Grow a Sustainable Diet: Planning and Growing to Feed Ourselves and the Earth Read Free

much of this information would get to the local farmers. In the past I had seen extension programs come and go. During the years the research was funded, there would be field days and informative meetings. Then, however, it would be written up in bulletins and buried in the files. I hoped that would not be the case with this material.
    For work on a smaller scale I realized that I could translate this information into ways to manage cover crops with hand tools. Knowing the right crop to plant at the right time, and when to cut it, was all the same whether you were going through a field on a tractor or tending a garden with a sickle. Instead of roller/crimpers and no-till planting aids we just needed a sickle and a sturdy trowel. In particular, I could see how this would benefit small-scale market growers. I was going to teach this in my classes at the college, but I needed to reach even more people.
    When he was in high school our youngest son, Luke, would sometimes film me in the garden and I would show the film in class. After high school Luke went to film school. Upon graduating he returned home and I realized that, with Luke’s help, I could get this information topeople through a video. We filmed an episode in the garden each month except August, from March through November 2007. In February 2008 we released the 66-minute DVD Cover Crops and Compost Crops IN Your Garden , showing it at the annual conference sponsored by the Virginia Association for Biological Farming and Virginia State University.
    One thing leads to another and even before that video was finished I knew I would have to produce one about garden planning. Through my years of teaching I had developed a method of getting a whole garden plan on paper, enabling my students to all present their plans to me in the same way. This was more than just a way to make grading easier. Knowing what it takes to plan growing for the markets, I had developed a way to make that planning easier. It was information I wish I had when I was selling vegetables. At the beginning of the season I would know how many seeds and plants I would need, what was to be planted where and when, and when to expect a harvest. In January 2010 we released the video Develop a Sustainable Vegetable Garden Plan . It includes a 115-minute DVD, plus a CD with all the worksheets. My husband, Walt, a computer programmer, was tech support for those worksheets. In the DVD I teach garden planning for the first hour, and you meet nine other gardeners and tour their seven gardens in the second hour.
    Producing those videos was intense work. Transforming the information I wanted to get across was one thing. Learning the ins and outs of video production was quite another. Luke did a great job filming and editing. Working with any other film crew would have been quite a different experience, I’m sure. To even my own surprise, once that second video was done I decided I needed to leave the college in order to address a larger community. Conveniently, our daughter Betsy was moving back to Virginia from Arkansas that year and was able to take over teaching the classes. Betsy is one of the gardeners in the garden plan video, walking you through her Arkansas market garden. Today I continue my work on sustainable diets, including how to get food all the way to the table using the least fossil fuel, and I write a blog at HomeplaceEarth.wordpress.com . Occasionally I get out and about to promote my work and Walt often joins me to man the Homeplace Earth booth while I’m speaking.
    Our second oldest son, Travis, a talented artist and photographer, readily agreed to photograph cover crop seeds so that I could show them on the packaging of the first video. He emailed the photos to me in January, 2008. Four days later, he suddenly passed away at age 30. Since then, I have learned much about what happens when we pass from this world to the next. We are not really gone, just changed, and our energy is still here. Travis