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. . . ”
Credit Ezra Freeman