Welcome to Growing for Market! - Growing for Market

Growing for Market is America's most respected publication about growing and direct marketing vegetables, fruits, herbs, cut flowers, plants, and other farm products. Growing for Market covers farmers markets, Community Supported Agriculture, the local food movement, organic growing, cut flowers, and much more. Growing for Market publishes 10 issues per year, in print and online, and offers memberships to our extensive online archive of articles. Become a member today!

March 2010 Issue now available, featuring:

• Movable hoophouses — the benefits and perils

• How to anchor hoophouses

• Grow peas, even where it's hot

• New, easy annuals for summer bouquets

• Build an efficient wash station

• Equipment that makes washing root crops easy

Plus news, classified ads, and new suppliers. Subscribe now and start with the March issue. Plus you'll get a 20% discount on all books!

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New Books in the Online Store

Frank and Pamela Arnosky are expert, successful flower growers who have been writing about cut flowers in Growing for Market since 1995. Local Color is a compilation of their most recent columns, from 2001 through 2009.
Click here to purchase Local Color as an E-book to download now.
Click here to purchase the printed version.

cover of Microgreens book

Microgreens by Eric Franks and Jasmine Richardson provides clear, detailed advice on growing nutrient-rich microgreens for market or your own table. Illustrated with beautiful color photos, it includes recipes from chefs in Big Sur, California, where the authors live and grow microgreens commercially. Click here to order.

These articles have recently been added to the GFM Archive.

Urban farming fears: disease, noise, commerce (in: Archive) Feb 1, 2010: Food and food production stirs up feelings in people. It is one of the things that I love about being a farmer — we can open up deep wells of feelings and connections for people as we feed them. The downside, though, is that the idea of urban agriculture — of neighbors growing and selling down the block or of chickens in a coop in someone’s back yard — can stir up negative emotions that are hard to respond to. We like healthy food, we like fresh eggs, but as a society we’ve got a lot of emotional baggage that is not so positive around how those eggs and food are produced.

Celery and celeriac: seeding is the hardest part (in: Archive) Feb 1, 2010: Celery and its rooty cousin celeriac are slow growing, but easy to care for once established. Celery can provide harvests all summer and fall, while celeriac is an eye-catching winter storage root vegetable. Celeriac is sometimes called “turnip-rooted celery.” Its flavor is starchier and sweeter than celery, with hints of parsley, and a nutty taste.

Don’t heat the whole greenhouse (in: Archive) Feb 1, 2010: Tomato prices in May and early June in northern Indiana, where we farm, are nearly triple that of mid-summer tomatoes. Customers can't wait for the first local tomatoes! But prices are high for a reason — early tomatoes cost more to grow, mostly because of heating costs.

A daughter reflects on her family farm’s lessons (in: Archive) Feb 1, 2010: Erin Aquino wrote this essay last year for the newsletter of Lane’s End Farm in Lowell, Indiana, where she grew up. Erin’s parents, Liz and Corey Aquino, have been growing organic vegetables for 18 years and selling through Chicago and local farmers markets as well as an 80-member CSA. “This was very inspiring to us as parents and farmers, when we wonder if this was the right thing to do for our lives and our family,” said Liz.

Managing hoophouse soils, weeds, pests, disease (in: Archive) Feb 1, 2010: The benefits of growing produce and flowers in hoophouses are well-documented: higher yields, better quality, a longer season, even better flavor in some crops. But hoophouses come with their own set of problems. Among the prominent management challenges are soil quality, fertility, insects, diseases, and weeds.

A quest for long-stemmed sweet peas (in: Archive) Feb 1, 2010: Of all the flowers we grow on our little farm, sweet peas are my all-time favorite. I have never seen a flower have such a strong impact on the recipient as these exquisite blooms. Tears, joy, nostalgia; no matter how tense, cold or brittle a person, sweet peas always cut through and touch the heart.

Free crop planning software (in: Archive) Feb 1, 2010: When Clayton Carter left his job as a software developer to start farming in 2006, he found little in the way of software to keep track of the multiple crops and tasks on his diversified vegetable farm.
“Our first year of growing, the largest obstacle I had was making sure I could keep track of what to do and when to do it,” he said.

Mapping crops on a spreadsheet (in: Archive) Feb 1, 2010: One of the most powerful and versatile tools on many farms is the computer spreadsheet. A basic spreadsheet application like the ubiquitous Microsoft Excel can function as a calculator, database, analytical tool, planning tool, and even as a very editable piece of graph paper for making maps in time and space. I’ve been using these spreadsheet maps for a decade in planning complex crop placements within fields, working out crop rotations, passing on instructions to field crews, keeping dense and compact crop records, and as a cheat sheet in creating weekly and daily to-do lists during the season.

Take dahlia cuttings now for hoophouse planting (in: Archive) Jan 1, 2010: Dahlias are spectacular cut flowers that always command attention at the farmers markets. The main season for field-grown dahlias is late summer through fall, but if you have a high tunnel, you can get an early start by taking your own cuttings in January. Dahlia plants from cuttings, planted out in April in an unheated high tunnel, will produce harvestable stems by late May here in Michigan.

Water greenhouse plants automatically (in: Archive) Jan 1, 2010: I apprenticed a number of years ago on a small farm with a woefully undersized but beautiful old glass house where we propagated all of our vegetable starts. I learned a lot in that glass house, hand watering the seedlings every day, making sure it was opened in the morning for ventilation and closed in the evening to keep the heat in, mixing up potting soil and seeding tray after tray. Andy, the farmer, rigged up a system to automatically water. It worked for a while but one day in summer, we came to check on the seedlings, after having been distracted for a day or two, and they were just about dead. If I remember right, the battery in the timer had failed. That memory sat with me for years and, determined to never let that happen again, I stayed away from automatic water for a long time.