Long first post!

Allow me to introduce myself - I'm Chris, and I'm new here. Brand new. I read the article in the paper on June 12th, and immediately knew I was gong to be a part of this. The Red Barn Community Farm (permission to use RBCF from here on out?) fits perfectly into what I envision is our next logical step as consumers of food - eat local. I still had a multitude of questions, however, and Dean was kind enough to meet with me to address them. A excerpt below, the accuracy of which is possibly tainted by the effects of some great Scuttlebutt IPA (my apologies to Dean for any substantial misrepresentations):

Me - So, if I sign up ten people, and THEY each sign up ten people, I'll get rich, right?

Dean - You're in the wrong meeting.

Me - What is the Transition Movement, and how does that play into the RBCF?

Dean - The Transition Movement is a plan for dealing with the post "Peak Oil" world. In uses an incremental approach to helping people understand that there is no master plan for what will happen when oil is not as inexpensive and available as it is now, and we alone are responsible for putting the effort in to prepare. The RBCF is a community-based project that will be one aspect of Transition Port Gardner's overall Transition plan.

Me - Well, sign me up.

He did. And, deciding I was less of a lunatic than he probably expected, Dean also invited me to post on the blog about my successes and failures in my gardening experiments over this first year. So, I'll be dropping in here every once in a while to use up some of your bandwidth.

In our conversation I discovered that there are other people that think along the same lines about the oil issue as myself. I don't consider myself an extremist. I suspect there are some who wouldn't even call me an activist... I'm just a consumer who grew up in a consumerist society and is looking for ways to integrate a little less conspicuous oil consumption into my daily life. I have a full-size diesel truck (to be honest, bought with running on BioDiesel in mind, but the reality of that experiment on my particular engine was not looking like a model of success). I work for a manufacturer that outsources a lot of the manufacturing overseas. I don't own a pair of Birkenstocks.

But I do have a concern for our collective future, and see this project as an avenue for me to contribute in some small and meaningful way as part of a unique community, and help others do the same. I really look forward to meeting the other gardeners out there this year. Feel free to stop by my plot at any time and introduce yourselves, and I'll do the same. I should probably come up with some clever tag line that I end every post with, but for now it'll just have to be...


Chris