The Market Gardener’s Toolkit is an upcoming 90 minute film by Jean-Martin Fortier of The Market Gardener fame. Read my review of his book. He is making this film (actually two films, one in English, one in French) using crowd-sourced funds through Ulule. Here’s the website for the project:The Market Gardener’s Toolkit. It was launched Monday 15 February, so you still have a chance to be one of the Early Bird donors and win a discount on the digital download or the DVD of the film. This project will provide us with an educational film about tools and techniques for a profitable, human-scale agriculture. As Jean-Martin says You can see a short trailer (preview) of the film and read how your money will be used, on the Ulule page. If you have only just heard about Jean-Martin Fortier for the first time, here’s a photo of their beautiful 1.5 acre mini-farm. Clearly, he knows what he’s talking about!
I will be presenting two workshops (of the 140 offered) at the Organic Growers School on March 12 and 13 in Asheville, North Carolina. On Saturday, 2-3.30pm I’ll be presenting Intensive Vegetable Production on a Small Scale, which was a big hit at the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group Conference at the end of January. On Sunday , 4-5.30pm, I’ll be presenting a fully revised and updated version of my Growing Great Garlic slideshow. I’ve been busy working on that (while the weather is so awful).
Meanwhile, the weather here is atrocious, and not much vegetable production is happening outdoors. Our hoophouse is still providing salads, cooking greens, turnips, radishes and scallions. Outdoors, we have managed to prune some of the blueberry bushes, and spread compost on some of the beds we hope to grow spring crops in. I say hope, because we’ll be getting a very late start, and the soil is saturated from the past two days of snow and freezing rain, on top of previously saturated soil. We were luckier than some places. We didn’t get a large quantity of snow or ice, we didn’t lose electricity, and we didn’t suffer by having to stay off the (very icy) roads. We had what we earnestly hope will be the coldest night of the year, clocking 2F (-17C).
I’m planning to spend a bit of time “perking up” my website a bit, after realizing that people couldn’t find out how to subscribe or follow my blog. Currently what you need to do is go to the bottom of the “Posted in” Tags and Categories listed at the end of the post, click “Leave A Reply”; fill out your contact info, go to the bottom of the Leave A Reply space and click “Notify me of new posts by email” Surely I can make it easier than that? I thought I had installed a button, but it isn’t visible. I plan a survey too, when I’ve figured out how to do that.