Back to farming!

It was a great gathering at People's Co-op on Wednesday nite to talk about urban farming in Portland. I thought it was important to come together for a second year with more farmers, and certainly more viewpoints. It was great for so many of us to meet each other too. I saw and heard collaborations and alliances forming even before all the chairs were put away. Yes! This is what I think has made the event such a huge "success". For me, just getting you all in the same room was what I was after. Thank you to everyone who helped fill the room with your creative energy.

I also got what I had wanted out of the conversation too, as I heard new ideas being talked about. It made me think about the different kinds of work more of us will be doing as we start to tranisition to new situations in our world. I see lots of folks with new jobs like compost person, seed librarian, and barter specialist. I also think we will all adopt new skills that will become neccessary to live well. I don't think it will be long until we are all involved in food production in some way. I see a return to gardening as something we all did a bit of for our food back before we got used to running to the supermarket for things.

If you're reading this blog you likely already get it. So for us it's a matter of finding out how we can work together, starting right now, to begin to develop local food networks involving farmers, folks working with us to grow some of their own food, and those that have other necessary skills to provide us other things we all need besides food. The interesting thing is going to be finding out what those other "neccessary" things really are. No doubt that is going to be constantly redefined as we humans learn to live on just our fair share of this planet.

So I think many people, especially here in Portland, are going to be thinking about these things and developing new skills that we will need. If you have skills like bike mechanic, or bike messenger, or bike taxi, or I guess anything with bike in the title, you have skills that will be in demand.

Just how we intend to "charge" for these services is quite another thing. There will likely come a time when U.S. currency is not the main trading currency. Something like local dollars, time banks, and just good old trading will then prevail. We will need to start thinking in terms of skills that are needed, and that people are willing to trade for, rather than skills that command the highest monetary compensation in the job market. Many of those skills that pay huge sums of money now will not always do so, or be good trading currency in the new economy.

So come out and work in the gardens, help us make new compost piles and create new growing spaces, and figure out more about how food can be grown in the city. I'll be organizing an email list in the next couple of days for all of you that have contacted me about working in the gardens. I am going to be collaborating with a couple of other urban farmers on growing things in common and sharing some of the bigger growing spaces, so there should be lots of opportunities over the season to see lots of different growing conditions, see the life cycles of many varieties of veggies, grains, herb, and medicinals, and watch the seasonal cycles of the gardens themselves.

And now...back to farming! It was a weird and wonderful week last week as I made the rounds handing out flyers and talking about urban farming, but it left me feeling very ungrounded to not be very focused on my own farming for that long. That situation was remedied yesterday as I helped transition a new 1/4 acre lot to growing food. It felt good to dig in the dirt!

Peace and peas,
Calliope