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?)

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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.158_full

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

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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