On New Ground

After attending the Eco-Farm Conference, I continued on my quest for ideas and possible answers about where to go next. Luckily, my time off from teaching in January coincides with other folks' time off from farming, so I signed up for yet another workshop, this time with Curtis Stone of Green City Acres , who was away from his urban farm plots in British Colombia and on book tour, promoting The Urban Farmer, Growing Food for Profit on Leased and Borrowed Land.  Stone’s premise is that quite a bit of food can be produced on a small (sub)urban lot or collection of lots, and it isn’t relevant whether you own or lease the land. As it states on the back cover of the book, Stone’s approach involves, “minimizing risk and maximizing profit by using intensive production, and making a good living growing high-yield, high-value crops right in your own backyard (or someone else’s).” As someone who did not own a backyard, was reluctant to invest in land that wasn’t mine and take

Well, here we are. It is July 2017. From all outward appearances, my forays into the world of organic, sustainable gardening and farming have gone kaput. I didn't really post anything here all last year, except a summary of the permaculture program that I completed the year prior. Tap, tap. Is this thing still on? Well friends and blog reader(s), the answer is yes! Don't be deceived by what you don't see. The truth is, I did a lot of agricultural-ish stuff in 2016, guided mostly by the question of “What and where should I do and go next?” After completing the permaculture program at RDI , I was hanging out in Selmo without a real project. We were renting and didn’t have tons of outside space, and truth be told, I was feeling tired of building gardens in places that I would leave behind . It was nice to pass them on to the next person, but I wanted to sink my teeth in more, set up water catchment, turn the plumbing into grey water, sheet mulch and plant cover crops, in