Chris Blanchard – Sustainable Market Farming

Heirloom tomatoes, string-weaving, seed germination temperatures

The October issue of Growing for Market is out, including my article about heirloom tomatoes. It’s an assessment of tomato varieties we have grown, mostly in our hoophouse, and how they’ve done in central Virginia. When we decide to try a new variety, we first grow just two plants, in our hoophouse with all the other weird and wonderful types we like, and a bed of early-maturing varieties like Stupice and Glacier. We also grow non-heirlooms, including hybrids like Sun Gold. We track whether we like the flavor, how productive they are and how disease-resistant they are.

Some of the winners for us are Amy’s Sugar Gem, Black Cherry, Five Star

Striped German tomato in all its beauty. Photo Southern Exposure Seed Exchange — Striped German tomato in all its beauty.
Photo **Southern Exposure Seed Exchange**

Grape F1, Garden Peach, Jubilee, Mountain Magic F1, Reisentraube, and for simple delicious reds, Tropic. We love Cherokee Purple and Striped German, but they *appear* not to be very productive. I suspect browsers got them all!

This GfM also includes practical help with financial reports from farmer Chris Blanchard, a consideration of copper-based fungicides and their bad effect on soil health, from Meredith Melendez,an Agricultural and Resource Management Agent for Rutgers Cooperative Extension. Organic farmers need to take more mindful care when using copper compounds, even when facing Late Blight. Alexandra Amonette writes from Washington state about dealing with the extreme heat this summer, and Gretel Adams encourages flower farmers to hang in there producing hardy cuts for the last part of the year.

Detail of string-weaving tomatoes: locking the twine by crossing the second wrap over the first. Photo Kathryn Simmons — Detail of string-weaving tomatoes: locking the twine by crossing the second wrap over the first.
Photo Kathryn Simmons

Mother Earth News Organic Gardening blog has published my post on string-weaving tomatoes.

If you are considering a different support system for your long rows of tomatoes next year, give string weaving a go!

I heard my book Sustainable Market Farming got a great review in Acres USA although I haven’t seen a copy yet.

We’re in the transitional period in our hoophouse, planting the winter crops. Today is Yukina Savoy transplanting and tatsoi thinning day. As an aid for future winter hoophouse planning I’ve been working on a chart of soil temperatures for best germination of vegetables, and how many days it takes for germination of each vegetable at different temperatures. This chart is a work in progress, so if you have any gems of information to contribute, do leave a comment. For instance, if you firm up any of the uncertainties, or if your experience contradicts what’s written here, I’d love to know! Click to open the pdf.

Winter Hphs Crops days to germ

Yukina Savoy in November in our hoophouse. Photo Ethan Hirsh — Yukina Savoy in November in our hoophouse.
Photo Ethan Hirsh

And a blog I’ve just signed-up for is from the same Chris Blanchard who writes for Growing for Market. It’s the Purple Pitchfork or the Flying Rutabaga (the weekly newsletter). Packed with info on farming, based on real experience, from someone who is paying close attention.

Public speaking, Garden Calendars, Winter-kill temperatures

The January issue of Growing for Market magazine is out, along with my article about giving talks. I want to encourage more gardeners and farmers to “grasp the nettle” and offer to give a workshop on a topic you know about. I speak at about 9 or 10 events each year now, but I used to be completely terrified of public speaking. So, if I can do it, I think you can too! It’s a way of sharing useful information to help improve the quality and quantity of fresh healthy food in the world. It’s a part of a co-operative model of spreading information rather than hording it. It can be a way of “singing for your supper”, as conference speakers usually get free registration to the conference and accommodation. Sometimes traveling expenses are covered, sometimes meals, sometimes there’s an honorarium. Start small and local and offer a farm tour, perhaps after joining a local group like CRAFT (Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training). At Twin Oaks, we have been part of the Piedmont CRAFT group of central Virginia. Each month in the main season, there is a gathering at one of the involved farms, with a tour and a discussion topic. Todd Niemeier of the Urban Agriculture Collective of Charlottesville was the starting energy for that group too.

The January Growing for Market also contains a helpful article about using hot water seed treatments to reduce seed-borne diseases (by Chris Blanchard). The idea of soaking seeds in hot water for half an hour or even more, and then drying them out to sow later can be daunting. But with this step-by-step guide and encouraging reports from different growers, it all becomes manageable.

Andrew Mefferd has branched out from his detailed series on hoophouse tomato growing, to talk about growing eggplant in hoophouses or greenhouses. Very useful for people in climates colder than ours here. And, of course, there are tips that are helpful to people who thought they had already read everything about growing eggplants!

Kyle and Frances Koehn write about the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program (FFVP), a federally assisted Farm to School Program suited to small-scale growers. FFVP supplies elementary schools with fresh produce as snacks (so you don’t have to grow enough to supply a whole lunch every day). For the authors, this has been a great fit with winter leafy greens grown in their NRCS funded high tunnel. Search for the FFVP program in your state. Virginia, for example, covers FFVP in their Farm to School Program Resource Guide.

Lynn Byczynski writes about growing heirloom mums, and Valley Oak Tools advertises the debut of their Electric Cub crop cultivating tractors.

Flats of seedlings in our greenhouse. Credit Kathryn Simmons — Flats of seedlings in our greenhouse.
Credit Kathryn Simmons

And, here we are with another new year, thinking about the next growing season. I recently read a post in Margaret Roach’s A Way to Garden. She has gathered regional garden calendars. I found the one from West Virginia Extension Service particularly helpful and attractively set out. This put my in mind to give the link to our Twin Oaks Garden Calendar for all vegetable growers in the mid Atlantic. Especially as one of my local farmer friends asked me about it recently. And let’s not forget that on Saturday 1/17 we are scheduled to start some cabbage, lettuce and mini-onions!

Red marble mini-onions. Credit Johnnys Selected Seeds — Red Marble mini-onions.
Credit Johnnys Selected Seeds

Part of my attention at this time of year goes to Winter-kill temperatures for different crops. We’ve had a couple of unusually-cold-for-this-early-in-winter nights already. What did I learn?

At 14F, Cylindra beets were OK, as were Tribute and Kaitlin cabbages. The remaining broccoli shoots became rubbery.

At 10F, some of the Tribute and Kaitlin cabbage heads were damaged; Some carrot tops were killed, but the roots were OK; Senposai was damaged, but not killed; the winter radish (daikon, China Rose and Shunkyo Semi-long) were OK; the celery is over; most of the chard leaves were killed, and the medium-sized non-headed oats cover crop took quite a hit. Outredgeous lettuce is not as cold-tolerant as I thought. Olga was damaged, but Salad Bowl, Red Salad Bowl, Pirat, Red Cross, Sylvesta and Winter marvel were fine under hoops and thick rowcover.

Before it got any colder, we harvested the last of the Melissa savoy cabbage and the bed of Deadon cabbage (we could have covered it if we’d really wanted to preserve it for longer, but we were ready for some fresh cabbage – it does make the stored cabbage look rather wan.

Lettuce bed. Credit Wren Vile — Lettuce bed. Salad Bowl and Outredgeous in early spring.
Credit Wren Vile

Growing for Market article about sweet potatoes; zipper spiders

The August Growing for Market magazine is out, including my article about growing sweet potatoes. There is (of course!) a whole chapter in my book about sweet potatoes, and I’ve written previously in GfM about harvesting, curing, selecting roots for growing next year’s crop, and storage (September 2007). And also about starting sweet potato slips and planting them in spring (Feb 20007). And the harvest (twice) and starting the slips are covered in my blog too.

This time I wrote about growing the sweet potatoes out in the garden or field: varieties, crop requirements, when to plant, making ridges, using biodegradable plastic mulch, stages of development (roots first, then vines, then potatoes); and pests and diseases.

Also in this GfM is a good article by Joanna and Eric Reuter of Chert Hollow Farm (who I’ve mentioned before., when they decided to drop organic certification). They write about their 12 or so varieties of garlic and how they market them for specific uses such as roasting, eating raw and sauteeing.

The editor, Lynn Byczynski, writes about her son’s wedding and the flower arrangements she made for the big day. Chris Blanchard writes about Gardens of Eagan farm in Minnesota. Once owned and operated by Martin and Atina Diffley, it is now owned by the Minneapolis Wedge Food Co-op. It has expanded and now hosts a few satellite farms which help supply all the broccoli the Wedge needs. Eric Plaksin of Waterpenny Farm (not too far from Twin Oaks), writes about when he broke his foot, and makes suggestions to help other farmers be (somewhat) prepared for adversity, so it’s manageable. And lastly, Gretel Adams writes an inspiring article about growing bulbs and corms for cut flowers. A good read all round!

And, on a different topic: Does anyone know if zipper spiders eat hornworms?

Zipper spider on tomato plant. Credit Wren Vile — Zipper spider on tomato plant.
Credit Wren Vile

We get tobacco hornworms on our tomato plants. Outdoors, they usually get parasitized and do little damage. But the mother of the parasites doesn’t fly inside the hoophouse, and in there we sometimes have to handpick the hornworms. These things get big! And are hard to squash! This year we have lots and lots of these zipper spiders, and few hornworms. I never seem to find zipper spiders eating, but they must, because they grow fast. Anyone know what they eat?

My article on blueberries in the May Growing for Market

The May issue of Growing for Market is on its way, and in there is my article about growing blueberries (and protecting them from all the other critters that want to eat them too!) I’ve mentioned our blueberries before, when we were weeding and mulching them this spring. Also they feature in my Twin Oaks Task List for the Month for April and June. And I wrote about the netting support structure we created for our new blueberry bushes. Here’s Bridget’s photo of that:

The netting on big hoops over our new blueberries. Credit Bridget Aleshire — The netting on big hoops over our new blueberries.
Credit Bridget Aleshire

Our older blueberry patch in the spring. Photo Kathryn Simmons — Our older blueberry patch in the spring.
Photo Kathryn Simmons

Highbush blueberries are our most successful fruit crop. Our old patch of 40 bushes has some over 20 years old, still doing well. Our younger patch of 20 bushes is 6 years old. Right now they are all weeded, composted and mulched, and they are flowering. Soon we’ll think about putting the netting over the top to keep the birds out. It’s best to get the netting on before the fruit is anything like ripe, or else the birds learn that there is something really good in there!

Here’s our Twin Oaks Schedule for blueberry care

Late winter (January/early February for us):

1. Weed

2. Add soil amendments such as sulfur, if soil test indicates a need.

3. Add compost around the base of each bush if this wasn’t done in fall. Bushes will need 20lbs N/acre in the first year, rising by 20lbs/acre a year to 80-100 lbs annually for mature bushes. If the foliage becomes generally yellow (not just between the veins) then your plants are short of nitrogen. Another sign of nitrogen shortage is less than 6” of new growth on mature bushes. A third is reddening of the leaves, although this can also be caused by water stress.

4. Renew the mulch: we use two layers of cardboard topped by 3” of woodchips or sawdust. 6-12” is a better depth, if you don’t use cardboard. Cardboard works in humid climates, but could be too much of a challenge for the roots in a dry climate.

5. Plant new bushes if needed.

6. Repair fencing if needed.

Early spring (April. March if there’s a drought):

Check irrigation and run it twice a week. Foliar feeding with fish and seaweed emulsions can be helpful if the plants seem stressed. Weed.

Late spring (May-June):

When flowers are setting fruit, install the roof netting.

Harvest.

Summer (August):

Weed. Water (root growth is greatest in August and early September in our climate)

After harvest, remove and store roof netting, check that perimeter fencing will keep groundhogs and deer out.

Fall (September/October/November):

Prepare new beds if needed. Plant new bushes in November (or wait till February)

Weed, spread compost, add to the mulch, take soil tests.

Blueberry flowers. Credit Kathryn Simmons — Blueberry flowers.
Credit Kathryn Simmons

A cluster of blueberries. Credit Marilyn Rayne Squier — A cluster of blueberries.
Credit Marilyn Rayne Squier

As well as my article there are plenty of other good ones, of course. Andrew Mefferd has written about hoophouse tomato pruning. Not something we worry about here in steamy central Virginia summers, but people in colder climates do have to work quite hard to get good yields of presentable tomatoes. Pruning is part of that.

Chris Blanchard writes about determining farm labor costs and how to get good value for money spent on workers’ wages. Liz Martin writes from New York State about a new emerging pest – the swede midge – and how she has dealt with it. (Swedes are rutabagas by another name, in case you didn’t know). The Swede midge attacks broccoli heads as they are forming, not just rutabaga plants. Liz describes the lifecycle, and which broccoli varieties are most susceptible. The solution for their farm has been the 25gm weight ProtekNet insect exclusion netting made by Dubois Agrinovation. They got the best broccoli ever! The netting kept out fleabeetles and cabbage worms, as well as the Swede Midge. We, too, are big fans of ProtekNet for brassicas especially. It lets air and light throughbetter than row cover does, and so it is less likely to pick up and blow away in a strong wind.

And lastly, Gretel Adams writes about planning and organizing for sales of wedding flowers.

Lots to read, and plenty to do outdoors too. More on that next time!

What’s still standing after two nights below 0F?

Recently I reported on which crops were still alive after two nights at 14F (-10C) and What’s still alive after two nights at 4F? We’ve now had the Polar Vortex, which brought us two nights at 4F, on 1/6 and 1/7. Then it got even colder.We got the Big Round 0F 1/22-1/23, then a few nights at 5F or 6F, and then the big insult: -4F on the night of 1/29-30.

What’s still standing?

The Tyee spinach under thick rowcover has sustained big damage, showing as patches of beige dead cells. It will recover. Meanwhile we can eat from the more-protected spinach in the coldframes and the hoophouse.

The Vates kale without rowcover is still alive, but badly damaged. The big leaves are crunchy and brown round the edges, and some of the inner leaves are dead. I hope it will grow back, but we won’t be able to pick that for a while. The Beedy’s Camden kale looks worse – the big leaves have died and flopped over. Not sure if it will recover.

Many of our strawberry plants look dead – very disappointing!

Our hardneck garlic and Polish White softneck tops are killed back to about one inch up from the mulch. Equally hardy, it seems.

We had the remains of a lettuce nursery bed, still holding surplus transplants from September sowings that we didn’t need for our greenhouse or hoophouse. After the 4F assault we still had life in the centers of the Winter Marvel, North Pole, Tango, Green Forest. Now only the Winter Marvel shows any signs of life. So that variety gets the prize for cold-tolerance here!

Red Round Turnip. Photo Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds — Red Round Turnip.
Photo Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds

In the hoophouse, we covered all the beds with thick rowcover every night it looked like dropping below 10F inside. Almost everything survived – we only got some minor stem freezing on some turnips and Asian greens. We have been eating Pak Choy, Tokyo Bekana, Yukina Savoy, various turnips and their greens (Hakurei, White Egg, Oasis, Red Round), also plenty of lettuce leaves, radishes, scallions, and some spinach. We lost our second sowing of spinach in there to over watering and flooding, and we are really noticing the lack right now. We’re short on spinach. We have small amounts of mizuna, Ruby Streaks, Bright Lights chard, Bulls Blood beets to add to salad mixes, and Red Russian and White Russian kale growing slowly.

In January we have taken to sowing spinach, kale and collards in a hoophouse bed to transplant outdoors in early spring. We back this up with sowing some in flats if we don’t get good emergence for some reason. This year emergence is late. Is it just late, or is there a problem? We’re holding our breath for a few more days. . .

We are not the only people tracking the effects of the unusually cold weather. The February Growing for Market magazine opens with an article by Ben Hartman “Testing the Limits of Cold Tolerance”. He farms in Goshen, Indiana, using two double-layer plastic greenhouses heated to 30F (yes. I said heated!) and two unheated. They planted kale, carrots, spinach, salad greens and arugula in their greenhouses for winter harvest. Their outdoor temperatures fell to -16F on 1/6 and 1/7. I imagine they’ve had worse since. They used mid-weight rowcover over their beds. Ben reports that baby greens and young spinach survived, as did their rosemary and their 3 fig trees (all farmers deserve some thrills!). They lost baby salad greens that had already been cut previously (all those cut edges didn’t do well). Crops in the outer beds were lost. The tips of full-grown kale leaves froze, but the plants survived.

In their unheated, single-skin plastic hoophouses, the soil froze down to 4″. They used two layers of mid-weight rowcover suspended over the crops. Despite this cold, tiny salad greens less than 1″ tall survived. Spinach survived under just one layer of rowcover. The carrot tops froze and the roots may or may not be marketable. The (uncovered) fully mature kale looks dead. The mature salad with two layers of rowcover didn’t survive.

From this experience, Ben points out that salad greens and spinach less than 1″ tall are very cold-tolerant. Spinach and kale once larger, benefit from more protection than they got this time. Beware the outer beds!

My own article in this issue is about matching crop spacing with desired goals, such as maximum yield, optimum size, or convenience for cultivation.

Andrew Mefford has written some greenhouse tips for hoophouse growers, including tomato grafting, trellising. Chris Blanchard has written the second part of his piece on growing herbs – this is about harvest and maintenance. Erin Benzakain has undertaken a 59-variety trial of celosia.

New year, new Growing for Market, new slideshow- Providing vegetables for the full eating season

<div style=”margin-bottom:5px”> <strong> <a href=”https://www.slideshare.net/SustainableMarketFarming/providing-vegetables-for-the-full-eating-season-2013-pam-dawling” title=”Providing vegetables for the full eating season 2013 Pam Dawling” target=”_blank”>Providing vegetables for the full eating season 2013 Pam Dawling</a> </strong> from <strong><a href=”http://www.slideshare.net/SustainableMarketFarming” target=”_blank”>Pam Dawling</a></strong> </div>

This is the presentation (Providing Vegetables for the Full Eating Season) that I gave to the Local Food Hub in Charlottesville in December. It’s a combination of Succession Planting for Continuous Harvests and Cold-hardy Winter Vegetables. I have got all my powerpoints re-instated on Slideshare.net. If you go to their site and search for Pam Dawling you’ll see many choices. Down the right side of the screen you’ll see other people’s slideshows with related content. This can be a great way to learn more. (Is it raining hard where you are too?)

The January Growing for Market is out, along with my article Planning Your Harvest Schedule. As anyone who plans any kind of garden knows, planning is circular and no item is planned in isolation. So I discuss the sequence of planning steps and where the harvest dates, quantities and diversity of crops will fit into all that. I give leads to lots of good resources and look at some of the valuable lessons that can be learned from the experiences of those farmer-teachers. I look at how much you might want to harvest, and therefore how much you’ll need to set out to grow. The next step is deciding the sowing dates to meet those harvest dates. Some people use web-based planning systems, others (like us) use spreadsheets, while some prefer worksheets in notebooks. No one method is right for every farm!

Also, there’s an article by Chris Blanchard, on growing fresh cut herbs for market, one by Darlene Wolnik to update farmers about accepting SNAP at farmers’ markets. The last article is by Gretel Adams, about scaling up a flower farm. Much is relevant to vegetable farms too. The photo of the four EarthWay seeders bolted together is useful to anyone growing four rows of anything!

The editor of GfM, Lynn Byczynski, has written a great article on taking good photos of your farm – many lessons for me in there! Nowadays, farmers need photos. Even if you aren’t writing a book, you probably have a website, blog or Facebook page for the farm, and showing customers what life is really like (or sorta really like!) on the farm helps develop their interest and understanding of what’s involved in food or cut flower production. Lynn’s new book Wedding Flowers, Fresh from the Field, is at the printers. In creating the book, she gathered four photo essays of different types of flower arrangement, four videos and dozens of other photos about producing beautiful flowers.

The Arctic Vortex gave us two nights at 4F

Next post I’ll update “What’s still alive. . . ”

Ice on the pond. Credit Ezra Freeman — Ice on the pond.
Credit Ezra Freeman

Growing for Market articles

The November/December issue of Growing for Market is out, and

Roma Virginia Select, grown at Twin Oaks. Credit Southern Exposure Seed Exchange — Roma Virginia Select, grown at Twin Oaks.
Credit Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

with it my article on No-Till Cover Crops. We use an organic no-till winter cover crop mix of winter rye, Austrian winter peas and hairy vetch before our paste tomatoes (our home-grown Roma Virginia Select available from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange). We sow the cover crops in mid-September (zone 7 here, average first frost Oct 14). In early May the vetch is starting to flower and the rye shedding pollen, and we are itching to transplant our paste tomatoes. We mow down the cover crops with our hay cutting machine, which cuts closer than a bush-hog and leaves the straw in long strands. Then we set out stakes and ropes and transplant, pushing aside the cover crop as needed. The vetch provides all the extra nutrients the tomatoes need, and the resulting mulch keeps the weeds away for 8-10 weeks. By then we have installed T-posts and started string weaving.

String weaving tomatoes (these aren't Romas). Credit Kathryn Simmons — String weaving tomatoes (these aren’t Romas).
Credit Kathryn Simmons

We mow between the rows if there is much regrowth from the cover crop, or weeds getting big, then we roll out spoiled hay to deter weeds for the rest of the season, add some more organic matter and keep the cooler temperatures and the moisture in the soil over the high summer. We plan for this and make our rows 5.5ft apart, so we can unroll the big round bales to carpet the aisles.

In my article I talk about the pros and cons of no-till, and give examples of other suitable food crops and other suitable cover crops for no-till.

Also in this issue is an article about the honeybee crisis and what we can do, such as growing pollinator habitat and encouraging or importing other pollinators. A follow-up article discusses the big problem of neonicotinoid insecticides, which are very long-lasting and may even cause more insect deaths the year following spraying. This is a major problem for organic farmers and for everyone who eats vegetables and fruits. Yes, all of us.

There is also a timely article on preparing hoophouses to deal with snow-loading,and one on growing lisianthus for splendid cut flower sales.

Chris Blanchard tackles flaws in the proposed produce safety rules, which seem in places to be based on a nonsensical idea of growing food in a sterile environment. The comment period for the Proposed Produce Rule and the Preventive Controls Rule closes on November 15. If you read this before that date, click here for information and instructions on how to comment on the rules. Chris (who has written a series of very practical recent GfM articles on food safety) also writes in this issue about water (for irrigation and for washing produce) from a food safety point of view. Those who use any surface water (ponds, creeks) have a particular responsibility to check their water supplies frequently and work to keep them sanitary.

I have been writing an article for the January issue of Growing for Market, so that I can take a break at the end of the year. I am writing about Planning Your Harvest Schedule, and I’m including links here to our Twin Oaks Harvest Calendar, which lists which vegetables we expect to have when (if all goes well!). We have the list sorted alphabetically by crop, and also by starting date.

Twin Oaks Harvest Calendar by Crop

Twin Oaks Harvest Calendar by Date

You can see what you could be eating if you lived at Twin Oaks and helped us grow it all. Actually, of course, you wouldn’t have to work in the garden yourself, to get this good food. We share all our work, and you could instead be doing some tasks I’d hate to do, like repairing cars, making tofu or tackling accounting.

November sunset Credit Ezra Freeman — November sunset
Credit Ezra Freeman

Growing for Market February issue is out! So is USDA Climate Change Report!

The February 2013 issue of Growing for Market magazine is now available, including my new article Making Good Decisions Under Pressure. This is the fourth article in my series about being resilient, understanding what’s going on with the plants and the weather, and knowing when to take action, is about tools to help busy farmers with complex decisions that have to be taken quickly. The middle of a hot field in mid-afternoon of the day you need to plant is not the best place to make a hard decision. It’s better to have a framework in place to lean on when the going gets tough. I talk about various decision-making techniques, clarifying whose job it is to make each decision, what resources are available, and what the impacts of the decision might be.

If that sounds abstract, I also include our sad chart “Can’t Do It All 2011”. In early March that year, we realized we had nothing like enough experienced workers. We were looking at an overwhelming amount of work. We made a list of labor-intensive crops for possible cuts. The main point was to save us time, not just cut crops we personally disliked! We noted the decision date by each crop on the list. As each date approached we reviewed our situation. This method enabled us to make one decision at a time, in a straightforward way, and not go insane. Such a list is helpful for many types of calamity. It leaves the door open for possible upturns of fortune later in the year. It’s less distressing to take one bite at a time than to take a big decision when you already are struggling to cope with some big bad thing having happened.

This issue of GfM also has these articles:

• Lettuce varieties that tolerate heat and cold By Lynn Byczynski

• Book Reviews: The Organic Seed Grower (John Navazio) and The Art of Fermentation Sandor Katz) by Lynn Byczynski

• A new meal-planning service keeps CSA members happy by Lynn Byczynski

• Capturing information in the field to help with recordkeeping, by Chris Blanchard

• Plans for farm-built pallets that make it easy to move transplants, by Chip and Susan Planck

• What the proposed federal produce safety rules mean to you, by Lynn Byczynski

• An urban flower farmer builds a flourishing business in weddings, an interview with Jennie Love by Erin Benzakein.

Also newly arrived is the Report Climate Change and Agriculture in the United States: Effects and Adaptation (USDA Technical Bulletin 1935). I wrote about this in my post following the CFSA conference in October, where I attended a gripping workshop by Laura Lengnick, one of the authors of this report. It has 193 pages, and when I’ve read it, I’ll review it. Chapters include An Overview of U.S. Agriculture, An Overview of the Changing Climate, Climate Change Science and Agriculture, Climate Change Effects on U.S. Agricultural Production, Climate Change Effects on the Economics of U.S. Agriculture, Adapting to Climate Change, Conclusions and Research Needs, and various appendices.

Photo by Wren Vile

More strategies for dealing with a changing climate – article in Growing for Market

GFM-January2013-cover200px

The January issue of Growing for Market is out, and in it is my article More strategies for dealing with a changing climate. A photo of our fava beans is on the cover. This is the third in a series of four. (You can see earlier blog posts about the first two, in the Articles category.) This article covers the use of soil temperature as a deciding factor on when to sow or plant, and includes a table of minimum (spring) and maximum (summer/fall) temperatures for about 50 crops. As the climate becomes harder to predict, using a calendar (“Plant potatoes on St Patrick’s Day!”) will need to be replaced by using information like soil temperatures, which reflect what the plants will actually experience this particular year.

The article also discusses scouting, which is the practice of making a regular tour of your crops to monitor growth and health. If you see a pest or a disease, you can determine if the level of infestation is enough to call for action, or if watchful waiting is in order. Keeping in touch with how your crops are doing will help you know when you need to take action to avert disaster or to make good use of an opportunity like an early-finishing crop opening up the possibility of using a longer-term cover crop.

drought I also talk a bit about being prepared for more extreme temperatures – trialing varieties that are more cold- or heat-tolerant than your old favorites, and using shadecloth and organic mulches to reduce heat stress. ATTRA’s Drought Resistant Soil addresses ways to increase the organic matter content of the soil, and keep the soil covered at all times, helping you farms’ resilience.

In addition I added in a few more resources I’ve found to help with predicting climate change. DailyClimate.org – a daily email newsletter; NOAA Climate Prediction Center, and Weatherspark.com, a fun weather site is where you can see, for instance, what your average winter low has been, and plan plantings accordingly.

Two additional resources on frost management are NCSU’s Frost/Freeze Protection for Horticultural Crops and the Food and Agriculture Organization 126-page book Frost Protection: Fundamentals, Practice and Economics.

Favas, spring sown, good germ Why the fava bean photo? Wait till the soil temperature reaches 36F (2C) before sowing.

As well as my article, there are many other gems – Identify your biggest money-making crops by Chris Blanchard; A Tool Review of The Quick Cut Greens Harvester by Jean-Martin Fortier; 8,000 miles and 18 farmers markets, a travelogue by Gwynn Hamilton and Bert Webster about their cross-country road trip visiting farmers markets all the way; Understanding one of the few insecticides for organic growers by Raymond A. Cloyd, about spinosad formulated as Entrust, and Growers create their own wholesale market for local flowers in Seattle by Debra Prinzing, co-author of The 50-Mile Bouquet about the movement toward locally grown, sustainable flowers.