A friend sent me a link to the video Small Axe Farm posted on their Instagram of a little rolling bed marker they had just made from wood scraps and a piece of threaded rod. I’ve been using rolling bed markers for over 20 years, and even wrote an article about them in Growing for Market all the way back in 2009. The one Small Axe Farm made was the smallest I’ve ever seen, and it was also something I’ve been thinking about making for myself for a long time but just haven’t ever gotten around to doing. I reached out to the farm and had a nice chat with Evan, the one who put the thing together, and got a few more details about their farm and the tool he built.

Spring has sprung, hopefully newly emerging crops are sprouting forth with youthful vigor, spurned on by your abundant soils’ sweet succor. I had the opportunity in a recent issue of this illustrious ag-mag to share with you some tips on weeding tools (Tools and strategies to reduce time spent weeding from the October 2022 GFM). While knives, hillers, finger weeders, and other ways to physically control weeds are neat-o, they are but bits of metal.

Last summer I joined four other farms in Oregon’s high desert to do field research on irrigation management in no/low-till vegetable production. The project lead, Katie Swanson of Sweet Union Farm in Klamath Falls, Oregon, invited farms to measure plant-available water differences over one growing season between beds with no- or low-till preparation and beds prepared with tillage. 

Paths have always been a conundrum for me as a vegetable grower. They make up almost one of our three cultivated veggie acres, and we’ve spent hundreds of hours over the years scraping them of weeds. Yet, they produce nothing.

For most of my 12 years at Adamah, an educational and organic production farm in northwest Connecticut, we have rototilled in lush cover crop in the spring, planted vegetables, rototilled after harvest, planted cover crops, cycle repeat. This involved a ton of thrusting a wheel hoe back and forth, back and forth down miles of pathways on between 3 and 6 acres of vegetables, depending on the season. 

One of the tools that has helped me keep my farms going for the past 15 years is a budget coupled with well-maintained books. The budget is a planning tool which helps me make good decisions through the year, and the books are a record keeping tool that help me understand the budget. As a bonus, keeping good books makes getting my accountant the information he needs to do my taxes every year much, much easier.

“How do I farm better and do less?” asks a yellow sticky note above my desk; it has been here for a few years now. There are probably a variety of ways to answer this. One solution I’m trying is the incorporation of more perennial species, including trees and shrubs. Incorporating woody perennials into production systems is called agroforestry. 

If you missed the first part of this series in February’s GFM, we highly recommend you revisit it. You’ll find an overview of what the Farm Bill is, where we are in its legislative cycle, and an exploration of what market farmers should know about Farm Bill authorized programs related to land access and markets. In this installment, we’ll run through some market-farmer-relevant programs related to conservation and climate, risk management, research, and infrastructure.

Farmers — some burnt by bad experiences with venture-capital-owned sales platforms — have been seeking better software to manage sales and distribution of their products. Enter Farm Generations Cooperative and GrownBy, the first farmer-owned and designed online marketplace. Built to address the needs of both consumers and producers, GrownBy democratically places decision-making power and financial rewards in the hands of its most important users: farmers. 

Among the many challenges of running a successful CSA farm is managing the work of creating and maintain your list of CSA members. I’m not that old, but I still remember a time when farms didn’t have websites and we pretty much had our CSA members sign up by filling out paper forms. Those forms then got filed, or entered onto spreadsheets. Payment was all by check, or sometimes cash. As email became more common paper forms gradually were replaced by emailed ones, sometimes auto-generated by fancy forms on the websites. 

This final article in a series of three about a native plant nursery business focuses on equipment, labor, pricing, opportunities, and restoration projects. As with the January and February 2023 GFM articles, it centers on my neighbors, mentors, and dear friends Sandy Roth and Dick Kenton who started Plant Works in 1996 in rural La Grande, Oregon. We hope these articles encourage others to grow native plants and work in restoration.

Potting mix, called “potting soil” in the United States and “potting compost” in the United Kingdom, often contains no soil, no compost, and is not even always used in pots. Instead, the material farmers mix themselves or buy in bulk every winter is actually a sterile, soil-less mix of organic and inorganic materials meant to offer plants a perfect goldilocks place to put down roots. Depended upon by backyard gardeners, farmers, greenhouse and nursery growers, botanists, landscapers, foresters, conservationists, and biotechnologists, potting mix is a ubiquitous, quiet part of everyday life that is surprisingly exotic — made from mosses, fibers, and minerals that originate all over the globe, from Sri Lanka to India to South Africa, Greece, and Canada.