November 10 2017.
Photo Pam Dawling
We had a few 24F nights and the ginkgo trees responded by instantly dropping all their leaves. A beautiful sight.
At the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association Sustainable Agriculture Conference I gave a presentation called Sequential Planting of Cool Season Crops in High Tunnels as part of the Friday morning High Tunnel Crop Production Intensive workshop. It’s a new workshop I prepared especially for the CFSA. I usually call the structures hoophouses rather than high tunnels, but either name is fine. It used to be said that farmers called them hoophouses and researchers and academics called them high tunnels. Nowadays there is not such a binary distinction; farmers do research and teach, researchers and academics grow crops. Here is the longer version of the slideshow, including “bonus material” I didn’t include in the 60 minute presentation. Click the diagonal arrow icon to view full screen.
On the Sunday I gave a presentation on Year-Round Hoophouse Production which was a back-to-back presentation of the Hoophouse in Spring and Summer and the Hoophouse in Fall and Winter. You can view those slideshows by clicking the links to them on the SlideShare.net site.
I’ve added a new event to my calendar for January. You can see all the events I plan to speak at, by clicking the Events tab at the top of the screen on my home page. This one is the Chesapeake Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture Future Harvest Conference January 11-13, 2018 at College Park, MD.
On Saturday January 13 11.30am -12.30pm I’m presenting Cold-Hardy Winter Vegetables – Why farm in winter? Information includes tables of cold-hardiness; details of four ranges of cold-hardy crops; overwintering crops for spring harvests; scheduling; weather prediction and protection; hoophouse growing; and vegetable storage.
I might also be participating with other speakers in a new format Lightning Session, where we each get 10 minutes to tell the audience the top 5 things we want them to know about a certain topic. That isn’t decided yet.
I also hope to be signing books at the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange booth at some point.
Meanwhile here on the farm it’s got colder, as I said at the beginning, and even dreary some days. We are getting our winter carrots harvested, getting ready to plant garlic, adding draft-proofing strips to our hoophouse doors, and admiring and harvesting our hoophouse salad crops.
Photo Wren Vile