What to grow?

    What will I grow on my pocket farm? A focus is a matter of heart and of marketability, and the two seem to conflict early and often as I forge ahead on my solo farming endeavor.
     This first year, I have decided to focus my growing efforts on cut flowers. I have always loved growing vegetables above all other things — something I'd like to blog about later on when the furor of getting started is settled and writ upon. Meanwhile, my reasoning is as follows:

Aug. 2015: Bouquet- in-progress from my CSA fields

•     Space: It takes less space to raise flowers. Once they start blooming, you can—and must—keep picking annual flowers to keep them producing. Some vegetables produce all season—or most of it—from the same plant. Many are one-harvest crops: things like root vegetables and seasonal crops like peas. It takes more real estate than I can get ready for planting this year on such short notice.
• Infrastructure: To make produce marketable means you have to keep it coming, it all has to be appealing (meaning you have to grow more than you can sell), and it needs to be washed and packaged appropriately. That means lots of wash water, containers, and abundance. A greenhouse for seedling production is pretty important to filling limited space most efficiently.  Much as I would love to have one, a greenhouse is out of my budgetary reach this year. 
• Justice: What would I really, really like to do? Grow food for low income folks—people like me who can only afford fresh and local if they skimp elsewhere or grow it themselves.  I live in a very wealthy area, with a concomitant high cost of living. "Buying local" is very hip, CSAs are everywhere (this county was the seat of the CSA movement a few decades ago), and every other store in town is a restaurant. There is also a big and largely invisible population of working-class residents with strong, ancient ties to the area (and, for many very valid reasons, an aversion to this imported hip-ness) and a growing population of immigrants who serve the wealthy population and struggle to pay for food and housing , let alone find the kinds of foods they grew up eating.  Who is providing fresh, local food to these folks? Flowers seem like a luxury item, and in some ways, it makes me embarrassed to choose this as a crop for that reason. On the other hand, it would be nice to spread the wealth around. How about an affordable, local source of flowers for weddings? I used to make arrangements for small weddings —some of them very informal affairs—through my church, and it was fun to give luxury and beauty to those occasions.) Imagine getting a deal on fresh flowers that let you make a conscionable bunch part of your housekeeping budget? Further, while flowers should be something one gives as a symbol of everything happy, joyous and hopeful, the hothouse flowers we can get from the grocer or florist are very often not produced under conditions in any way happy or joyous. There is a dark underbelly to the cut flower world, which relies heavily on fossil fuels from farm to florist (think fertilizers, greenhouse heat, air transport, packaging), pesticide use, environmental degradation, and unfair and unhealthy working conditions for those who grow and harvest that happy bouquet for your sweetie or ill friend. 
• Skill base: I have been growing flowers for as long as I have vegetables. I love to work with color, texture, and the seasonality of flowers. Putting together the weekly bouquet for CSA shares was the high point of my former job. Nobody who gets flowers is ever mad about getting them, and nobody ever complained that they didn't know what to do with them. Making bouquets is happy work.

   So, for a startup endeavor, flowers it is. Besides, even if I don't make a profit, I get the chance to spread a lot of joy and make the yard a lot more beautiful than it was, and provide a lot of food and habitat for butterflies, moths, honeybees, native pollinators and hummingbirds. Besides, isn't my motto Bloom where you are planted?