Archive

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.

We’ve heard it many times. You didn’t get into farming to do marketing, bookkeeping, and all the other tasks of running a business. Yet, here you are knee deep in spreadsheets, Quickbooks reports, social media videos, and a host of other things you didn’t think you signed up for when starting a farm. It’s true, running a successful farm business requires that we wear many other hats.

Many years ago, I took my family on a road trip to the Grand Canyon and the beautiful red rocks of Utah. Highways in this part of the country are desolate with long stretches between exits. I still remember when we missed a critical fork in the road because my GPS service was spotty. As our exit suddenly appeared, I hesitated and missed the interchange, only to discover it was 25 miles to the next exit. We added a costly hour to our trip that day.

I’ve made over 40,000 yards of compost over the past 28 years using a skid steer, bucket loader, and a compost turner. But the first compost piles that I built in 1978 were entirely hand-made endeavors. Beyond their careful construction, the fact that these piles were never turned, yet produced high-quality compost, continues to guide an approach to composting that I refer to as “low-input” or “slow” composting.