April 1, 2014

Every Saturday, May through October, we have all hands on deck to handle three markets and sometimes multiple weddings. Much planning goes into every weekend, making sure we have the staff, vehicles, and time to do it all.     Since we do three markets on Saturdays, most staff members are required to work, but […]

If you were a tiny man stuck in a blender, how would you get out? Last month I discussed some of the important big-picture items to keep in mind when going through your farm employee hiring process. This month I am going to delve into the best practices of the five core elements of a

In our gardens we use several kinds of mulch: Our small fruit crops have landscape fabric or cardboard, topped by sawdust, wood chips or hay. I wrote about using landscape fabric for strawberries in the September 2013 issue of GFM.Our asparagus has hay (though we used cardboard and sawdust once when we had a disastrous

Over 16 years, our farm has owned four vehicles for delivering produce. They ranged from small to quite large. Our current line-up includes an all-wheel drive station wagon for local errands and very light wholesale as well as a great Isuzu box truck that happily hauls 8-10 tons of cargo. I advise taking these steps

Our produce farm is diverse in what we grow and diverse in how we market. We have 10 wholesale accounts, a summer CSA of about 400, a 230-family winter CSA, and we sell at two farmers markets. Most of our customers are urban, but we farm in the country. Less than 20% of our income

By Andrew Mefferd One of the best reasons to grow tomatoes in a hoophouse or greenhouse is to improve fruit quality. There are a lot of ways that fruit quality can be improved just by going under cover. You can keep off rain, which can cause checking or spots. You can keep the foliage dry,