Some Farm news:

We had an interesting working arrangement this week because of the holiday so Paige, Justin, and Ashley worked on Sunday the 4^th, doing most of the harvesting including edamame, eggplant, tomatoes, lettuce, watermelons, musk melons, squash, carrots, and a number of other things you probably saw in your shares, and then they took Monday off, when Gretchen and I wrapped up some harvesting and had a list of other tasks to complete on our own without the "farm bosses" around.  After having a couple margaritas and a nap in the walk-in cooler, I think we did a pretty good job of getting it all finished.

One of things we completed then and continued the rest of the week was trellising our many, many tomato plants.  Much of our different successions of tomatoes all required being "trellised" at their different stages of growth.  What is tomato trellising?  Instead of staking or caging a tomato plant, which is something you may have done or seen in home gardens, trellising is a faster and more effective method of getting the plants off the ground for larger scale crop production (but can be good for home gardeners as well). 

When we trellis tomatoes, we stake 5' or 7' metal conduit posts every three plants down each row.  Then we drive those posts securely into the ground with a 'post driver.'  We then strap a box of tomato twine (a fine type of soft string) to our belts and feed that string through a few feet of PVC pipe, which makes it easy to keep the sting taught throughout the process.  Once fed through the pipe, one can securely tie the end of the string to the first conduit pole, and begin trellising.   With one hand on the string, holding it tight (glove recommended), the other hand holds the PVC pipe, guiding the string, and then wrapping it around each conduit pole (this can be tricky your first time).  As you go along, you want to try to keep the string about 6 inches from the top of the plant and avoid touching the plants, as they are very susceptible to the spread of disease.  This is also why we change the PVC pipes we use before going on to a new field.  After having reached one end of the row you repeat that process, coming back down the other side.  Once one has completely finished a row, you can keep the string tight by placing it under your foot, then cut it off near the string box.  Lastly, secure the sting to that last pole, and voila, you have trellised one row of tomatoes.  The process is repeated several times as the tomato grows, always keeping the trellis line about 6 inches from the top of the plant.  It can sometimes be hard to keep up with throughout the year!  Trellising helps with disease prevention and also increases yields.  

"The City That Ended Hunger"

Since I get excited about food justice issues and I find this article fascinating, I thought I might share it with you.  The article (title above), written by Frances Moore Lappe, (found in YES! Magazine's spring 2009 issue and can be easily found online by 'googling' the title) is about a large city in Brazil that decided to address hunger in their community head-on.  Belo Horizonte's population is roughly 2.5 million people and had 11% of the population going hungry in the early 90s.  20% of its children were malnourished.  In 1993 the city decided to end hunger and created a task force of 20 citizens from labor positions, businesses, and churches to advise and come up with a new food policy.  By implementing ideas that directly united local farmers and consumers, eliminating middlemen, and developing "ABC" markets where farmers contracted with the city to keep food prices low, both the farmer's profits grew and poor people got access to healthy food.  The farmers who benefited from these contracts were also required to make weekend distributions of food to the poorer parts of the city. 

The city also developed restaurants around town where locally grown and healthy food was served in meals that were the equivalent of less than 50 cents about 12,000 times a day.  The food is so good there one often finds homeless people eating beside workers, eating beside businessmen.  No one has to prove they are poor to eat but 85% of the clientele are.  The contracts with the farmers also allocated funds that put local healthy food into the city's schools.  The city uses less than 2% of their budget (or $10 million) annually to accomplish this and the results are impressive.  They have cut both their infant death and infant malnutrition rates by half and given all of the population access to local, healthy food.  The participants of the task force and city agencies involved remark that in hindsight, they knew how bad the problem was but never realized how easy it would be to 'end hunger' in their own community. 

It is quite difficult to compare this city to the city of Atlanta or Georgia overall but after some quick research, it is interesting to note that roughly 13% of Georgia's residents are considered as having very low 'food security,' or ability to secure food for a normal, healthy lifestyle.  9% of Georgia's residents are on food stamps (now called SNAP cards).   Right now, in the entire state, there are only 4 farmers markets that even accept those cards and only because of grant money awarded by the Wholesome Wave Foundation, which doubles the money for these SNAP cardholders at those farmer markets.  Atlanta's population is 3.5 million (includes 5 largest counties), its city budget is roughly $600 million, and they will finish the 2010 fiscal year with $18 million (3%) in unspent funds.  Just something to think about! 

To help support the Wholesome Wave Georgia, go here.  Also, Serenbe is hosting a Southern Chefs Potluck to help benefit the Wholesome Wave foundation on July 18th.  Enjoy good food and put your $ to a great cause.  You can buy tickets here. 

I hope you enjoy your shares this week. 

--John