I just got back from a four-day trip to St. Joseph, Missouri, to attend the Great Plains Growers' Conference. Having been through my first year of really seriously focusing on the gardens, I now understand why growers' conferences happen in January and February! Hopefully everyone has recovered from the holidays and is ready to buckle down and start planning their crops for the year in anticipation of some great sunshine. We are in perihelion this year, so let our proximity to the sun shine upon our faces and our gardens!
My husband attended with me and we split the sessions we attended to get as much information as we could. The weather was absolutely beautiful for the 12-hour drive both ways, our lodging was great (Museum Hill Bed & Breakfast), the conference sessions were well planned out and well presented, and we accumulated a lot of discussion items to consider over the next months to years as we build our business at Bear Butte Gardens.
This particular conference attempts to meld the different theories on gardening and farming ranging from conventional to organic and sustainable. You could sign up for whichever tracks and sessions you wanted to attend. Since we are pursuing organic certification and smaller scale gardening (small compared to conventional farming of hundreds or thousands of acres, large compared to the traditional family garden) on the first day Rick chose to attend a track geared toward using high tunnel greenhouses and I chose a track geared toward CSA (community supported agriculture) farming.
Most of what I heard during day one was on the organic side of the options. It just seems that people who do CSA farming are more geared toward organic than not, so the sessions tend to lean in that direction. Rick's sessions on high tunnels were somewhat organic, but really focused on the kinds of crops you can grow, the actual building of high tunnels, and utilizing high tunnels in all seasons. We came away from the sessions at the end of the day with a load of new information and some affirmations of things we already knew.
Day two was interesting because there wasn't a track per say, but you could pick and choose different sessions throughout the day. Rick chose to sit in on some small fruit sessions and I chose sessions focused on transitioning into organic. Again, my sessions were as you would think.....mostly geared toward organic production. Midway through my first session of the day, which was about methods of seeding and transplanting, I was pretty engrossed in the basics of building your benches in a greenhouse, watering options, seed trays vs. soil blocks.....when I got a text from Rick asking where I was. A couple minutes later he showed up and I asked, "what happened to the small fruit session?" to which he replied, "well, the first sentence out of the presenter's mouth was "when you're growing small fruits such as berries you will want to start off with spraying all of your plantable area with Roundup" and they just never left that mindset", so 30-40 minutes later he determined that wasn't the session he wanted to attend and joined me for the rest of the day in my sessions. Just for a little history, we bought our land almost 16 years ago and we've always strived to go as natural as possible and use as few sprays as possible. So, the "Go Roundup!" cheer never lasts very long on Team Grosek.
I think this example just goes to show the widely varying views that are occurring now, even just in the Plains states, about how to grow a simple strawberry or tomato. I fully respect those who are conventional farming the way their father did and possibly even their grandfather. They have put food on our tables for decades. But I am very excited that I have the opportunity to explore some different options in small acreage farming and that there seems to be a good-sized population out there waiting for me to do it. I am a very cheap person at heart and the idea of laying out a lot of cash for pesticides and herbicides has just never set well with me, so I utilize as many free or near-free environmentally friendly methods as I can to avoid that cash outlay. I'm hoping that in the end I will be able to cover my costs, maybe share some information that I have learned with others along the way, and make for some healthy eating at the same time. Because, you know, at the end of the day it's all about the food. ;-)
Michelle Grosek
Bear Butte Gardens
Sturgis, SD
michelle@bearbuttegardens.com
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