Read Online Blessing the Hands that Feed Us by Vicki Robin - Free Book Online Page B

technically even rent land. She partnered with the owners, producing food for them in exchange for a (hefty) portion of the crop. I know this is called sharecropping in other parts, which is just this side of slavery. But Pam’s strategy is canny to the max. She farms with no land debt, allowing herself to live on the proceeds of her farmers’ market sales rather than plowing profits back into owning land.
    Her arrangement is maintaining the events and flower gardens during the summer months and then cleaning up, moving plants if necessary, broadcast fertilizing, manuring, and replacing the irrigation system in the winter months, in trade for a residence in the barn, the processing room downstairs, and the quarter-acre vegetable garden / greenhouse space.
    She has an engineer’s mind, a love for vegetable production, and the good sense to seek out a “sharecropping” model that worked brilliantly, called SPIN-Gardening.
    After years of tweaking the model, she has a precise system, a precise mix of growth medium for her seedlings, a precise selection of seeds, and a precise grow light system to produce vibrantly healthy starts for her gardens—and her customers. Her beds are built according to a successful formula as well. They are strung with watering tape, and soon after planting, uniformly gorgeous healthy vegetables march in straight lines, proud and ready to be harvested.
    Having managed to support herself through gardening alone—after giving up her fall-back job at Boeing—Pam thought to train others in her methods. Enter Tricia, my soon-to-be feeder. She attended Pam’s course on her high production and precision method and was well disposed when Pam and Laurie Carron (architect turned wannabe farmer) approached her with a proposal to start a CSA garden on the land she and her husband, Kent, had just bought. Tricia went one further. She wanted to be a partner in the business. In February 2008 they broke ground and started building beds with half a dozen volunteers. By June they had twenty-five customers.
    Tricia was no stranger to growing food. She grew up in Ohio in one of those heartland families where the grandparents still had a large kitchen garden and canned in the fall to provision the family for the winter months.
    Tricia and her husband-to-be, Kent Ratekin, met in 2004, got sparky, and were inspired to build a life together on their many walks in the woods. He too was from Midwest stock, and he was also a student of Rudolf Steiner, the father of biodynamic gardening (as well as of Waldorf education and many other spirit-infused arts). So it was natural for them to imagine buying a property and growing some food. They looked for just the right place and found a ten-acre parcel where a woman had raised seven children and countless chickens, dairy cows, and horses—all of which had amply fertilized sunny fields. The place was infused with love—and fertility. They made an offer, it was accepted, and they became not just occupants of the land but stewards.
    Eventually Laurie went back to architecture and Tricia and Pam decided to each farm half the land independently and ended the partnership, but still, the spread of SPIN-Farming had started.
    Pam went on to set up a garden on a different woman’s land. It was part of her vision: to multiply the model on successive properties, getting ever more garden partnerships going. Others are experimenting with this model as well. City Grown, for example, is farming using people’s Seattle yards. There’s genius in seeing that grassland yards can be farmland. And Pam is certainly a genius of the practical.
    The Straight Truth
    So it was logical that I’d turn to Pam to assess our actual capacity for food self-sufficiency on the island when the economic and energy crises brewing like off-shore hurricanes eventually swept ashore—which we both agreed they would do. That’s when she did that