Photo from Les Jardins de la Grelinette in Saint-Armand, Quebec, Canada.
The Market Gardener’s Toolkit by Jean-Martin Fortier is now 
available for sale online on DVD or Digital Download. $25.49 and $15.49 respectively. Worth every penny! It’s 80 minutes of very inspiring and immediately useful information on small scale sustainable vegetable growing.
The Market Gardener’s Toolkit is an educational documentary featuring Jean-Martin Fortier, small-scale vegetable grower and author of the bestselling book The Market Gardener. In the film, he shares his tools and techniques for successful, profitable, human-scale vegetable growing. From soil preparation to strategies on dealing with insect pests, discover how this micro-farm manages to generate $150,000 in sales annually – without the use of a tractor or any heavy machinery.
There is also a teaser or two on YouTube here and here.
I participated in the crowd-funding effort to help get this video made, and so I am now the happy owner of a digital download. I’ve watched it once, and am now organizing a group showing for our crew and neighboring gardeners.
I loved every precious minute of this video. It made me proud to be a vegetable grower, using sustainable techniques, contributing to a healthy local food supply. It made me inspired to try harder to use more effective and efficient methods. The aerial views and plan of their plots and crop rotation are inspiring and beautiful.
It was valuable to see tools in action, such as the broadfork, the five row flamer, the Terrateck manual mulch layer and the home-made precision vacuum seeder.
It was helpful (and fun!) to see the speeded-up version of the farmers moving the large sheets of “occultation plastic” (poly silage covers) used for weed control. It was encouraging to be reminded (after too many years of battling weedy gardens) that clean productive gardens are possible and, indeed, wise. They are more productive, more satisfying, more profitable, with less wasted time. I get it that hand-pulling weeds is more like first aid for a garden gone sadly wrong. I know it’s better to hoe when weeds are tiny, to flame and to prevent weeds from coming up in the first place. We’ve been doing better this year on preparing “stale seed beds” by tilling and prepping the bed at least week before we need it, then scuffle-hoeing on the day before planting. This one change is really making a noticeable difference in our gardens.
Last winter I had been thinking we needed to get a cultivating tractor, and to re-arrange our garden plots for tractor access and accept the turnaround space lost to crops that tractors require. And accept the increased use of fossil fuels, and time spent fixing machines. Watching The Market Gardener’s Toolkit instead reaffirmed the high value of intensive use of garden soils and smart manual work. This fits with the series of books I’ve been reading recently: Ben Hartman’s The Lean Farm, Curtis Stone’s Urban Farmer, Colin McCrate and Brad Halm’s High-Yield Vegetable Gardening, and of course Jean-Martin Fortier’s Market Gardener and Eliot Coleman’s work.
These books emphasize the importance of thinking clearly about what crops you grow and why. In the case of purely commercial growers, it is plain to see that some crops are much more financially worthwhile than others. Some find more ready sales than others. Some grow much quicker than others, enabling the space to be used for another crop in the same season, meaning more income (or simply more food, if you aren’t selling your crops). Our situation at Twin Oaks Community is a bit different. We are growing food to feed the community of a hundred people, year round, as best we can manage it. Commercial growers can specialize in baby salad mix and sell it at a good price at market or to restaurants. They can put a large amount of land and time into such crops. They can ignore winter root crops, or space-hogging sweet corn or time-hogging green beans. We, instead, need to figure out how to efficiently grow as many different vegetable crops as possible. That is why my book, Sustainable Market Farming focuses on production techniques and organization and planning. Although we are not tied to growing according to the relative financial profitability of different crops, we do need to plan our use of space and time, and not get distracted growing demanding crops that are difficult in our climate and don’t provide a decent-sized chunk of our diet. This is why we have stopped growing bulb fennel and parsnips, for instance. And why we do grow sweet potatoes
Photo Bridget Aleshire
Jean-Martin Fortier also has a series of 13 YouTubes. The Market Gardener, Six Figure Farming, Living Web Farms: Part 1, Introduction and Part 2, Getting Started and more: Bio-Intensive Farming, Cropping Systems, Compost Strategies, Soil Management, Cover Crops, Seeders, Weed Prevention, Seedlings & Transplants, Crop Planning, Insect Control, Market & CSA .
You may remember I reviewed Jean-Martin’s Book The Market Gardener. His book has sold over 80,000 copies, and is the winner of the American Horticultural Society 2015 Book Award and the Living Now 2015 Book Award.
You can buy the book on his website.