Archive

As a flower farmer and an ambassador of the Slow Flower Movement (which promotes local, seasonal, and sustainable floriculture), I always try to come up with beautiful eye-catching combinations that make an impression. Beautiful flowers should always start a conversation. Like many of you, I can fill fields year after year with gorgeous annual varieties, but at some point, we hit saturation. There are not many undiscovered varieties, but there are still extra tools in our toolboxes. I wanted to reach into mine and pull a few out to write about.

Perkins’ Good Earth Farm is a permanent bed, deep compost, no-till, and certified organic vegetable farm. I want to share our journey from a low-till to no-till system to encourage others to consider how this production system might apply to your farms.

This year, we are bringing three new employees onto the farm after losing someone who had been with us for four seasons. So, I’m thinking hard about how to “onboard” them and give them the information necessary to do a great job with harvest, seeding, cultivating, and all the other tasks on the farm. It’s part of my mission to get information and decision-making power out of my hands and into theirs.

This winter I finally replaced the plastic on our hoop house which was getting a bit ratty after many years of abuse from wind, rain, sun and vandals with knives (our most annoying urban farming pest). The plastic wasn’t completely useless though, so I returned to a practice I’d used many years ago with good success: covering freshly seeded beds in cold soil with clear plastic to improve germination.

The H-2A visa process is fairly complex so it’s no surprise that most farms hire consulting companies, recruiters, and attorneys to help them navigate requirements to bring migrant farm workers into the United States. But it’s actually quite possible to DIY the H-2A process entirely. Because of grant-related obligations, we recently went the DIY H-2A route and learned a lot of lessons along the way. As a disclosure, I’m not an immigration attorney, just a fellow farmer with some tips to share.

Aphids are perhaps the soft-bodied insect pest most well-known to both farmers and gardeners. There are many different species of aphids, but green peach (Myzus persicae), melon (Aphis gossypii), potato (Macrosiphum euphorbiae), and foxglove (Aulacorthum solani) are some of the most common aphid species of concern for market farmers. 

Snapdragon, or Antirrhinum, is a staple spring and early summer crop on our farm. We do succession plantings in our unheated greenhouses and in the field for eight to ten weeks of continuous harvests. They are a fairly easy cut flower to grow, and they produce an incredible number of stems per square foot, making them quite profitable. You can dry snapdragons and add them to everlasting bouquets for sales during the winter months. They are also an edible flower.

Spring looks different at Clay Bottom Farm this year. The propagation house, a polycarbonate-walled structure attached to the south side of the farmhouse/barn, is empty of its usual explosion of green vegetable seedlings getting a head start in gas-heated comfort while the snow melts on the garden beds outside. Instead, you can find the trays of vibrant starts on the shelves of two white grow tents added to the processing room this winter. 

The 2024 season was our eighth season of farming in the high desert of Colorado’s western slope. By far, it was our hardest. By May, the grasshoppers started in our hoophouses as nymphs, and by early summer there was an infestation in our field, too. Due to climate change the baseline level of grasshoppers is increasing. What was a bad grasshopper year in 2023, coupled with a mild winter, turned into a plague in 2024 as eggs overwintered in the ground.

There are a lot of little, very low-tech tools that I almost take for granted because I’ve been using them for so long and so regularly. This time of year, I’m seeding a lot of trays for the greenhouse and there are two very simple and effective ones that I thought I’d highlight here: a 12” drywall knife and my custom chopstick.

Back in 2023 I wrote an article on my budgeting method for my farm, the way I compare actual expense against the budget on a monthly basis, and some of the analysis I do at the end of the year. (“Farm bookkeeping and budgeting” from the April 2023 GFM.) One thing I skipped over in that article was how I handle depreciation, and how the concept of depreciation can be useful in understanding profitability from year to year and in making sure that you’re budgeting for maintenance and eventual replacement of “fixed assets.”

Last fall we invested in a bale buster and flat filling machine for our cut flower farm, Moonshot Farm in East Windsor, New Jersey. It’s one of our favorite investments we’ve made to date. The machine has provided significant labor savings and more even planting results. If you’ve been considering investing in one, it might not be as out of reach as you think.