Growing for Market in partnership with Johnny’s Selected Seeds has created a library of expert information about growing and selling vegetables and flowers. Links in the article will take you to johnnyseeds.com. Subscribe to Growing for Market for more great ideas about growing and marketing! For more topics in the series, click on Market Farming […]
Extend the Selling Season with Storage crops Read More »
Growing for Market in partnership with Johnny’s Selected Seeds has created a library of expert information about growing and selling vegetables and flowers. Links in the article will take you to johnnyseeds.com. Subscribe to Growing for Market for more great ideas about growing and marketing! For more topics in the series, click on Market Farming
Launch a Winter CSA Read More »
With the popularity of local food still growing, opportunity awaits for farmers who can expand the range of food products they offer. Grains, dried beans, eggs, meat, value-added products all become potential new crops for the produce grower. But it’s not easy to determine whether a new agricultural venture will fit with the existing work
Book review Small-Scale Poultry Flock offers good advice for market farms Read More »
The first year I grew flowers, my cutting garden was a jungle of flowers and waist-high weeds. While I loved the process of selecting varieties, planting, tending and picking, I hadn’t anticipate just how much energy would be used battling weeds to ensure a healthy and abundant harvest. The following spring, determined to have a
Eliminate weeding with landscape fabric Read More »
Becoming more independent of purchased inputs is always a work in progress. Simply to make a start with a home flock is to decrease our dependence on purchased eggs and poultry, even if we are buying all our feed for the flock. Practicing more natural husbandry will likely eliminate purchased medications entirely. However, most of
Dependencies: What resources must be bought Read More »
Fava beans (known as broad beans in the UK), are easy to grow and have an unusual earthy, nutty flavor. Botanically, they are a kind of vetch. Like all legumes, they can fix nitrogen in nodules on their roots, leaving a fertilizer boost in the soil for the next crop. Their flowers are surprisingly fragrant
Favas: the bean for cool weather Read More »
Most farms have a basic set of carpentry tools and use basic dimensional lumber to build all kinds of useful farm furniture. Wood is an accessible building material and it’s versatile so a lot of small farmers rely on it heavily for customizing work spaces, building structures and even for building custom tools. Metal is
Metalworking skills, tools come in handy Read More »
Customer satisfaction is always important for Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms. Part of what makes the CSA such a desirable marketing model is the stable customer base that ideally sticks with the farm year after year. Happy CSA customers are more likely to return and share positive words with their friends, who may become new
Make your CSA recession-proof Read More »
The following is an excerpt from The Small-Scale Poultry Flock: An All-Natural Approach to Raising Chickens and Other Fowl for Home and Market Growers by Harvey Ussery. This book is about patterns of poultry husbandry that are more independent of outside purchases from far away, and more dependent on home efforts and local resources. It
Housing poultry in the greenhouse Read More »
