Tomatoes To Market: Season working on next year & begging for garbage

Our students have been getting a lot of compliments on the tomatoes they are growing this year.
 When they are asked how they did it, we have to tell them to tell others that it is a long story.  We started this project over a year ago.  It started with going from place to place and essentially begging for garbage.
Soil is the key to a good tomato.  Soil is the key to a strong plant. Strong soil equals strong plant.  So, that is where we started.
The United States throws away approximately half the food that it produces. The vast majority of that food goes into landfill.  It is wrapped in plastic and left to rot.  Some places have created ways to harvest the methane created by this process.  Many others just let it break down Whether you believe in global climate change at all or whether it is caused by man, that one fact remains; we throw away a lot of food.  We decided to kill two birds with one simple stone.  Create strong soil by creating great compost and create great compost by tapping into something that is in great supply, food waste from restaurants.
This time last year we engaged in doing something rather unusual, we went around asking people for
stuff that would normally have discarded, composting it, and using it to feed our plants.  Simple enough?  Yes and no.
As we have stated in other blog posts, we see that the main hindrance to the process is not the process itself but people and thus we can somewhat see why we are in the mess we are in.  The key for us was creating a model where people could give us their garbage so we could compost it.  The largest producers of compostable matter are often the least willing to part with it.
At some point we as a society became comfortable with complexity and inefficiency.  Before the advent of large scale waste disposal systems, getting rid of waste was unsanitary yet efficient.  Things were thrown out the back door or fed to the hogs.  When cities got larger and there became a larger need to deal with waste of all kinds what we increased in sanitation decreased in speed and efficiency.  Taking garbage out at the end of the night turned into collecting it up so that

someone could pick it up at a specific time of the week and take it miles away, out of sight and out of mind, to dump in a hole.  Over time we began to have need to dispose of more things that could not simply be tossed in a hole.  Plastics and chemicals were dumped in these same holes and we as a society were ok with it because; out of sight, out of mind.
The problem was the mindset that had changed.  We became disconnected from our garbage. and things that we did not need were simply repulsive to us.  Part of our problem as a society is that we have to reconnect to our garbage.
One of the problems that we see is that when we approach a restaurant and tell them that we want their vegetable scraps and the like, they look at us like we are crazy.  "B-B-B-But that's GARBAGE,ewww!" they seem to say and a banana peel that was just wrapped around a banana that they have eaten is suddenly the most disgusting thing they have ever seen.
We don't use anything on our tomatoes and they are thriving.  No chemical fertilizers, sprays, or anything else and our tomatoes are doing great because the soil is strong and our plants are able to fight back disease better.
We need to rethink our relationship with our trash moving forward.  For all of the talk of knowing where our food comes from, we don't like to think about where it originates.  I am not talking about the farmer who grew it.  I am talking about the soil that causes that seed to grow and how the nutrients in the soil were taken up by the roots and what brought the fruit or vegetable or leaf into being.  This is a cycle that started many many years ago and in order to keep that cycle going, we need to understand it and deal with the more, forgive the technical jargon, "icky" parts of it in real terms rather than just wrapping it in plastic and burying it outside of town.
We are getting better and better at this and the compost we collect today is going to be next year's tomato.  This is true permaculture; instituting systems that work align with the world we live in and solve the problems that are in front of us.  The billions of people on the planet are not going away.  They are not giving up their restaurants.  We need to manage the waste that is coming and put it back into use as it was intended.  We need to change the mindset.

Wanna help?
Make a donation at
Sunshine and Rainwater Farm

Follow us on Instagram at @thelifecooperative
Contact us at Sunshineandrainfarm@gmail.com