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#toolsforgrowingformarket   An email from a reader got me thinking about seed drills, those tools we dump seed into, and then push or pull down a bed to set the seed into the ground at just the right spacing and just the right depth, all in a straight line. A lot of folks probably just

If you’re like me, you’ve probably seen endless footage and photos of pristine looking market gardens where all the plants look amazing and there is nothing to do but plant and harvest. A good market garden can get to a point in which pest and disease pressure and fertility issues become virtual non-factors, but that

A small-scale, community-based farm store   We can’t all live near Manhattan, Boston, Montreal, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, Madison, or any number of other awesome markets for organic produce. In my experience as a farm manager on farms in the Hudson Valley, Finger Lakes, and Sacramento Valley, you can sell it all, all the time,

A practical approach to intercropping  When we started A Way of Life Farm in 2009, intercropping and companion planting (the practice of growing two or more crops in the same space at the same time) were a part of how we wanted to farm. Yet, after some trial and error, we abandoned it, writing it

Like most small businesses, our farm took several years to make a profit. After starting farming as a side hobby in 2019, we gradually grew our business until I quit my job at the end of 2022 to farm full-time alongside my husband (see my article “Making the leap to farming full-time from the September

Fundraising, partnering and sliding scales to reach them   As farmers, our customer base is limited to the number of people within our sales range who can afford what we grow. To increase our customer base, we are used to thinking about tempting more people to put what we grow at the top of their

The farmers market is a likely destination for many new farmers and gardeners who are ready to try selling their vegetables and flowers. And it is a logical one — relationships need to be formed, experience needs to be gathered, lessons need to be learned, and reputations need to be forged as you begin to

Just before you picked up this issue of Growing for Market, you likely were at your desk or computer planning out the growing season: What you will plant and where, and what supplies you’ll need to prepare for the growing season. Maybe you just charged a bunch of purchases to your credit card or scheduled

#toolsforgrowingformarket   Scrolling back through all of the photos tagged #toolsforgrowingformarket on Instagram I found a post of some long gauntlet gloves hanging in a packing shed that was posted by Kat Johnson when she was manager of @fieldsedgefarm back in 2020 (I also wrote up Kat’s pocket magnet knife holder in this column a