It's Not too Late to get Started.

by sean kohler

With the last frost behind us (maybe?), summer seems to be in full swing. The days are long and warm now, and there’s enough daylight to squeeze some life out of the end of a work day. With evening bike rides, farmers markets, and the wildflowers coming in, summer excitement is in the air. Despite the pandemic, the valley is determined to trudge forward into summer. The longer days seem to have brought our community back to life. With bugs and birds flying everywhere, kids and deer running around, and the flowers blooming, everyone is griped in summer excitement. And with this excitement comes a dilemma that I am sure I am not alone in. I want to spend more time outside and I’m ready to grow food, but it’s already June. Is it too late to start gardening?

I talked to Sierra Fairfield-Smith to help me with this dilemma. Sierra has been gardening in the Gunnison Valley for 12 years now, and in that time she has learned quite a bit about gardening here. With this information, she started a company called Sol Food Gardens. A full installation edible garden company. It was at a very special one of these installations jobs that I caught up with her. GCSAPP has partnered with Mountain Roots and Sol Food Gardens to help kick off the Victory Garden Revival at the Tender Foot Preschool. For the last two weeks volunteers from the Health and Human Services center, GCSAPP, Mountain Roots, and Tender Foot have been working to get the new garden installed, and it is looking good. 

After setting the fence posts and spreading some mulch, I got to talk to Sierra about what her vision for the garden was, and I had one question on my mind. Is it too late to get started? She informed me that from this point, Tender Foot was going to really take the lead on the garden, with support from the Mountain Roots Farm to School program, but she gave me a bit of insight to what the plan was. The short answer to my question was no. It isn’t too late to start, fact it is still a great time to get a garden started. There is still a lot of plants that you can get started straight from seed, right now, and more that you can do from starters. She told me that the preschool was planing on planting potatoes, lettuce, and radishes with the little ones. If you’re looking for a little more diversity in your garden though, by this point it is too late in the season to get any yield off of most other vegetables starting from seed.

Veggies you would need to transplant from a starter:

-Brassicas: broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kohlrabi,
-summer squashes, beans, or cucumbers,
-peppers, or tomatoes

Veggies you could start from seed:

-Potato starts that are sprouting
-leafy greens such as: kale, lettuce, spinach, arugula, swiss chard
-radishes, beets, carrots, peas,
-and any herbs. 

Through their Grow and Give initiative, CSU has put out a lot of information on soil temperatures, germination, and transplanting. Check it out here:

If you already have a garden going, Sierra gave me some good tips of things that she has on her to do list for the up coming week. On the top of her list for the gardens that she looks over, is thinning. Its a dog-eat-dog world out there, and with the warm days in front of us, you want to give your strongest plants the best chance you can. So start thinning out those sprouts. If you’re wanting to transplant any of your sprouts while thinning, make sure to be very careful pulling them out, so that you do not disturb the root structure.

Is your garden looking a little splotchy as the sprouts start coming in? It is a good time to reseed any of the crops mentioned above that you can start from seed still. If you’ve got peas going, odds are they are looking for somewhere to go. If you haven’t already got a trellis set up yet, nows the time to give those little buddies a place to go. And Finally, now is a great time to give your plants a little boost with some compost tea. If you are unfamiliar with compost tea, there is another blog post in the que all about compost tea and nourishing your garden.

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With the warm days in-front of us, let’s get those plants in the ground, so we can be bringing in a bountiful harvest for ourselves and our valley this year. If you haven’t already, please feel free to set up a garden consultation meeting with me here. If these days and times don’t work for you, email me at sean@mountainrootsfoodproject.org, and we’ll find a time that works. I look forward to gardening with you all this season. Together we can liberate ourselves from the industrial agriculture system.

—Sean Kohler

Revival in the Face of Insecurity

1942, the world is plunging into darkness. Turmoil is felt throughout the world, as nations are facing off in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Cities that once stood firm are being leveled in a matter of days, and the meaning of total war is being truly understood. Forested hills and tropical Islands are being reduced to smoldering wastelands. War is ravaging the home front as much as it is ravaging the battle field. In Australia the fields are being left fallowed, as young men leave their farm for war. German U-boats sever Great Britain’s supply lines causing food rations to run low. In the United Stares, the gears of war have begun churning. Men are enlisting, factories are producing machines of war in place of their normal products, and the whole nation has put its weight behind the war effort. This shift in focus sends ripples through the fabric of society. With supplies going to the army, American households are beginning to feel the costs of war. Food rations are becoming tighter, and food insecurity is being felt throughout the world.

In the wake of this instability, the civilian population is given an opportunity to strengthen the home front, as well as bring some security into their life. The Victory Garden movement sweeps the nation. Implemented by the Department of Agriculture, the movement aimed at easing the strain on the national food system, by having everyone in the nation grow as much food for themselves as they could. There was nationwide support for this movement. Lawns were ripped up to grow crops, vacant lots were turned into community gardens, comics, and cartoons showed support for the movement, even the White House dug for victory with Eleanor Roosevelt building a Victory Garden. Victory Gardens swept the nation turning urban citizens back into farmers. The USDA originally did not want to create this movement for fear that it would topple the industrial food system. A fear that was well placed. At the height of this movement, home gardeners were able to produce 40% of all produce grown in the United States, a yield that is estimated to be between 9 million and 10 million pounds of produce a year.

2020, paranoia pulls at the stitches of our nation. An unseen enemy lies in waiting. Spreading throughout the world, The COVID-19 pandemic is shaking the foundations of the global age. International travel wains, businesses begin to close their doors, and our understanding of what is essential is reshaped. As the virus begins to outpace us, conversations shift from containment to flattening the curve. This requires a halt on normal life. Stay at home orders were placed, and people began to stock up. Super market shelves were empty, and for the first time in many American’s lives, they were unable to get the food that they were looking for.

One of the biggest fallouts of the COVID-19 pandemic is the faults that it brought to our international food system. People in this country are going hungry while farmers are turning thousands of pounds of food back into their fields, unable to sell what they grow. Our industrial food system is faltering on both ends, and tensions are rising within this country as uncertainty sets in. But this has happened before, and we know how to overcome this. We have already done it.

The solutions are in our own backyards, down the street from us, in our history. The Victory Garden movements of WWI and WWII needs to be revived. A movement to increase food security, community strength, and increase people sense of agency is desperately needed in the world right now. In the face of paranoia, we band together. In the face of insecurity we give to our neighbors. In the face of hunger we plant our own food. In the face of a pandemic, we persist.