already getting some weedy growth in some of the beds, but thankfully not the peas. It has been so wet recently that Dan suggested that peas, onions and potatoes are about all that can get planted. We had a mild winter up until early planting season started a couple weeks ago. The next time I get a couple sunny days to dry things out, I'll be planting mustards, spinach, raab/rapini and carrots. Also, the second round of peas will get planted soon, as well as potatoes - they are still on their way in the mail.

Wood chips and sprouting peas

For the last few months, I've tried in vain to get (free) wood chips delivered to the garden. Many weeks ago, I laid down cardboard on all the paths in the garden (mostly just the perimeter), and in the intervening weeks, the pieces have blown all over the place. It has been a pretty dry winter (up until recently), so the cardboard hasn't wetted down to a rotting mass. Every time the wind blew hard, I would run across the street and gather cardboard from the street and from up against the fence and try to keep some semblance of order.



I had called about 15 tree care companies in the phone book, in addition to the two local power companies, and none of them came through. I've heard so many times about how "you can get free wood chips from the power company", but it did not work out for me. Finally, on one of the very last entries in the phone book, I struck gold. "No, you can't have our chips dropped off at your house," said the office manager. "But you can go pick them up from our storage location," which happened to be about two miles from the garden. And it's a veritable ocean of wood chips (the pictures don't do it justice). A quick 20 or 30 minutes of shoveling, and I've got about 2 1/2 yards in my trailer.



My friend Norris helped for one day, and Dan came over for another load, so things are almost done with garden preparation tasks. It's time to start growing!

Oh and also, the peas are sprouting. Almost exactly a month in the ground, and they're about an inch tall. They germinated about two weeks ago.

About Fruits of our Neighbors

Fruits of our Neighbors is a 5000 square foot garden located in close-in Portland, Oregon and run by Nat West with help from Jane Palmieri and Eric Fair-Layman.

In late 2008, I made an agreement with the owner of an empty lot directly across the street from my house. I get to garden on the lot, and she gets a share of the produce. This is a classic share-cropping (actually tenant farming) situation, and fits both the landowner and myself very well.

I get a lot of questions, and I like the format, so here's a FAQ:

Q: How big is your garden?

A: The lot is a full-sized typical City of Portland lot, which is 50 by 100 feet. I'm only gardening on the front half, and there is a big laurel hedge poking in, and there are paths, so it ends up being about 1440 square feet of growing area.

Q: Are you doing raised beds?

A: No I'm not doing "raised beds" as you may know them. That term is generally applied to a wooden frame with imported dirt inside. I'm not using wood, nor am I importing dirt. Instead, I've made "beds" by marking them off, then digging out dirt from the paths, tossing it into the beds. Once tilled, these areas raise higher than the paths, so they're kinda sorta raised beds.

Q: Have you brought in a bunch of compost or manure?

A: Yes, we've spread about 10 yards over the whole lot, which is only an inch or so, and we may do so in the future, but they're only amendments, not primary growing soil.

Q: Is it all sunny?

A: Yup, pretty much. It has good southern exposure, despite a two-story house to the south. We don't need to position specific crops in specific places for sun.

Q: Where is the garden?

A: It's on a quiet street, right across the street from my house. This is the Woodlawn neighborhood of Portland, which is close to MLK and Alberta street.

Q: What do the neighbors think?

A: Thankfully, I have good neighbors all around. Two of them are on the waiting list, one has offered use of a tiller. Pretty much every day that I'm in the garden, somebody stops by and asks, "What are they going to build here?" To which I reply, "There is no they and I am making this into a garden," which always gets approving congratulations.

Q: What was there before you?

A: A number of years ago, the current landowner used it as a garden also, albeit much smaller. For the past few years, it's been very neglected with garbage accumulating. Cleaning it up made the biggest impact on the neighbors.

Q: Have you done any soil tests to ensure that there is no lead in the soil?

A: No, for a couple reasons. First off, the lot has never had a building (or auto mechanic, or smelter, or municipal dump, or... etc.) on it. That's the number one source of lead in the soil. Secondly, lead uptake by vegetables is minor at worst, and is dependent on the pH of the soil as well as the kind of crop. I've made sure that my pH is high enough so that veggies can't take it in. And finally, since the lot has never been used for anything that might be a potential source of lead, I would have to take tests from many many places in the garden. So even if I found acceptable levels of lead in the soil from my test locations, that doesn't mean that a bit of dirt a foot away is also safe. Short of testing all the dirt, a metals test isn't conclusive. My 5 year old daughter will be eating straight from the garden. More information in an easily-readable format can be found here.

Q: Where are you getting water?

A: There has never been a house on the lot, and as such, there are no services. In 2009, I irrigated using a hose connection from neighbors in exchange for paying the overage of their water bill from the previous year. For 2010, I plan to "dry farm".

Q: What are you going to do with all the produce?

A: In addition to eating fresh for our families, along with a healthy abundance of preserving (canning and freezing), we plan to give away and trade.

Q: What crops are you growing?

A: 2009 was my first year with such a large plot, so I was initially very tempted to go crazy with dozens of varieties. But I whittled down the list many times, and ended up with: peas, peas and more peas, lettuces (green leafy, red leafy, romaine and bibb/butter, all as baby leaves and full heads), spring, summer and fall greens (mustards, boc choi, raab, collards, kale, chard, spinach), cucumbers, yellow squash and zucchini, pole (green) beans, potatoes, onions, carrots, carrots and more carrots, some herbs, radishes, beets and of course, tomatoes (cherry, slicing and saucing).

Of notable absence are: corn, eggplant, peppers, garlic, celery, broccoli and cauliflower, brussels, cabbage, melons and turnips. This is mostly due to the kind of foods I like to eat, combined with the space requirements of individual plants (e.g. cabbage taking too much room).

Q: Are you looking for more land? Are you going to do this again next year?

A: I'm not sure about my plans for next year. I am treating this year as a learning opportunity, hence my relationship with Dan Bravin and the low cost of the CSA program. I am definitely interested in hearing about available land (particularly full empty lots or larger), close by to my house.

Q: Can I visit you at the garden?

Yes, I occasionally have work parties, and I love helpers. Watch this blog (by entering your email on the right side) and you'll stay informed. If you want to just come by for a look-see, let me know.