What’s in the ground:

Now is the time to take a good look at your plants in the garden and check their growth. Every gardener should take a walk through the garden at least once a week, but now it is even more important. If you have broccoli that still has not headed up, or you have tomatoes that are growing leafy vegetation like crazy, two things should be looked at. The first is that you may actually have too much nitrogen in your soil. Try amending it with more carbon, like leaf mulch or wood chips, or add calcium to balance the PH. The other thing to do is prune or sucker your plants. If you prune those excess broccoli leaves off, more energy will go to the heads. When you sucker, mostly on tomatoes, you want to cut off those little stems that are growing off your bigger stems. This way you will concentrate more growing power to your existing stems. Just be careful when you do this. Make sure you cleanly clip the stem as close to the main stem as possible. Also, to stop the risk of disease don’t do it on a wet plant or if it’s about to rain. Other than that, happy gardening and I hope you get some hearty, beautiful crops.

What’s going on in sustainability:

I actually don’t have much to write about this week. The youth coop is going great, the kids are delivering with their new bike trailers and we are looking to solve our water problem with a very innovative partnership which I’ll write about another time. For today I just want to ask a question.

While talking to a fellow urban farmer, we got on the topic of profitable urban farms. After a lot of considerations, he made the great point that we have an inflated profit because we rely heavily on volunteer labor to produce. We then started to think of other types of farms and found comparisons. Agribusiness uses exploited, many times immigrant labor. Family farms often use child labor. And while using volunteers or kids from your family is not evil like paying migrants a penance, although not all people who run family or non-profit farms are shining examples of good human beings,  it still falsely supports the industry.

So how do we get to the point where we can make farming equitable for all producers? Today I just read an article that makes the point that farming has never been profitable for all involved, that it’s not a sustainable to make a living off the earth. But if we can’t do that, then how can we make a living, by not living on it but just raping it as our industrial model is doing now?

I wish I knew the answer, maybe I’ll find it in this coop model with the kids, but time will tell. Until then, this is the note from the Urban Homestead.