The Beginning of Planting Season and Musings on Roots and Detroit

Hey everyone!  June is here, and planting season is underway out at the farm.  We've been doing a lot of work to get our plants in the ground out at the demo farm, and some of them are already beginning to sprout!

Over the past few days, we've been planting butternut squash and cantaloupe.  So far, we've planted fourteen beds of each.  Here's what the squash seeds look like:

To plant the squash, we used trowels to dig small holes about one or two inches deep.  The seeds were donated to us, so we put three in each hole to make sure that at least one of them will grow.  After we planted the squash, we covered the beds with a fabric called Agribon to protect the plants from pests, specifically the squash vine borer.

Planting the squash

The rowcover

I did not personally take part in planting the cantaloupe, as I was caring for our plants in the hoophouse.  Two other workers and I weeded the beds with a stirrup hoe.  We also put in some eggplant starts into one of the empty beds (I forgot to get a picture, so I'll show you one next time!).  To ease the transplant shock, we fertilized the plants with a little bit of kelp juice, which is an organic fertilizer.  As for the cucumbers that we planted in the rest of the beds in the hoop, they are looking great!

Cucumber plant, growing fast!

Cucumber beds

In other news, some of our potatoes are starting to sprout!  It is very exciting to see the things that we planted, like our potatoes and cucumbers, start to grow.  I can't wait to watch the transformation of our other plants.  Some of the farmers have also been out getting started, and I have had the pleasure of meeting one of them.  I'm eager to meet the rest and help them get going.

Potato sprouts!

Since I've started at Roots, I've been thinking a lot about the benefits of a program like this, like I wrote about in my first post.  I think a program like Roots would be very beneficial in a place like Detroit.  You may have heard about the idea of converting Detroit's abandoned neighborhoods to farmland, as described in these articles:

Plowing Detroit Into Farmland - The New York Times

Is Detroit doing the right thing? - Mother Nature Network

As you may have heard, poverty is a big problem in Detroit.  Using repurposed land to start a program like Roots there would be a great way to help people earn extra income.  Although there have been contradicting reports in the media about whether or not Detroit is really a food desert (see Data Driven Detroit debunks food desert myth, highlights food distribution issues and Mapping the Basics in Detroit), a program like Roots would also be a way to provide fresh produce to people who may not have easy access to it.

Many things sound easy in theory, of course, and Roots has taken a great deal of work by many people to get started in Lansing.  But I think Detroit would be the perfect place to emulate a program like Roots if it works as imagined in the Lansing area.

Thanks for reading, see you next time!