Hello Everyone.  My name is Sean Williams--I'm a co-founder of Farmscape, and I'm going to serve as the unofficial editor of the Farmscape blog.  Since our blog went live last week, I've left Jesse's entry alone at the top of the page because I thought it was a good introduction to the business and our long-term goals. Now that it's beginning to gather dust, I wanted to follow up with a more formal introduction to the Farmscape blog.

Our desire to blog began very early in the process of starting Farmscape.  As we went through the initial steps of opening the business, we began to pose lots of questions without easy answers.  

Some were ethical and business decisions about the use of questionably sustainable materials such as peat moss.  Others were more political, and dealt with the role urban agriculture could play the American food system.  Still others dealt with the logistics of setting up a vegetable garden in Los Angeles or the day-to-day problems of maintaining urban farms.

It quickly became clear that the business, our customers, and the public at large would benefit if we could share what we learned as we tried to answer these questions and receive feedback from people outside of the business.  This blog is our attempt to explain both what we've learned and what continues to vex us, with the hope that our readers can avoid our mistakes and share with us their successes.

The more robust the dialogue that emerges on this blog, the more useful it will become as a tool for improving our business and furthering public knowledge. If you have a comment to share, let us know regardless of whether it's positive or negative. We're hoping to have comments up and running within a month; in the meantime you can contact me via email or the "quick contact" form above.

To give you an idea about what sort of content you can expect from the blog in the future, I wanted to describe the four general categories about which we expect to write. I've included the tags I plan to use when posting such entries, with the hope that you can easily search for more entries of that variety.

Food Politics and Urban Agriculture: Several of our staff members are politics and public policy junkies, so we can't help but comment on the broader trends in food politics and urban agriculture. Tag: foodpolitics

Farmscape the Company:  In part, this blog should serve to better inform you about what Farmscape does. We'll try to write about unique projects we're involved with, garden yield data, and other details of the business about which you might be curious. Tag: company

Gardening Tips and Research: As we encounter garden problems and troubleshoot their solutions, we'll write about techniques that we've found work well.  Some of these posts will be scientifically oriented, while others will be more practical Tag: gardentips

Cooking with Farmscape: The Farmscape staff loves to cook, so we'll try to share some of our favorite recipes and culinary experiments with seasonal and homegrown produce. Tag: Cooking

That's it! I'm really excited to finally launch this blog into cyberspace.  I hope you'll enjoy the journey as much as we will.