More organic veggie stuff

I do wish I could buy colorful peppers (fresh or frozen) grown nearby. My post yesterday presented the conundrum. Hopefully, we'll be able to crank up the cooperative systems that will allow local growers to preserve (freeze) their peppers at competitive prices, so we'll be able to buy them in the off-season, as well as enjoying them in our growing period.

It's a complicated system. Obviously, it's still cheaper for a small Pennsylvania-based company Village Grown Organics to contract-grow organic peppers in China. Oil is still cheap enough and container ship and truck transport is efficient, so a small company's product can appear in a local Southeastern U.S. grocery store.

That's essentially nuts as far as a real ecological footprint is concerned.

Village Grown Organics launched their product line within the last year. Here's a trade show video that popped up in a Google search.

I have zero connection with this company. I was impressed with the quality of their frozen peppers, and I think about the Chinese small (organic vegetable) farmers that produced them, too.

Hmm.

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Growing, growing, and more growing....

A second day at the Organic Growers Conference was just as interesting, although with the beautiful spring weather, I'd really have rather been hiking or gardening! The threads of interest at this conference were fascinating -- the growers who are making a living providing organic vegetables and edibles are clearly working hard, but at something they love. As a home gardener and garden educator, I'm feeling like maybe I take a bit too much for granted in terms of my food supply. I recently joined the American Farmland Trust -- their bumper sticker of No Farms, No Food tells the story.

A artisan baker (Farm and Sparrow) whose bread I greatly admire (I'd sign up for his classes anytime) who was a vendor, said that he didn't have time right now for teaching, but was hopeful of focusing on just wholesale in the winter and doing more teaching again.

But, today, I learned more about management of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium with cover crops, antique and heirloom apples, hoop house production of vegetables, and passive solar greenhouses. Maybe I should have learned more about heirloom tomatoes or managing tomato diseases. But all were interesting.

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