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This spring, Seattle Wholesale Growers Market turned 14 years old. Our updated mission statement reflects the growth of an ambitious idea into a resilient business. We are a farmer-owned cooperative dedicated to serving the Pacific Northwest and beyond through the cultivation of high-quality flowers and a resilient, ecologically-centered floral community. Today we have 19 owner-members from Washington and Oregon, representing well over 200 accumulated years of knowledge producing specialty cut flowers.

I was looking back through Instagram photos tagged #toolsforgrowingformarket and came across one from a few years ago from my friend Martin at Slow and Steady Farm on Whidbey Island in Washington. In the photo he’s showing a $20 infrared thermometer he’s using to check the temperature of his soil blocks. At the time I hadn’t used one myself and didn’t know how quick and easy they were to operate!

We grow cut flowers year-round at Moonshot Farm in East Windsor, New Jersey, but find that timing flowers for December — including winter holidays like Christmas and Hanukkah — to be the trickiest time of year for production. To bloom in December, most cut flowers need to be planted under the extreme hot weather and long days of August to then bloom during the shortest, coldest days of the year. Meanwhile, consumers often are willing to splurge on holiday decor, and competition for local blooms is low this time of year.

The first part of this article ran in the May GFM about many of the wonderful spring and summer perennials and natural elements that can add character to bouquets and arrangements. In this, the second and final part of the article, we look at the foraged and woody elements that can be harvested or held for fall and winter design work.

Western North Carolina was hit with a catastrophic storm on September 27, 2024, when Hurricane Helene (downgraded to a Tropical Storm) ripped through a region already waterlogged from days of preceding rains. Historic flooding, landslides and high winds decimated entire communities and killed at least 106. The region is still recovering.

Flea beetles are diverse in feeding preferences and morphology. Most flea beetle species are specialists, preferring particular crop types, though some are generalists who munch a variety of different plants. Flea beetles range in color from iridescent green to matte black. Their small size and ability to spring away when approached can make them difficult to see, though the damage they leave behind is clear. Understanding how to identify this insect, its lifecycle, and management options will help to avoid an infestation.

Well, hello, dear reader. I am happy to have your interest and your eyes for a few brief pages. I’ll do my best to offer you a diverting respite from the height of the season in your precious idle moments. 

When last I wrote you, we spoke of micronutrients (aka trace minerals) in the soil and how to manage them in the January GFM. Ultimately, we grow and eat plants so that the nutrients they make from water, air, and soil may nourish our bodies (and our spirits if we are fortunate). Whereas most of the ag world is concerned with producing quantity or yield, our subject is the quality of our produce — its fitness for nourishing us.

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.