Winter Gardening and Farming Conferences and Reading

I’ve just updated my Events page with more details about the events I’m speaking at. Coming up really soon is the Virginia Association for Biological Farming Conference. Here is a flyer for it:

I’ll be offering a half-day (1-5 pm) workshop on Friday 1/11: Year Round Hoophouse Vegetables.

On Saturday 1/12, 2.30 – 4 pm, I’m offering a 90 minute workshop on Cold Hardy Winter Vegetables, and on Sunday 1/13, 4 – 5.30 pm a 90 minute workshop on Crop Planning for Sustainable Vegetable Production.  

I’ll provide handouts for all my workshops, and there will be book signings and sales after each workshop. You can read more details on my Events page or on the VABF website.

I’m having a busy January! The very next weekend, January 17-19 (Thurs – Sat), I’ll be at the 2019 Future Harvest CASAat College Park Marriott Hotel and Conference Center. I’m offering two 90 min workshops, with book sales and signings after the workshops.

Lettuce Year-Round, Friday 1/18 2.00 – 3.30 pm and  Cover Crops for Vegetable Growers, Saturday 1/19 2.00 – 3.30 pm

And then January 23-26, 2019 (Weds to Sat), I’ll be at the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group Conference, Little Rock, AR.

On Thursday January 24, I’m doing a 1 – 5pm Mini-course (4 hours) Hoophouse Production of Cool Season Crops

On Friday January 25, 8 – 9.15 am (75 mins), I’m offering Diversify Your Vegetable Crops.

Book sales and signing Thursday evening.

And then it’s February, and I’m on to the PASA Conference

February 6-9 2019 Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture. Lancaster County Convention Center.  I’m offering three 90 min workshops:

Sequential Planting of Cool Season Crops in a High Tunnel, Friday 8.45 am – 10.15 am

Lettuce Year Round, Saturday 8.45 am- 10.15 am

Succession Planting for Continuous Vegetable Harvests Saturday 10.30 am -12 noon.

Handouts, Book-signing, Recordings for sale.

——————————————————————————————————–

And if you can’t make it to these events, I have found plenty of good reading on gardening and sustainable agriculture.

Reader Anne Donley sent a link to this fascinating news from the Guardian.com:

Finalists for the Royal Academy of Engineering Africa prize reveal their designs, The team has shortlisted 16 African inventors from six countries to receive funding, training and mentoring for projects intended to revolutionize sectors from agriculture and science to women’s health. Some of the ideas presented include

  • Vertical vegetable growing boxes which grow up to 200 plants and  include a wormery! Wonderful step to more food security.
  • Moisture extraction from the air using silica gels, then solar power to heat up the moisture to provide clean water. Kenyan Beth Koigi  points out that

“There’s six times more water in the air than in all the rivers in the world. With every 1F increase in temperature, water begins to evaporate on the ground but increases by about 4% in the atmosphere, and that’s water that’s not being tapped.”

  • Gloves that translate sign language into speech

  • Smart lockers that dispense medicines.

Growing for Market January issue is out

The Organic Broadcaster is out

Gena Moore at Carolina Farm Stewardship has some great research on the efficacy of various biopesticides.

Modern Farmer is a good online resource for news. They offer a weekly digest via email, or you can go to their site and click on the stories you are interested in. Themes include Farm, Food and Lifestyle, Animal Heroes, News.

This winter week in the hoophouse, Virginia Biological Farming Conference

This post will be mainly photos. Outdoors the weather has been grey and dreary, and November was the coldest in 38 years, according to AgWeb, from the Farm Journal. But in our Virginia hoophouse, crops are growing well, and we have been harvesting salads every day, radishes every week, and have even started harvesting cooking greens. (I say “even” because we still have spinach, kale, collards outdoors too, which we normally harvest while we can.)

Koji greens in our hoophouse in late November.
Photo Pam Dawling

We’ll start harvesting the outer leaves of these Koji greens soon. Koji is a hybrid, rather like the open pollinated Yukina Savoy. Here’s our senposai just after I harvested 10 gallons of the biggest leaves:

Freshly harvested senposi. In just three days, the plants had grown enough to be ready for another harvest.
Photo Pam Dawling

Soon we will start harvesting leaves from our Russian kale

White Russian kale ready for harvest in our hoophouse at the end of November.
Photo Pam Dawling

.For salad mixes, we are harvesting outer leaves from the leaf lettuces, along with spinach, Bulls Blood beet leaves, and often the brassica component has been tatsoi.

Outredgeous lettuce in late November. The persistent galinsoga shows that our hoophouse has not yet reached freezing temperatures.
Photo Pam Dawling

Tatsoi, which we sowed September 6, has been very prolific. We have been harvesting the outer leaves and chopping them for salad mix, after removing the stems. These causes the patch to look messy, but feeds us well.

Hoophouse tatsoi in late November, with harvested plants to the lower right and not-recently-harvested plants to the left.
Photo Pam Dawling

Once we’ve chosen our basic three ingredients (lettuce, spinach/chard/beet leaves, and a brassica), we customize the mix with other ingredients, such as Tokyo bekana, baby chard or frilly mustards such as Scarlet Frills, Golden Frills and Ruby Streaks. We are harvesting our first sowing, cutting outer leaves, and thinning our second sowing.

Our second hoophouse sowing of frilly mustards. Here you see Golden Frills and Ruby Streaks.
Photo Pam Dawling
Our first hoophouse sowing of scallions is ready for harvest.
Photo Pam Dawling

Looking to the future, the first sowing of baby lettuce mix is almost big enough to harvest. We grow both leaf lettuce to keep alive all winter, and several sowings of baby lettuce mix to cut whenever it is big enough. Growing both gives us more resilience when the weather is so unpredictable.

Red Round turnips are beautiful, and the tops make good cooking greens.
Photo Pam Dawling

We’re also looking forward to turnips and chard.

Our second hoophouse planting of Bright Lights chard.
Photo Pam Dawling

The Virginia Biological Farming Conference will be held January 11-13, 2019 in Richmond, VA. See you there! See my Events page for more about my presentations.

Year-Round Hoophouse book update, Nematodes in hoophouse cucumbers, Organic Broadcaster.

Removing old hoophouse plastic. Photo Wren Vile

I just completed another step on the way to getting my new book, The Year-Round Hoophouse, published. I proofread aver 300 pages of text over the course of five very intensive focused days. In the next four days I checked all the photos, including the color section. I replaced a few photos that didn’t come out clearly, fixed a couple of glitches (that’s what proofreading is for!) And I added up to 17 more photos wherever there was enough space at the ends of chapters. The index is being prepared, and another proofreader is also carefully working through the text.

Then the corrected pre-press proof will be prepared by early August, and we’ll be on track for the November 20 publication date, with the books coming off-press in mid-October and heading to the stores. ISBN 978-0-86571-863-0.

The finished paperback book will be 288 pages, 8″ x 10″ (20 x 25 cm) for $29.99 (US or Canadian). It will also be available in digital formats.


Cucumber roots with nematodes (see circles).
Photo Pam Dawling

When we were clearing our early bush cucumbers from the hoophouse a couple of weeks ago, I found four plants at the east end of the bed with nematodes. I’ve written before about our struggles with root knot nematodes in our hoophouse, and indeed, you can read everything I know about nematodes in the Year-Round Hoophouse.

Here is another photo of the lumpy roots, with circles outlining the nematode lumps.

A different cucumber root with nematode lumps (see circles).
Photo Pam Dawling

The July/August Organic Broadcaster is out. The first article is about a poultry system compatible with regenerative agriculture. Regenerative Agriculture is one of the sustainable agriculture movements that are springing up as an alternative to USDA Organic, which now allows CAFOs, hydroponics and other unhealthy, non-sustainable methods. The regenerative poultry system includes trees for shade, ranging paddocks where the poultry are rotated, and night shelter. The aim of the author, Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, is a fully regenerative supply chain, starting with what kinds of grains they feed the poultry and how they are grown. Farmers can reach the organizers of Regeneration Midwest by emailing regenerationmidwest@gmail.com.

The second article explains the consequences of USDA halting the Organic check-off as part of their program. The editorial introduces Organic 2051, a one-day conference (Feb 21, 2019) prior to the MOSES Conference, “to bring together leaders in the organic and sustainable farming community to chart the path forward for truly sustainable farming by the year 2050 and beyond, demonstrating our capacity to feed the world.”

Another article (by Matthew Kleinhenz) discusses biofertilizers and explores differences between an average yield increase which is sustained and throughout the field, and one that might lead to a similar average yield increase, but with a result that is widely fluctuating between one plant and the next, producing a few start yielders but fewer plants with an actual yield increase.

Bailey Webster writes about industrial hemp, an up and coming crop with mostly non-food uses, although the seeds are finding favor, touted as a “superfood”. Brittany Olsen writes about the MOSES farm mentorship program, Teresa Wiemerslage writes about the Food Safety Modernization Act Produce Safety Regulation and Laura Jessee Livingston writes about a new apprenticeship program training farm managers.

Carlos Valencia and his dog, Paco, live on a farm in rural Kansas. He has faced numerous issues with officials and vandals that have prevented him from achieving his farming goals. Photo submitted

Another article by Bailey Webster explores a shocking case that looks like racism in rural Kansas (although of course it could be almost anywhere). Kansas farmer Carlos Valencia, who is is black and Hispanic, began managing a farm in Norton, Kansas that was owned by Golden Duck LLC in 2007. He was working for equity in the farm, rather than for wages, with the goal of owning it himself one day. He planned to raise poultry, and had submitted documents to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment to get farm operating permits to raise geese on a commercial scale. The paperwork was taking a long time, and if he was to raise geese that year and earn his living, he needed to get goslings on the farm while they were available. Geese do not produce young year-round, only February-June. Fully expecting to get his permits (the previous farmers there had an industrial hog unit), he bought 20,000 goslings. This sounds like a huge number to me, but I understand from the article that this is a modest start. In June, disaster struck in the form of an unusually strong hail storm that killed 800 of Valencia’s young geese. He chose a common practice on poultry farms: incinerating them. The local authorities caught wind of it, and worried that the poultry had died of disease. The USDA and the state biopsied the dead birds to check for disease, and found that there was no disease present. Continue reading “Year-Round Hoophouse book update, Nematodes in hoophouse cucumbers, Organic Broadcaster.”

Spinach Trials Update, National Ginger & Turmeric Conference, FLAG Organic Farmers in Disasters, Organic Broadcaster

Hoophouse spinach trial 3 April. Avon, Acadia, Escalade, Renegade just harvested.
Photo Pam Dawling

Spinach Trials Update

The spinach trials in our hoophouse continue, with a lot of harvesting! I’m always amazed to see how many stumps of cut leaf stems there are on each plant, showing just how prolific the spinach is being when we harvest it one leaf at a time like this. When I say one leaf at a time, I mean by cutting individual leaves and leaving the plant to continue to produce more. Our rule is “Leave 8 for later” – cut off large outer leaves close to the base of the plant, being sure to keep at least 8 of the inner leaves growing on each plant. Over-harvesting leads to decline. Our goal is sustainable harvesting. In the photo above, the area shown has just been harvested. In the second photo the section further down the bed from the labels has not been harvested for maybe a week. Reading from left to right, the varieties are Avon, Acadia, Escalade, and Renegade.

Close up of hoophouse spinach trials 3 April before harvest.
Photo Pam Dawling

The plants have not changed much in the last month, although in comparison with the February photo below, you can see the leaves are starting to become pointed in shape. We are waiting to see which of the varieties bolts first. The smoother-leaved Renegade definitely has thinner leaves now, and would yield lower weight (if we were weighing them). There was a stage at which it had the largest leaves, so its advantage in central Virginia hoophouses is probably as a faster-growing type.

The same spinach plants as in the top photo on February 5.
Photo Pam Dawling

National Ginger & Turmeric Conference, October 17-19, 2018, Richmond, Virginia will focus on the production, marketing and health benefits of ginger and turmeric. Click the link to see beautiful photos of Virginia farmers and their ginger and turmeric. Save the date!

With growing interest in ginger and turmeric, many health professionals, researchers, farmers, and food and beverage professionals are turning their attention toward these healthy spices. In order to cultivate new ideas and further grow the industry, Virginia State University is hosting the first National Ginger & Turmeric Conference in Richmond, Virginia this fall. The three-day conference is targeted at the agricultural, health, and culinary professionals who work or are considering working with ginger and turmeric. It will showcase the latest science and technology related to production, product development and health, as well as feature success stories and marketing strategies.

The organizers (Virginia State University and  Virginia Co-operative Extension Service) are sending out a Call for Abstracts at this point, to all individuals and organizations that may have information to share on the medicinal and nutritional, sustainable production methods and/or sales side of the industry. Abstracts are now being accepted for oral and poster presentation Submit your abstract now.

Ginger growing in our hoophouse.
Photo Kathryn Simmons

FLAG Farmers’ Legal Action Group

Farmers’ Legal Action Group is a nonprofit law center dedicated to providing legal services and support to family farmers and their communities in order to help keep family farmers on the land.

FLAG has produced a new resource that is intended to assist organic farmers in time of disaster. It looks at two important issues. First, the extremely challenging effects of a flood on an organic farm. Secondly,  a relatively new form of crop insurance —Whole-Farm Revenue — that could benefit organic producers going forward.

Download FLAG’s  Organic Farmers in Disasters – Flooding and Whole Farm Revenue Crop Insurance

 

Laughing Loon Farm

Photo courtesy of Organic Broadcaster and MOSES

The March/April Organic Broadcaster is out.

There’s a great article by Matt Leavitt on planting spring cover crops. An article by Kelli Boylen advocates for integrating livestock into cropping systems to improve soil health, spread farm risks (eggs in more baskets) and improve efficiency by reducing waste and other losses. Bailey Webster writes about the Food Safety Modernization Act, fondly known as FSMA (Fizma).

There’s an article on conducting on-farm variety trials by the Organic Seed Alliance, who have published a 55 page Grower’s Guide to Conducting On-farm Variety Trials which can be downloaded at the link. Working together to discover which varieties work best under organic cultivation can help us all.

There’s much more besides: news, events, politics, items for sale, employment opportunities

What’s growing in the hoophouse; reading; planning for winter.

Tokyo Bekana in the hoophouse.
Photo Pam Dawling

In the hoophouse we are perhaps half way through our bed preparations. The Tokyo Bekana was the first crop we transplanted from our outdoor nursery bed, and it’s looking very sturdy now.  We’ve also transplanted some Yukina Savoy and the first of the lettuces.

Cherry Belle radishes in the hoophouse, early October.
Photo Pam Dawling.

The crops we direct sowed in early September are growing well, and we are harvesting the radishes and some of the tatsoi and Bulls Blood beet greens (thinning to 6″ apart). The spinach is big enough to start harvesting but we haven’t needed to yet.

Hoophouse tatsoi in early October.
Photo Pam Dawling

The newer sowings (the second radishes and the first brassica baby salad mix (mustards) have emerged and are ready to thin to 1″. Sometimes we use thinned seedlings as a salad garnish, but it takes more time than simply pulling them out, and it takes attention to keep them clean.

This summer we grew more cover crops rather than seed crops, which we have been growing in summer for several years, because we were short of workers. In the photo below you can see some healthy cowpeas I’m going to be pulling up later today, as well as some pulled up and dried buckwheat. We don’t dig our cover crops under, just let them die on the surface for as long as possible, shedding bits of dead leaf, then haul them to the compost pile. With the cowpeas, we hope to leave the nitrogen nodules from the roots, by ripping the plants up roughly!

Iron and Clay cowpeas as cover crop in the hoophouse.
Photo Pam Dawling

These cowpeas have been cut back two or three times over the summer, to keep them manageable. At one point, they were black with sooty mold growing on aphid honeydew. We wondered if it was going to be a bigger problem, but after we cut the plants back, most of the aphids seem to have died. We also got a healthy population of ladybugs.


December beds with row cover.
Photo Wren Vile

I gather readers are planning for winter, as many folks have been visiting my Winter-Kill Temperatures List of hardy crops. I update this list every spring, with the info from the previous winter. It’s useful for planning harvests based on forecast temperatures, and it’s useful for planning which winter crops will grow in your location, either inside or out.

On the same theme, I just discovered the WeatherSpark website which provides “The Typical Weather Anywhere on Earth”. Enter your nearest town or airport and you get clearly explained info with fascinating graphics of how the weather goes over the year in your locality. Note this is not a forecast site, it’s about average weather for each place. Useful to people who’ve recently moved and want to know what to expect this winter, or to new gardeners who haven’t paid so much attention previously. Or to those who want to check their assumptions (I really thought the wind was out of the west more of the time than records say). There are charts of high and low temperature, temperature by the hour each month, cloud cover, daily chance of precipitation (both rainfall and snowfall), hours of daylight, humidity, wind speed and direction and solar energy. A big help in making wise decisions. I know that climate change is going to cause havoc with averages, and we’ll need to learn to become better weather forecasters individually, and to use soil temperature and other metrics to decide when to plant. But this website explains things well.


Tomato seed strained in a sieve.
Photo Pam Dawling

I wrote a more concise description of saving tomato seed for the Mother Earth News Organic Gardening blog. For the full length version, see my two posts here and here.

The October Growing for Market is out. Flower farmer Erin Benzakein writes about getting to grips with the marketing side of running a farm. She encourages farmers to get good photos, step out from behind the camera, and dust off their website. I could use some of this advice! (I’ve been very busy writing a hoophouse book, and have necessarily paid less attention to giving presentations and to rejuvenating this website!

Kai Hoffman-Krull writes about on-farm trials of bio-char. I’m looking forward to reading that. Jesse Frost writes about winter CSAs and profiles some he visited. Chris Bodnar covers Italy’s thriving agricultural co-ops and asks if this could be a model for the next phase of the locally-grown movement. Lastly Zach Loeks offers the first of a two-part series on Transitioning to a permaculture market garden.

The September/October issue of Organic Broadcaster is also out. Articles include attending to soil health to improve production; the top reasons customers buy organic foods (accountability, environment, health); interseeding cover crops in cash crops; an interview with farmers in the MOSES Farmer-to-Farmer Mentoring Program; designing an efficient pack shed; and selecting the right meat processor.

Lastly, the campaign www.keepthesoilinorganic.org has posted a letter a letter recently sent out by farming mentor Eliot Coleman about the travesty of allowing hydroponics to be certified as Organic. Hydroponics is a system of growing plants anchored in holes in plastic tubes, or in blocks of inert material, and feeding them with a liquid solution of things that work to produce mature plants. The arrogance of imagining we know everything a plant needs is astounding! The idea that all the many complex ingredients of soil can be replaced with a synthetic concoction is staggering!

Eliot Coleman’s letter includes these quotes:

Organic farming is best defined by the benefits of growing crops on a biologically active fertile soil.

The importance of fertile soil as the cornerstone of organic farming is under threat. The USDA is allowing soil-less hydroponic vegetables to be sold as certified organic without saying a word about it.

The encouragement of “pseudo-organic” hydroponics is just the latest in a long line of USDA attempts to subvert the non-chemical promise that organic farming has always represented. Without soil, there is no organic farming.

 

Eliot Coleman will be a speaker, along with Fred Kirschenmann, Enid Wonnacott, Jim Riddle, Will Allen, Jeff Moyer, Dave Chapman, Anaise Beddard, Lisa Stokke, Tom Beddard and  Linley Dixon at the Jacksonville Rally of the Keep the Soil in Organic movement. Oct 31, 2017 at 12:45 pm – 2:00pm EDT. Omni Jacksonville Hotel, 245 Water St, Jacksonville, FL 32202, USAThis Rally will be a gathering of organic farmers and eaters from all over the world. The march will begin at the Omni Jacksonville during the lunch break from 12:45 to 2 PM on Tuesday, the first day of the NOSB meeting. There will be a 5 minute march to The Landing from the Omni. Lunch will be available at the Rally. For more information, call Dave Chapman at 802-299-7737.

Washing tomato seeds, Heritage Harvest Festival, Organic Broadcaster

Wet Roma tomato seeds set to dry with a fan.
Photo Pam Dawling

Last week I wrote about saving tomato seeds and eating the tomatoes too. We left the extracted tomato seed in a bucket to ferment for three days. On Friday I washed the seeds. They look quite unappetizing at first, with a thin layer of mold on the surface of the liquid.

Roma tomato seed ferment on day 3, ready for washing.
Photo Pam Dawling

The process of washing the seeds and pouring off the detritus is almost magical. The fermentation kills some disease spores, and also dissolves the gel that coats the seeds. If you dry tomato seeds without fermenting, they all stick together.

Tomato seed processing: adding water from a hose and stirring the mix.
Photo Pam Dawling

With each successive wash, more of the tomato flesh floats off, along with poor quality seeds. I add water using a hose and stir. Here I’m stirring with a short length of green plastic pipe that was conveniently nearby. When the bucket is about two-thirds full I turn off the hose and stop stirring. Good seed sinks to the bottom of the bucket. When I think it has settled, I pour the liquid along with lumps of tomato flesh into another bucket. This is a safety precaution to ensure I don’t throw away good seed. If I just poured it on the ground I could slip and dump the lot.

Roma tomato seed ferment after first pour.
Photo Pam Dawling

I repeat the wash and pour a few more times. Even after the second pour the seeds are plainly visible.

Roma tomato seed ferment after the second pour.
Photo Pam Dawling

The seeds which float and get poured away are very light and are either very thin or they show a black spot in the center. So it’s counter-productive to try to catch every single seed.Let the useless seeds float away!

Tomato seed extraction after the third pour.
Photo Pam Dawling

After four or five washes the water I pour off is clear, so then I add more water, stir and pour the swirling stuff through a sieve balanced on a bucket.

Tomato seed extraction, fourth wash water. almost clear.
Photo Pam Dawling

In my case I have a small sieve balanced in a bigger one, which sits more safely on the bucket, but has a mesh too big for tomato seeds. This sieve contains seed from 10 gallons of Roma tomatoes.

Roma tomato seeds strained in a sieve.
Photo Pam Dawling

From here, I take the seed sieve indoors and empty it on sturdy paper towels on a tray by a small fan. See the first photo. After a few hours I come by and crumble the clumps of seeds to help even out the drying. For two days I turn the seeds over a few times a day. Once they are dry I put them in a labelled paper bag, and ready the space for the next batch of seeds to dry. Watermelon in this case. I alternate tomato and watermelon seeds, processing one batch of each every week through late July to early September.


Heritage Harvest Festival

I mentioned the Heritage Harvest Festival a few weeks ago. I’m presenting one of the Premium Workshops on Friday, about growing sweet potatoes. See my Events Page for more about this. Pictures of sweet potatoes at this time of year are a monotonous swath of green leaves (now we have got a double electric fence to stop the deer eating the leaves off.) Last year we didn’t do a good job of keeping deer off our sweet potatoes and we got low yields. One of our gardening mantras is “Never make the same mistake two years running!” so you can be sure we are working hard to keep the pesky deer from eating our winter food.

On Saturday September 9, I’ll be out and about at the Festival, and hope to see many old friends and make some new ones.

If you live in North Carolina and can’t make it all the way to Virginia for the Heritage Harvest Festival at Monticello, you could go to the Organic Growers School Harvest Conference that same weekend September 8-9. I’ve been to their Spring Conference several times, but never the Harvest Conference because it’s always the same weekend as the Heritage Harvest Festival.


Photo courtesy of Organic Broadcaster and MOSES

The July/August issue of Organic Broadcaster has been on my desk for a few weeks waiting for time to read it. This newspaper is free online, with a new issue every two months. It covers more aspects of Organic Farming than simply vegetable production. There are good articles about cover crops, including roller-crimping no-till rye. Also an article on weed control for market farmers by Bailey Webster, who interviewed farmers and researchers. Harriet Behar, the senior organic specialist at MOSES, write about the thorny issues of falsely labeled Organic foods: imported livestock feedstuffs, milk from cows with no pasture access and algal oil in Organic milk. Now that 68% of Americans bought organic foods of some kind (Pew), more Organic suppliers are needed to meet the demand (or else the unscrupulous rush in with false labels.) There are further articles about cash flow for farmers, winter bale grazing for cattle, the 2018 Farm Bill, and transferring the farm to new owners.

Now we are getting some rain from Cyclone 10, which might have become Tropical Storm Irma, but now looks less likely to qualify for a name. But, enough rain to want to stay indoors, so maybe I can read for a while.

 

Upcoming events, Growing for Market article, Organic Broadcaster

Harvesting Zephyr yellow squash.
Photo Brittany Lewis

Starting with what’s being harvested now – squash and zucchini are coming in nicely. The hoophouse Gentry yellow squash (chosen for being fast-maturing) is coming in by the bucketload, and the outdoor yellow squash and zucchini have started producing.


I’m off to Burlington, Vermont this weekend, for the Mother Earth News Fair. I’m giving two workshops:

Cold-hardy Winter Vegetables,on Saturday 6/10 at 11 am on the Yanmar Sustainability Stage, immediately followed by book-signing at the Mother Earth News Bookstore noon- 12.30.

Producing Asian Greens on Sunday  6/11 at 3.30 pm on the Heirloom Gardener Stage.

I’m also doing demonstrations of tomato string-weaving at the New Society Publishers booth 2611, near the Mother Earth News Stage (not the Bookstore this time), at 10 – 10.30 am and 3-3.30 pm on Saturday and 10 -10.30 am, 11- 11.30 am and 2- 2.30 pm on Sunday. Check out my Events page to see the pink sparkly tinsel tomato plant models I use!


At the Heritage Harvest Festival near Charlottesville, Virginia, on Friday September 8 (the Premium Workshops before the main Festival), I’m presenting on Growing Sweet Potatoes at 3.30-4.30 in classroom 7, followed by book-signing at the Monticello Bookshop.


The June/July summer issue of Growing for Market magazine is out, and includes my article on Hoophouse soil salt buildup. This is an issue we have been dealing with – we see white deposits on the soil. I did a lot of research and found ways to water the salts back down deep in the soil profile. I also gathered information on how to measure and monitor salinity, and how to understand the test results and their different testing methods and different units of measure. I learned about salt tolerance of different crops, the plant symptoms of excess salinity, and how to prevent the problem in future. This topic is rising in importance as more people use hoophouses with drip irrigation systems. We were blithely ignorant for our first several years of hoophopuse use, as salinity takes a few years to really develop, and there wasn’t much information available.

I’m also looking forward to reading the other articles, especially Summer lettuce lessons from Southern growers by Jesse Frost. There are some great photos of beds covered with hoops and shade-cloth, which show a good system. I always appreciate articles written for southern growers, which can be in short supply.

Daisy Fair in Utah’s zone 5 has written about moveable tunnels with in-ground hydronic heat. So there’s information for cold climates too. Sam Hitchcock Tilton has an article with tips learned from Dutch and Swiss farmers. Robert Hadad advises on careful monitoring of costs of production in order to actually make a living from farming. The flower growing article in this issue is from Debra Prinzing and is about American Flowers Week, a chance to highlight American-grown flowers with some light-hearted fun photos.


The May/June Organic Broadcaster just arrived in its paper format – I’ve had the digital one for a while. Good thing I’ve got that long car ride to Vermont this weekend to catch up on my farming reading!

The front page story this time is about Kansas farmers, Tim and Michael Raile, transitioning thousands of dryland (non-irrigated) acres to Organic steadily over the next 5 or 6 years. Dryland farming focuses on moisture retention. The Railes grow a wheat/corn/
sunflower/milo (grain sorghum)/fallow rotation. They are also trialing some ancient grains.

Organic production in the US is not meeting demand, and organic imports are increasing, including organic soy and feed corn, not just bananas and coffee. More farmers want to produce Organic poultry, eggs, milk and meat. And so they are looking for Organic feed at an affordable price. This is often imported, which raises issues about how Organic Standards vary from one country to another, and the bigger issue of sustainability – not always the same as Organic! Does it really make sense to ship in grains to feed livestock?

Harriet Behar writes about the true meaning of Organic and overall methods of production. It’s not just about following rules on allowed inputs and materials – it’s a whole approach to how we treat the soil, our plants and livestock.

Hannah Philips and Brad Heins share research on how cover crop choices can influence the fatty acids and meat of dairy steers. Jody Padgham writes about CSAs responding to competition and decreasing membership by offering more options on shares and delivery. Gone are the days of “One box, one day, one price” CSAs. Numerous modifications of the basic CSA model have sprung up to better fit the diverse needs of customers (members). Kristen McPhee writes about the Vermont Herb Growers  Cooperative, which buys from various small-scale growers and aggregates orders to larger buyers. Other topics covered include lessons learned from Hawaii’s GMO controversy, paying for end-of-life care without losing your farm, and many short items and classified ads. As always, a newspaper packed with information.


And by the way, we’re also picking blueberries – ah! heaven!

Blueberries.
Photo Marilyn Rayne Squier

Mother Earth News post, Organic Broadcaster, Jamaica trip

Hoophouse early squash planted in the middle of a bed of winter chard.
Photo Bridget Aleshire

I wrote a blog post for the Mother Earth News Organic Gardening blog on Hoophouse Intercropping in Spring.

We transplant our tomatoes, peppers, squash and cucumbers into the middles of the beds of winter crops. We pull out the middle rows, dig holes, add compost and transplant. Initially the rows of winter greens to the south of the new plants shade and shelter them a little, which helps them settle in. The next week we harvest out the greens on the south side of the new crops, then after that (but less urgently) the row on the north side.

Hoophouse peppers transplanted in the north hoophouse bed among lettuce mix.
Photo Bridget Aleshire

3/15 is our usual tomato planting date, 4/1 we planted squash. 4/5 we’ll put the cucumbers in and 4/7 the peppers. We used to plant the hoophouse peppers earlier but it’s such a struggle keeping them warm enough as seedlings in the greenhouse, that we moved a week later. It’s just not worth having stunted pepper plants!


The March/April Organic Broadcaster is out too. Phew it’s hard to find enough reading time in spring! There are articles about the Organic check-off program (discussed at the MOSES Conference), information about policy work for the National Organic Program, and their “Ask a Specialist” column answering a question about “fast, inexpensive greenhouse space.” The answer was souped-up 10 x 60 ft caterpillar tunnels, including heated benches for starting plants. Other articles address organic grain production, humane mobile houses for poultry, a profile of the MOSES Farmers of the Year, Hans and Katie Bishop, solar panels on small farms, diverse meat CSA farms, as well as news from the conference. Something for everyone!


I’m volunteering with the Jamaica Sustainable Farm Enterprise Project. Here’s a bit more about the project:

The people of Jamaica and the greater Caribbean region have long been buffeted by  natural and human-caused disasters that have left them in a state of economic, social, and environmental crisis. Jamaican  people are vulnerable due to national dependency on unaffordable, less healthy, imported food, lost skill sets needed to produce certain crops without expensive chemical inputs, and natural disasters that wipe out farmers crops with regularity. The Parish of St. Thomas and the other eastern parish of Portland have systemically been the most forgotten and underdeveloped parishes in Jamaica for over a century.

St. Thomas is a farming parish. However, since the liberalization of the banana industry by the European Union and NAFTA all the banana plantations have closed leaving few agricultural avenues for profitable employment in the parish. Many of the people of St. Thomas still rely on small cash crops and seasonal tree crop production for their livelihood.

JSFEP aims to focus on local sustainable production to increase food security and help develop high value internal and export markets to increase agricultural profitability. Permaculture and organic (POF) systems provide solid foundations for these solutions.

I’ll be going to St Thomas parish (click for a map) from 5/11 to 5/22, providing training in vegetable crop planning. JSFEP partners The Source Farm, a multi-cultural, intergenerational eco-village, located in Johns Town, in the parish of St. Thomas.  You can see a slideshow at their website. And You Tube has a short video The Source Farm Foundation Ecovillage.

Well, I’m out of time this week, as I need to get my laundry off the line and spray the aphids in the greenhouse and hoophouse with soapy water.

This post was hacked–we’re trying to restore it.

This post was hacked–we’re trying to restore it.

Speaking Events, Good Reading, Sustainable Agriculture Courses

Photo by Karen Lanier
Photo by Karen Lanier

I’ve got my Events Page organized now, so you can check there whenever you’re wondering where I might show up next, addressing a conference or a classroom.

In January, I will be speaking at two conferences: VABF and SSAWG.

January 10-11 (Tuesday and Wednesday) 2017, Virginia Biological Farming Conference http://vabf.org/conference/  Location: Omni Homestead Resort, 7696 Sam Snead Highway, Hot Springs, VA. 800 838 1766. Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2017-virginia-biological-farming-conference-tickets-28261472826.

Two 90 minute workshops: Cover Crops for Vegetable Growers and Spring and Summer Hoophouses. Book signing and sales.

Jan 25-28, 2017 Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group Practical Tools and Solutions for Sustaining Family Farms Conference http://www.ssawg.org/january-2017-conference/ Location: Hyatt Regency Hotel and Convention Center, 401 West High St, Lexington, KY 40507. 888 421 1442, 800 233 1234. Registration: http://www.ssawg.org/registration

Two 90 minute workshops: Diversify your Vegetable Crops (Friday 2-3.30pm) and Storage Vegetables for Off-Season Sales (Saturday 8.15-9.45 am). Workshops will be recorded. Book signing (Thursday 5pm) and sales.


planning-designing-the-family-food-garden-book-cover-2-e1454884966600-768x993I recently discovered an interesting website and blog: Family Food Garden by Isis Loran. I found it because Isis recommends my book Sustainable Market Farming in her article on designing for large-scale family food production. She lives in zone 5 in the mountains of British Columbia, Canada.

Isis Loran is collecting and sharing a lot of good information, and she has written a book Planning and Designing the Family Food Garden  (which I haven’t seen yet). The E-book is $12.99 online, and you can preview 12 pages before buying.

She also sells a 23 page garden planner via Etsy, the craft retail site, for $11.05 Canadian.

quarterly


broadcaster-picture-e1443112899347

For growers more at the farmer end of the scale than the family garden end, the November/December issue of the Organic Broadcaster from MOSES is out.

There’s an article Farmers use creative mix of new technology, adapted equipment to grow row crops. Carolyn Olsen writes about  a 36 burner flame-weeder they made from a sprayer!

In Expanding market offers opportunities for herb growers to create value-added products, Jane Hawley Stevens, of Four Elements Organic Herbals, writes about growing more than 150 varieties of herbs on their 130-acre certified organic farm near Madison, Wisconsin. In SILT offers permanent solution to affordable land access in Iowa, Denise O’Brien describes the Sustainable Iowa Land Trust (SILT), a new model that reduces land costs for sustainable food farmers for generations to come. SILT permanently protects land from development, for truly sustainable production of food. Retiring farmers are donating land to this worthy cause.

There are more articles, some about livestock, one about the questionable organic certification on some imported grain crops, one about farm finances, and many more.


Lastly, I’d like to hear from you if you know of a college using my book for a text for sustainable agriculture courses. I know of a few in Virginia, but I’d like to hear more. At the Carolina farm Stewardship Conference at the beginning of November, I met a student at the Central Carolina Community College. The “green-collar” workforce in the “Green Central” program learns about Sustainable Ag and according to the student I spoke with, they chose my book because it is more regionally appropriate for the Carolinas.

I’d like to make more contacts with teachers of sustainable ag courses, and look into marketing my book as a text.

Hoophouse lettuce in winter at Twin Oaks. Photo Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
Hoophouse lettuce in winter at Twin Oaks.
Photo Southern Exposure Seed Exchange