MARKET GARDENERS

[Garland Grower]

Does anyone know newsgroups for market gardeners?

[Charlie]

No.

Your transparent advertising ploy shall be forgiven, upon my part, on account of your venture. Best of luck to you. And keep on keepin' on. We are a 'growing' force.

Charlie Underlog... the Fool, the Slimer, the Zealot, The Organic Fanatic, the Paranoid... and numerous other derogatory names pasted upon me in this group.

[Billy]

Fool? Well, hey, but Organic Zealot? I've known you for awhile, Charlie, and you seem normal too me.

[Garland Grower]

I honestly was looking for help with that one.... There are no groups with the word market or truck farm or anything like that. I put my logo on the bottom of all replies because I was told by a member of the preserving group that it would be okay if I did not blatantly try to sell. I'm not that witty or clever to try to disguise it in that way. But a big thanks for the good natured forgiveness, even though you thought I was doing something I was not. LOL See that's why it's never wise to assume : ) I need to go to a lot of classes, seminars, visit other gardens and such to gain knowledge, but there never seems to be time and certainly not now with the season gearing up. I'd love to go to Boggy Creek Farm in Austin, they've been doing Organics for 19 years and you can tour their farm any time at all. From their website they seem to know the ins and outs of the business big time. Peace, Namaste and all that good stuff.

[Billy]

I think that you'll find that this group would recommend

and Joel Salatin

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan

126

"Grass," so understood, is the foundation of the intricate food chain Salatin has assembled at Polyface, where a half dozen different animal species are raised together in an intensive rotational dance on the theme of symbiosis. Salatin is the choreographer and the grasses are his verdurous stage; the dance has made Polyface one of the most productive and influential alternative farms in America.

Though it was only the third week of June, the pasture beneath me had already seen several rotational turns. Before being cut earlier in the week for the hay that would feed the farm's animals through the winter, it had been grazed twice by beef cattle, which after each day-long stay had been succeeded by several hundred laying hens. They'd arrived by Eggmobile, a ramshackle portable henhouse designed and built by Salatin. Why chickens? "Because that's how it works in nature," Salatin explained. "Birds follow and clean up after herbivores." And so during their turn in the pasture, the hens had performed several ecological services for the cattle as well as the grass: They'd picked the tasty grubs and fly larvae out of the cowpats, in the process spreading the manure and eliminating parasites. (This is what Joel has in mind when he says the animals do the work around here; the hens are his "sanitation crew," the reason his cattle have no need of chemical parasiticides.) And while they were at it, nibbling on the short cattle-clipped grasses they like best, the chickens applied a few thousand pounds of nitrogen to the pasture-and produced several thousand uncommonly rich and tasty eggs. After a few week's rest, the pasture will be grazed again, each steer turning these lush grasses into beef at the rate of two or three pounds a day.

By the end of the season Salatin's grasses will have been transformed by his animals into some 40,000 pounds of beef, 30,000 pounds of pork,

10,000 broilers, 1,200 turkeys, 1,000 rabbits, and 35,000 dozen eggs. This is an astounding cornucopia of food to draw from a hundred acres of pasture, yet what is perhaps still more astonishing is the fact that this pasture will be in no way diminished by the process-in fact, it will be the better for it, lusher, more fertile, even springier underfoot (this thanks to the increased earthworm traffic). Salatin's audacious bet is that feeding ourselves from nature need not be a zero-sum proposition, one in which if there is more for us at the end of the season then there must be less for nature-less topsoil, less fertility, less life. He's betting, in other words, on a very different proposition, one that looks an awful lot like the proverbially unattainable free lunch.

[Garland Grower]

Thanks, I'll check em out. Beef and Meat is not my big thing, but we do have two pigs and chickens. We bought the pigs to get the weeds out of the plots and they seem to be doing a good job so far.