Backyard Season Extension Workshop w/ John Dysinger

WORKSHOP IS STILL ON. COME ON OUT.

What: Season Extension Workshop w/ John Dysigner

When: Sunday August 7th @ 11a.m--1p.m (notice this is a Sunday--maybe the garden is your cathedral this week?)

Where: ENCM (807 Main St. 37206)

Cost: Free. But we’ll “pass the hat” for our speaker

Limit: 35

This weeks forecast has temperatures reaching into the triple digits and believe it or not it’s time to think about the fall!

This installment of the Backyard Foodways workshop series is on extending the season. We welcome John Dysigner of Bountiful Blessings Farm, a beautiful family run farm in Middle Tennessee. You might know them for their strawberries, or as one of the first farms to offer a winter CSA; I mainly know them for their amazing carrots through winter! As mentees of Eliot Coleman, the Four Season Farmer of Main, the Dysigner’s utilize season extension techniques of low and high tunnels, greenhouses, and suitable crops to extend the harvest right through winter and into the next growing season--talk about “food security”! These people don’t stop farming.

For this hands on workshop we will build a “low-tunnel” and plant a fall/winter bed. We’ll discuss suitable fall and winter crops for your backyard, and management of low and high tunnels, greenhouses, and row covers. John will bring materials for low tunnel construction and winter gardening books for sale, so you can go home and construct your very own and start enjoying the bounty of a winter harvest.

There is a lot of wisdom in the Dysigner’s. It’s a real treat to have them on the East Side for this workshop experience.

RSVP/sign up in the comment space below. Direct any all questions to Justin in the comment space.

The South!

I've recently delved into Literary Nashville, a collection of fiction and non-fiction writings about Nashville or written by authors who have been influenced by Nashville. One of the inclusions is titled "I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition" and is an excerpt from an Agrarian symposium published in 1930. The work was created by twelve noted Southerners with professions ranging from psychologist to poet to political economist. The symposium is a "refutation... of the mechanistic and materialistic values of industrial urbanism" (19). Sound familiar?

It is made abundantly clear that this is a battle: Southern agrarian tradition and modern industrialism cannot coexist. It must be "Agrarian versus Industrial" (20). There is no possible mingling of the two, for they represent opposing cultural ideals.

Even that early on in industrialism - for it had not been a great amount of time since Ford's assembly line that led to revolutionizing factory work - it was apparent that industrialism did not have the consumer's best interest in mind. The symposium notes the curious circumstance that people had become "enamored of industrialism," despite the fact that it is "a system that has so little regard for individual wants." This little regard includes the successful attempts of "the producers, disguised as the pure idealists of the progress [to] coerce and wheedle the public into being loyal and steady consumers, in order to keep the machines running."

Despite noting that industrialism is a harmful system, these authors were far from accepting its inevitability. Instead, they had high hopes for the agrarian lifestyle being regained:

"An agrarian regime will be secured readily enough where the superfluous industries are not allowed to rise against it. The theory of agrarianism is that the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations, and that therefore it should have the economic preference and enlist the maximum number of workers."


We can heartily agree with these gentlemen in their well-stated conclusion, as relevant today as it was 80 years ago:

"For, in conclusion, this much is clear: If a community, or a section, or a race, or an age, is groaning under industrialism, and well aware that it is an evil dispensation, it must find a way to throw it off. To think that this cannot be done is pusillanimous. And if the whole community, section, race, or age thinks it cannot be done, then it has simply lost its political genius and doomed itself to impotence."



This is just skimming the surface of this interesting document - I'll be checking the entire thing out at the library, so there is more come.

The cold, hard facts

I'm knee-deep in The End of Food and, while from what I can tell the very end is going to offer some hope, it is a difficult read because of the subject matter. Every aspect of our food system is so, so broken. None of it is sustainable. We are severely depleting natural resources and there are no viable solutions to keep things running the way they are. When we run out of water to produce grain, what is the alternative to that?

I was looking at these agricultural statistics for Tennessee and can see how our state is being affected by our food system. All these statistics cover changes over a 10 year period, between 1997 and 2007.

The world's meat consumption is steadily rising, a trend that is far from sustainable. Meat, particularly beef, is a highly inefficient use of calories: it takes 20 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of beef. In Tennessee, between 1997 and 2007, the number of acres used to grow crops decreased by 1.4 million, while the number of acres used for pasture (i.e. to grow meat) increased by 1.4 million. No surprise, the #1 agricultural commodity is cattle. Meat is becoming a priority.

Globally we are chipping into our non-farming acres, as all immediately arable land is already in use. In Brazil, 8,000 square miles of rainforest are depleted for the sake of farming (typically for poultry or beef production). In America, soil-fragile acres are being put to use, acres that the gov't has paid farmers NOT to use because of the risk of destroying the soil completely. In Tennessee, the number of acres conserved dropped by over 100,000 acres, a 25% decrease.

The good news in all this? Most Tennessee farms are NOT mega farms, which are known for their high costs on the environment due to higher use of pesticides and fertilizers. Tennessee's average farm size is 138 acres. A farm that size can be ecologically sustainable with a "small farm" vibe - our local Delvin Farms is almost 100 acres and is a family enterprise that remains in touch with its customers and the environment, growing quality organic produce.

Is there hope for change? Yes. The average age of a Tennessee farmer is 54, something that will change as folks from our generation (ages 20-30ish) develop a passion for the land. We need to glean knowledge from these farmers who have been working the land since the 50s or 60s. There is a huge gender discrepancy: there are almost 83,000 male farmers, but only 8,500 females. Let's rise up, ladies and young folks of Tennessee!

http://www.ers.usda.gov/stateFacts/TN.HTM