Archive

Sometimes it feels like my flower farm, Moonshot Farm in East Windsor, New Jersey, is an entomologist’s dream and a farmer’s nightmare. Surrounded on all sides by conventionally sprayed farms, our property is an oasis for all kinds of cut flower pests. We grow the majority of our highest value stems under cover — both heated and unheated greenhouses — where pest issues can be magnified.

Does it make any sense for a market vegetable or flower grower to plant an apple orchard?  It’s a question I’ve asked myself a fair bit over the last eight years of both growing for a 100-plus member CSA and managing a small, 500-tree certified organic orchard. As our orchard matures and we find ourselves putting certified organic apples (and smaller numbers of pears and plums) in summer, fall, and winter CSA boxes, I think the answer now, for us, is – YES!

I met Yoko Takemura in the fall of 2019 when I was no-till curious and searching for successful models. For several years, I had been experimenting with no-till methods here and there on our three acres of organic vegetables in northwest Connecticut. I had done some tarping between successions where it was convenient and hand flipping beds when we had time. Yet, I wanted inspiration and an equipment primer from people already more committed to no-till. 

When driving a vehicle on the farm we tend to do a lot of stopping and starting, drive at relatively low speeds, and to get in and out of the vehicle many times. Electric vehicles don’t require any warm up on cold mornings, just turn the key, press the pedal and they go. The utility carts are also really easy to slide in and out of, and there’s little worry about getting the interior all muddy or dusty. Getting in and out is easier partly because they’re closer to the ground, a feature that makes loading up the bed of the vehicle with whatever it is that you’re carrying easier, too. They’re completely silent when stopped, and much, much quieter when moving – a feature that’s hard to fully appreciate without experiencing it on a daily basis.

Youth team members aged 12-17 are a valuable and ready supply of labor on our farm. We developed this labor model over the course of eight years as we went from part-time to full-time farmers in 2019.

Going into 2024, my wife Julie and I are entering our 14th year of farming in rural northwest Indiana, our fifth year of full-time farming. Our gross sales in 2023 from farm produce (1.25 acres of permanent no-till deep compost beds) and value-added kitchen items is over 185K.

A group of North Carolina farmers created a co-op to share equipment and tools. They exchange them in a way that feels fair to everyone, and they manage the business of the cooperative without making too many demands on busy farmers. They’ve been at it for more than a decade, so the name, Tool Legit, is fitting.

An email from a reader got me thinking about seed drills, those tools we dump seed into, and then push or pull down a bed to set the seed into the ground at just the right spacing and just the right depth, all in a straight line. A lot of folks probably just call drills “seeders” these days and I’ve had the opportunity to use quite a few different ones over the years so I thought a little overview of some of the basic features might be helpful for folks starting out or thinking about buying a new seeder.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably seen endless footage and photos of pristine looking market gardens where all the plants look amazing and there is nothing to do but plant and harvest. A good market garden can get to a point in which pest and disease pressure and fertility issues become virtual non-factors, but that is not the story in a first-year no-till garden

A small-scale, community-based farm store

We can’t all live near Manhattan, Boston, Montreal, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, Madison, or any number of other awesome markets for organic produce. In my experience as a farm manager on farms in the Hudson Valley, Finger Lakes, and Sacramento Valley, you can sell it all, all the time, in those markets. Not so in the myriad small markets many of us find ourselves in.

A practical approach to intercropping 

When we started A Way of Life Farm in 2009, intercropping and companion planting (the practice of growing two or more crops in the same space at the same time) were a part of how we wanted to farm. Yet, after some trial and error, we abandoned it, writing it off as “not practical on a farming scale.” However, we revisited it a few years later as we were looking for ways to maximize space in our new high tunnel. Now, it has become a very important part of how we continue to grow more and more food on the same (or even less) area over the last few years.  

As farmers, our customer base is limited to the number of people within our sales range who can afford what we grow. To increase our customer base, we are used to thinking about tempting more people to put what we grow at the top of their weekly grocery list, or figuring out how to expand the geographic sales boundaries toward larger population centers. Here, we’ll think through increasing sales by reaching customers with minimal food budgets. (See the related article “Serving the underserved” in the August 2018 GFM.)

The farmers market is a likely destination for many new farmers and gardeners who are ready to try selling their vegetables and flowers. And it is a logical one — relationships need to be formed, experience needs to be gathered, lessons need to be learned, and reputations need to be forged as you begin to establish your operation. And a farmers market is an excellent place for this.

Wholesale contracts, restaurant and grocery store connections, CSA shares, these all tend to come later with a few seasons under your belt. Plus, direct-to-consumer sales are famously where the best money is to be found.

Just before you picked up this issue of Growing for Market, you likely were at your desk or computer planning out the growing season: What you will plant and where, and what supplies you’ll need to prepare for the growing season. Maybe you just charged a bunch of purchases to your credit card or scheduled payments from your bank.

Scrolling back through all of the photos tagged #toolsforgrowingformarket on Instagram I found a post of some long gauntlet gloves hanging in a packing shed that was posted by Kat Johnson when she was manager of @fieldsedgefarm back in 2020 (I also wrote up Kat’s pocket magnet knife holder in this column a few years ago). 

As I spent most of the day yesterday washing mud off of veggies in an open shed, taking extra care not to get water into my gloves, this was yet another reminder to me that I need to order a couple pairs of these gloves for me and my crew.