Green Gate's Fall Veggie and Flower Plan
GGF Fall Veggie and Flower News:
Hope you all are enjoying today’s gentle rain. We certainly did as we prepped our fields this morning for Fall. And speaking of Fall, we wanted give you a heads up about our plans for our 16th year of farming:
- Focus on Infrastructure: Building a farm stand and creating a wedding/event venue are our priorities in the coming months. These projects are going to require all of our resources, so we won’t be able to administer a fall CSA, but we will have veggies and flowers every week...
- Instead of CSA, order via private Facebook page (“REKO Ring”): Beginning mid-September, veggie and flower orders can be placed twice a week (Mondays for Wednesday pickup; Thursdays for Saturday pick up). Pick up will be at our east Austin farm (8310 Canoga Ave., Austin 78724) on Wednesdays and Saturdays, 9-noon (times are flexible). Created by a Finnish farmer, our REKO RING Facebook ordering system is purely transactional; order as much or as little as you like. We hope you will take advantage of this option and let your friends know it is open to all.
- Farm Stand beside Big Red Barn in east Austin Opens in September: Beginning mid-September, all are welcome to shop at our farm stand on Wednesday and Saturday mornings (9-noon)...stay tuned for more details.
Volunteers, Workshare Members, and Interns welcome at both farms beginning August 31.
Work times are likely to be 9-noon at River Farm: Tuesday and Thursdays (156 Howard Lane, Bastrop 78602) and at East Austin Farm on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Just fill out our volunteer form.
Questions? Drop us a line at info@greengatefarms.net. Village Farm Agrihood construction is underway for second and third phases. Contact Rebecca Powers at Village Farm if you’d like to tour a Tiny Home, 512-995-7335.
Get Involved
Join our Flower Power Workshares (like Prisilla photographed here beside our cantaloupe echinacea): Learn how to cultivate organic cut flowers this fall! Shifts 9-noon at east Austin farm (Wed, Fri, Sat) and Bastrop farm (Tues, Thurs). Apply here!
News You Can Use: Round-Up Banned Nationwide!
Healthy Steps Toward A Friendly, More Permanent Agriculture
By Harold Skip Connett
Long before there was Friends of the Earth, there was Friends of the Land. A national organization of farmers, conservationists, soil scientists and writers, Friends was forerunner to the environmental movement as we know it today. At its peak in the late 1940s, its soil conservation campaign spanned the countryside through rallies, conferences, and a quarterly magazine that featured essays by Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson long before they were household names.
If the land ever needed Friends, the time is now. A resurrected and repurposed Friends of the Land could do for climate crisis mitigation what it did for soil erosion three generations ago. If nothing else, we need to remember and honor the “permanent agriculture” movement it started. Friends of the Land prepared the field, so to speak, for the milestone victory last week when Bayer-Monsanto pledged to stop selling Round-Up for lawn and garden use by 2023.
These Post-Round-Up plots of land — millions of acres if pieced together — present a huge opportunity to reimagine and restore our most valuable resource.
The primary mission of Friends was reversing a national crisis that culminated with the Dust Bowl. Permanent agriculture offered a more holistic and regenerate approach to farming than the monolithic industrial agriculture that was also eroding the fabric of family farms and rural communities. Its prescription — more cover crops, less tillage and overgrazing, long-term organic practices rather than short-term chemical ones — was the right medicine at the wrong time. Friends was founded just as the United States entered World War Two. The massive, industrialized upscaling of food production needed for the war became the scientific and business blue print for the green revolution that has dominated agriculture ever since. Friends faded away but it prepared the ground for the organic farming movement and the permaculture principles now regaining the attention they deserve as the climate crisis upends business as usual.
If famed author and farmer Louis Bromfield, the most outspoken of Friends founders, were starting over today, where would he focus its mission on the American landscape? Reclaiming fields for forests? Reducing nitrogen runoff? Returning more organic matter to the soil? In the rush to increase carbon sequestration, these strategies are high priorities, yet one that stands to cover most ground is the quest for perennial grain crops. With that holy grail comes a true no-till agriculture, not the much-touted one today that relies on the ever-increasing use of herbicides, Round Up being the most dominate.
Check out the rest of the article here.
Neighbor Farms to Support
Please be sure to spread the love to our friends and neighbors at the following farms, many of whom run on-farm farm stands and CSAs: