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Old 16-03-2020, 09:41 PM posted to rec.gardens.edible
songbird[_2_] songbird[_2_] is offline
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First recorded activity by GardenBanter: Jun 2010
Posts: 3,072
Default Moby Grape Tomato

T wrote:
songbird wrote:

....
that's still three months not two! June, July,
August...


Exactly. That leave only one month for fruit bearing.


that's not been a problem here. tomatoes we plant at
the end of May will be started on picking by mid to
late August, the next few weeks are busy. sometimes
we have green fruits left when the frosts come but that
is ok as they ripen inside sitting on a table. a
few might rot, but enough are still good.

90-110 days is plenty for about everything i grow
with the exception of new varieties that i don't know
about yet.


....
in contrast we had a pretty good season even with
all the rains, diversity in planting and adapting to
conditions makes a huge difference. when people
complain that organic farming can't produce enough
food to feed a lot of people i know as a fact that
those claims are BS.


I hear that nonsense all the time too. Yields from
organic farms are a lot higher. One study I saw years
ago, a full circle farm was getting $1,400 per acre
whist his conventional neighbors were getting $400
per acre.

In The People Republic of California, virtually all
the wine grapes are now organically grown as the
yields are higher and, get this, every section of
their farms are producing consistent quality. No
more of this the north end is sweet and the south
end is sour.

And the difference i taste between full circle produce
and meat is striking. A guy around here that grows
full circle turkeys is bough out FIVE YEAR in advance!


probably what you are calling full circle is what i
would consider permaculture - there's a lot of different
names for some similar techniques. good thing it doesn't
matter what we call them as long as they work.


most farmers i know are older and not owners of
the land they abuse. a few are marginally better
than others but still often abusive. around here a
lot of fields that used to be prime topsoil are now
subsoil grade and poorly drained because they have
abused them so much. when you kill off the worms
and other soil community and don't plant cover
crops or use reasonable rotations that is what
happens. topsoil blows away or washes away or is
degraded by the abuse of fertilizers and too much
plowing/disturbances. you gotta work with a
place to know it and not just abuse it.

ok, rant over.


No problem. You are ranting to the choir. Full
circle farming is growing the soil.

On the bright side, those abused lands should go
for cheap to full circle farmers so they can heal
the land and make it productive again. And
bring back family farming.


it would be nice, but as long as they have lime
and synthetic fertilizers they're not going to be
stopping what they're doing.


And get away from the bottom line on NEXT MONTHS
spreadsheet and look at the bottom line of a historical
spreadsheet.


also would be nice, but our system is not geared
towards that either. it's all high-expense and high-
turnover type crops. corn and soybeans are the two
main things you see farmed around us. winter wheat
or winter rye once in a while, sugar beets here or
there. rare to see any kind of cover crops which i
consider a near criminal negligence as all that
energy the sun is putting on the soil is being
wasted when you could be harvesting it, generating
more biomass, improving your topsoil and protecting
it from the wind and the rain.


it was pretty nice out yesterday, today might be
about the same. we'll see. frost last night.


It is still snowing off and on. Melts pretty quickly.
Hopefully we will get a good 1/2 inch of water out
of all this and my favorite fishing hole won't dry
up again


there are very few places i'd fish around here
and eat anything i caught. up north is where the
better fishing is at.


songbird