Subarctic climate change: Agricultural opportunities and threats
Agriculture is expanding in the subarctic and arctic of Alaska and Canada as temperatures in those northern latitudes rise two to three times faster than on the rest of the planet. Crops are started earlier and remain in the ground longer. In Whitehorse, Yukon, farmer Sarah Ouellette harvested field herbs and greens in the later […]
Write newsletters people want to read
Newsletters aren’t just for CSA farms From 2006 to 2020, my husband Casey and I operated a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program as the core marketing outlet for our farm, Oakhill Organics. Over the course of those 15 years, I wrote a newsletter to accompany every week’s share — 614 newsletters in total. A weekly […]
Crop succession planning for even harvests
I get a lot of questions from newer growers about how to figure out good succession planting schedules and crop rotations. The tools I use for both are the same: a combination of very basic spreadsheets and concise field maps that capture both space and time. But like most things, it’s actually less about using […]
Leeks: A guide to the versatile winter workhorse
Leeks are a versatile vegetable, with a potentially long harvest season from summer to the following spring. Though most customers don’t really get excited about leeks until the weather cools, they can add to the diversity of winter crop offerings, being neither a hardy leafy green nor a stored root vegetable. In the southern United […]
Brownfield flower farms
Cultivating blooms on injured land When farmers look for land to grow food or flowers, they generally seek out healthy soils. On the other hand, the flower farmers profiled below grow on land polluted by harsh industrial chemicals, or in one case, military firefighting foam that leached perfluorinated compounds (PFCs) into the groundwater, where the […]