In article ,
songbird wrote:
Gunner wrote:
songbird wrote:
Gunner wrote:
Bird, You guys should be darn proud, 20 #s a plant is exceptional in
any climate. Just know that would not happen here without some help.
Hell, a lot of help, hence the BS hothouse vines sure taste better
than the Fl field pinks shipped up here. So I tweak under lights.
i'm happy, but not particularly proud because we
didn't really have to do much other than plant them
and water them during the dry spells. a little weeding
here or there.
I also agree w/ ya, you can't place a price on a quality product. So
I don't understand "whats the price" thing was?
i'm not sure what you are talking about
unless you mean the point i was trying to make
about what it actually costs to produce a pound
of greenhouse tomato compared to what it costs
to produce a pound grown in the dirt.
You would not be
pulling 20 # here and you admit you can't compete with the commercial
growers on price point.
i don't understand you. you quoted wholesale tomato
prices not wholesale organic tomato prices. and i'm
not a commercial grower anyways. the question i answered
was how much did it cost me per pound and i put a number
out there and my reasoning behind it. i still have yet
to see a number from you. 
Kinda sounded like you were tag teaming with
billy, one of those organo vs. the world folks when we started this
little posturing game.
it's not posturing if i'm backing it up with
facts.
My garden is a cook's garden. I do really good with it because of a
lot of good teachers around the world. My rosemarys are not the
Mediterranean quality I have known but I can tweak em in a green house
better to taste than I can in the cool wet short growing season we
have here. That is priceless to have that. Sure nice in the winter to
have some rosemary garlic trashcan potatoes from your own garden.
Same for the many varieties of peppers, epozote, basils, marjoram/
oregano,Bay Laurel .... you get the picture I'm sure. So growing my
own is much better than not. The 20-30 bucks a month is acceptable to
me , again especially in the winter when I'm in my greenhouse. I still
have time to review the seed catalogs in front of the winter fire with
the dog at my feet as you do
it all sounds good to me. here, keeping a
greenhouse warm enough to keep a rosemary plant
would cost a lot of money. the rosemary plant we
have comes inside for the winter and sits by the
window here in my room. that's all the space for
plants i want to bring in. the amaryllis are
taking over as it is. gotta give some away soon.
As for your sermon of "go forth and cause no harm". Your preaching to
the choir, maybe not yours perhaps and certainly not the billy bad
goat Doom and Gloom Fringe Band. I do not see it as an "either/
or". You've even stated you use billy's evil OP.
? billy's evil OP? no idea what that means.
But billy has
never been anywhere nor seen anything except what he reads on the
Internet to really compare. I have been around the world a time or
two to appreciate the little things that American billys seems to
think is exclusive to the Organos. He has no bona fides except from
his Amazon Organo book of the month club . Your 20# @ give you
some. My Inlaws in Detroit didn't have such luck.
the neighbor's garden 150yds away didn't
have any luck this year either. but it's
really not lack of luck as much as nobody
cares much for gardening there. just a
little effort in the right direction and
they'd get much more for their efforts.
to defend billy a bit, he does garden.
yes, i'd like to hear more direct experience
from him and less quoting of other sources as
this isn't a "post your research quotes"
newsgroup.
in the end, i think his heart is in the
right place.
Just know I'm using less 'cides than most in my IPM schedules and
certainly less water than dirt scratchers except mine is about equal
in the hottest part of the summer when our soil drains too well.
Luckily we have Hydropower here so my energy/water is cheap. Old Sol
is not always here for ya in the PNW. You results may vary in the
Great Lakes.
sure. our power is mostly either coal or nuclear.
the wind and solar is gradually increasing. they are
just now adding a 90MW wind farm that will come online
this year. the problem here with solar is that the
winters are cloudy often enough so it isn't something
that gets paid back as quickly as it would in the
southwest.
Regardless, The best to you birds. I also hope you keep your land
for many years to come. Also know my grandkids will be helping yours.
thanks,
BTW, Miracle-Gro is still OK to use
gack! i was just thinking about what i
would rather drink, dilute MG or dilute
worm tea. can't say i've tasted either.
don't intend to.
now my break is over and time to get
back out and get the buckets of stuff
buried and the grapes cleaned up a bit.
if i have any energy left after that
then i move on to finishing up thinning
the strawberry patch.
O&E,
songbird
Psst. Is he gone? When do you think he'll find out that you are just
another hemorrhoidal, fat, old man? Whups ;O) shussh.
Anyway, all I got for you is another ol' book report. To wit:
Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry
Farms to Humans and the Environment by David Kirby
http://www.amazon.com/Animal-Factory...vironment/dp/B
004IK9EJQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1310272843&sr=1-1
(Available at your local library, until they are closed.)
260 ANIMAL FACTORY
What irked Chuck most was that not all hog farmers [CAFOs] were doing
their part to avoid pollution. "And it ticks me off," he said. "I spend
so much time and trouble and paperwork on all the things I do ‹ most of
my expenses, really ‹ for applying and monitoring the waste. And then
some guy somewhere just decides to let it go, and then that paints a bad
picture for all of us."
Chuck was personally involved in the hunt to make [CAFO] lagoons
obsolete.
Chuck introduced them to the inventor, an old farmer named Don Lloyd.
Rick and Nicolette watched in wonderment as Chuck and Lloyd explained
how it worked.
"We take all the wastewater washed from the barns and pump it into this
underground holding tank, where heavy solids settle to the bottom," Chuck
said. "Now, this is all the stuff that would normally go into the
lagoon. So you see, we've already eliminated the need for a lagoon right
from the get-go." Rick liked what he was hearing so far.
Once the solids had settled out, Chuck and Lloyd siphoned water off the
top and ran it to a large above-ground tank.
[T]he solids, raw manure cannot be used on food crops because of
the harmful pathogens it contains, limiting its commercial value as a
fertilizer. Most of the germs can be killed through composting, though
that takes time and money to accomplish, without adding enough market
value to the manure to make the system economically feasible.
"Then we discovered an answer," Chuck said proudly. "It was worms‹
vermiculture, they call it." Lloyd devised a system that feeds waste
solids to worms on a continual basis. Inside a barn with dirt floors, he
had dug several rows of trenches‹three feet wide and about twenty-two
inches deep‹the entire length of the floor. A mix of worms and organic
matter were introduced into the trenches, and then specially designed
machinery deposited an inch of solids into each trench every morning. By
the end of the day, the worms had consumed the entire inch of food,
turning it into clean, odorless, disease-free castings. The worms
returned to the bottom of the trench, and another layer of, solids was
applied to begin the process again.
"I chose a type of worm that turns this stuff into some kind of superfood
for plants," Don said. "Farmers and gardeners can't get enough of it;
they pay top dollar for it." The worm barn could yield about three tons
of the coveted "black gold" each day, he said, adding that the state
department of transportation had told him they wanted to buy it for
roadside plantings.
"And because of the value added on the manure from those little worms,"
Chuck concluded with a big grin, "it brings our net costs down to about
fourteen
262 I ANIMAL FACTORY
dollars per thousandweight," or a penny and a half per pound. "But this
is still in its early stages. We're just a little Chitty Chitty Bang
Bang kinda outfit up here."
---
--
- Billy
Both the House and Senate budget plan would have cut Social Security and Medicare, while cutting taxes on the wealthy.
Kucinich noted that none of the government programs targeted for
elimination or severe cutback in House Republican spending plans
"appeared on the GAO's list of government programs at high risk of
waste, fraud and abuse."
http://www.politifact.com/ohio/state...is-kucinich/re
p-dennis-kucinich-says-gop-budget-cuts-dont-targ/
[W]e have the situation with the deficit and the debt and spending and jobs. And itąs not that difficult to get out of it. The first thing you do is you get rid of corporate welfare. Thatąs hundreds of billions of dollars a year. The second is you tax corporations so that they donąt get away with no taxation.
- Ralph Nader
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/7/19/ralph_naders_solution_to_debt_crisis