“Some of you will grow food. — Probably a lot of you, actually. Even those of you who do other things as your main job. So you should probably start to learn how it’s done. Right now. Because it’s not something you can learn in a year – how to add fertility and prepare the soil, when to plant and harvest, how to store the harvest and save seeds, etc. There’s more to it than you think. And it’s gonna get even trickier when the climate starts its carbonic seizures – droughts, floods, heat, cold, and storms. In no particular pattern. So you better be good.”
People still regard home farming as an elective “green” activity, but might it be a survival skill by the time current teenagers are adults. Should we start retooling home ec classes to start covering agricultural education?
Slow Food is the organization that first brought me to sustainable eating. It showed me how to enjoy the experience of eating the best in local foods. I learned that often times local foods are easier on the planet than organic if they are grown sustainably and that my diet was one of the best tools in my plight to reduce my carbon footprint. December 10 marks the first annual Terra Madre Day celebration.
Our first stop was Nectar Gardens, run by Scott Pomeroy in Moloaa. He was farming 15 acres of a beautiful, well organized gardens and orchards. Scott has been commercially gardening here on Kauai for many years. He currently sells most of his produce at local farmer’s markets, but in the past has done CSA’s (Community Supported Agriculture), sales to local restaurants, and even exporting to Oahu.
Scott uses frequent plantings of cover crops to enrich his soil. They fix nitrogen and add organic material. Some of his favorite cover crops are cowpeas, sudan grass, and buckwheat. He also rotates crops and even moves gardening areas to let the soil recover from depletion of nutrients caused by intensively growing food crops.
Scott’s main vegetable gardening area is an array of beautiful curved rows. He weeds weekly, before the weeds have time to get established. A sprinkler system is used for watering. Scott recently bought a tiller which pushes soil from the paths into raised beds for planting.
There is a great new market being held every Saturday at the parking lot of Kauai Community College (KCC), across from Grove Farm in Puhi. Hours are from 10am to 1 pm. The endeavor is sponsored by Kauai Community College and Grow Kauai. The Saturday schedule allows attendance by working people who can never make it to the other local Farmer’s Markets held on weekdays.
It has been a science fiction dream: the completely integrated, closed loop system “micro-farm.” And we get it with the Inka Curve, a vertical minifarm that provides herbs, grasses, fruits or vegetables grown on a vertical “bio-quilt.”
But these need nutrients, which come from fish poop. But fish tanks need cleaning and aerating, and the vertical farm needs pumped water which requires power; that comes from wind turbines and solar panels, stored in a battery bank.
So the fish poop provides nutrients for the garden, all powered by the sun, using 10% of the water of conventional farming. The bacteria in the bioquilt of the vertical farm break down the nutrients and purify the water so that it can be returned to the fish tank, providing a balanced diet of protein and green vegetables on an incredibly small footprint. It is a dream kitchen addition that means we will never have to go out food shopping again.
A high school chemistry teacher has an interesting (and cheesy) open letter to his students in Energy Bulletin. He takes stock of a changing world, and makes some interesting predictions:
