gratuitous veggie spam!

other than the corn this all came in this week

not pictured: stuff from way earlier this year (strawberries, blackberries, peas, green beans, garlic), stuff still growing (most of the sweet potatoes, more pumpkins), & shittons of herbs & buckwheat

it's hard to see the pumpkins in that pic, try this one

the JV squad lol

shout-out to MVP @RobTaber for his many contributions including manual watering in truly godawful weather

oh! also not pictured! A fig tree that will start fruiting next year, the many mushroom logs we've inoculated since July (100's more to go ), sunchokes, tomatoes, tea, & taro.

sorry no pics for these, they're still in the ground & I'm trying not to doxx myself lol

Why the gratuitous veggie spam? Well first of all, because it's cute.

But also bc if you talk about the shady underbelly of agriculture, the community's first line of defense is "well you're just bad at growing things and jealous of our skilz."

So as long as we're talking shit about skilz

We grew all this stuff on a very small, very poor patch of land in the NC Sandhills.

Our soil is so notoriously difficult that back in the day farmers gave up on the entire region. It got relegated to turpentine pines, not farming.

The Sandhills are one of many patches of ancient sand dunes ringing what used to be the South's coastline.

Water runs straight through. It's like a sieve. It can rain 3" and 2 days later, all the plants start wilting.

Sandhills aren't friendly to western-style farming. Landowners found even w slavery they couldn't get soil like this to yield a useful crop. So the slavocracy abandoned ancient dune deposits, & all the South's undesirables moved in- largely free Blacks & poor whites.

This is how you wound up with things like the free state of Jones. There were a lot of poor, free, biracial Southern communities that opposed secession. They tended to be in "pineywoods," "scrub," & "wiregrass" regions: aka they tended to be on top of ancient sand dunes.

(Or swamps. But swamp communities tended more often to be self-liberated slaves & remnant Indigenous communities who went there to get tf away from white society. Sandhills tended to be integrated into it, just poor.)

That was a big ol' historical digression. Point is, growing crops here is so miserable that people literally shot up the Confederacy about it. It's a far cry from fertile lands that do most of the work for you.

Not only that but our yard has a lot of trash & broken glass buried in it bc previous homeowners were gross lol

(yes we've gotten the soil tested for lead, yes it's a little elevated, now I have a perfect excuse to not grow spinach but most other things are fine)

The yard's also only got 1 little corner that actually gets full sun.

So we hit the Plant Murder Bingo: It's hot, humid, dry, AND dark. There are absolutely no plants adapted for this shit lmao

We grew all this stuff while getting slammed with work this summer. Rob had normal full-time teaching plus all the extra work of pivoting to online. I'm running the mask business & writing a book, in addition to normal food safety work for clients.

So yeah in short I'm not having it when people who inherited land & equipment act like the reason they're farmers, and the rest of us aren't, is "skill."

Especially when around here so many of the "successful" farmers are actual frauds.

in conclusion: veggie porn is fun AND political

here have half a shot glass of some green beans that got overgrown & we threshed them out for funsies