April 1, 2013

I have been following the flower farming adventures of  Pamela and Frank Arnosky, owners of Texas Specialty Cut Flowers, from the start. Their wonderful monthly column here in Growing For Market spanned more than 15 years and eventually became two fabulous books, We’re Gonna Be Rich (out of print) and Local Color (still available from […]

By Pam Dawling. Pam is the garden manager at Twin Oaks Community in central Virginia. Her book, Sustainable Market Farming: Intensive Vegetable Production on a Few Acres, is available from Growing for Market. Subscribers always get 20% off books when they are logged in. Pam’s blog is at sustainablemarketfarming.com. This article originally ran in the April 2013

This is the first in a series looking more closely at the five areas of potential food contamination identified by the FDA. On the market farm, almost every crop is harvested and handled by human hands at some point between harvest and sale. People bunch kale, pick up carrots, sort tomatoes, and dump rutabagas into

We like mulching the aisles between rows of plastic on our 8 acres of vegetables, and after trying different methods we’ve settled on rolling the smaller 4’ x 5’ round bales down the aisles by hand. Compared to square bales they cost half as much per pound of hay, which is nice. More importantly, though,

As I mentioned in my March 2013 article in Growing for Market, I tried a new trellising method in the hoophouse last year, which I ended up loving for cucumbers and hating for tomatoes. For  some people, it works well for both, and in that case it saves time, money and materials in the lowering

There is a new kind of lettuce that could change the way you grow salad mix. You may have noticed it while looking through seed catalogs this winter. It goes by several trade names including Eazyleaf, Multileaf and Salanova. Available to the large-scale bagged salad mix industry for a few years, it is available to