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Part two: crop planning In the first part of this two-part flower CSA series, I discussed the logistics and rationale of running a successful flower CSA. This part covers the more fun (and often more stressful) aspect of a flower CSA: crop planning. As I mentioned in Part 1, at Moonshot Farm in East Windsor, […]

On this week’s podcast we talk with with Addie Candib, who oversees American Farmland Trust’s programs and policy advocacy in the Pacific Northwest. You might be familiar with American Farmland Trust from their “No Farms No Food” message that shows up on bumper stickers throughout rural America. But their work is much bigger than just

Since the pandemic there are hundreds if not thousands of people who have declared that they are now flower farmers. You don’t have to be an Instagram camper to have your feed saturated with a multitude of daily posts of people’s farmstand flowers or bouquets or to whatever degree they’re growing flowers in their backyard,

How to keep track of what maintenance needs to be done when I’ve been maintaining tractors and tractor implements on farms for more than a couple of decades now and I’m still using the same simple system I started with for keeping track of maintenance schedules for each piece of machinery. These days the tractor

I don’t know about you, but there have been times in my life when my seed storage got out of control. It happens innocently enough,  you come back from seeding in the field & you quickly drop your seeds into a bin because you need to get to your CSA delivery. You get your latest

Below: The author’s last harvest of field-grown flowers including zinnias, dahlias, and marigolds, usually comes in mid to late October. This season went by so fast, and the end is near for outdoor production in our area. September is always our busiest month so I think of it in terms of a marathon, where you

Below: Amy’s Sugar Gem   One of the crops we grow in our hoophouse in spring and early summer is a range of heirloom and other open-pollinated tomatoes. Because we use drip irrigation and it doesn’t rain in there, our plants don’t get water falling on the leaves. Naturally, they have some dew in the

“I’ve never seen anything like this!” Farmers say this all around the Columbia Basin in Eastern Washington, an excellent region for growing a variety of crops. But extreme heat, low water supplies, catastrophic wildfires, sunburned crops, earlier harvests, and shifting crop-growing zones are impacting crops from our changing and unstable climate. As of this writing