Friday, April 2, 2010

Monsoon Season

The Monsoon season has begun. Torrential, driving rain; howling winds; stem-breaking hail, thunder, tornadoes. From here on out until Summer my vegetables will fight for survival. It is a miracle that they make it at all.

Not that it is all bad. When I started growing plants, I noticed that my plants were a little brighter and stood a little straighter after heavy thunderstorms --heavy on the thunder that is. Now I understand that a certain amount of Nitrogen gets fixed from the air by the tremendous energy of lighting and it gets delivered to the plants via the rain.

BOOK
I am reading the book Just Food by James E. McWilliams. What an eye opener! McWilliams is an Agricultural Historian and he makes a good case for not concentrating solely on food miles when we look for sustainable agriculture. There is so much more in the book though. I am terrible at book reviews but when I am done I will attempt to review it here.

AND WHILE I'M ON THE SUBJECT...
I have this fantasy rolling around my head that I can produce vegetables at mega-farm prices in my yard. I've been doing some research on the Internet (it is amazing how much info on farm production there is online) and, at least for tomatoes, I need to make my plants produce anywhere from 8 - 20 lbs (3.6 kg - 9 kg) per plant. Of course, I have to get that at a profit if I was to sell my tomatoes.
The next stage is to grow 50,000 lbs of tomatoes in one season, which is the output of many tomato farms.
Then I would like to grow various crops, not just tomatoes.
Naive? Maybe, but even if I can't do it, failure is such a wonderful teacher that I am bound to come out ahead.

1 comment:

  1. Hi David,
    It always rains here in Oregon so I'm quite used to that, glad we don't get tornadoes we just have volcano's to worry about. Will be waiting to see if you reach the tomato count.
    Good luck.
    Doc

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