Farming Conference Tips, Hoophouse Cool Season Crops slideshow.

I’ve just been on an intensive conference hopping jaunt, three weekends in a row with not much time at home mid-week. One notion I heard discussed is the “Actionable Nugget”. It’s an idea you learn from someone else that inspires you as a possible solution to a problem or challenge you’ve noticed. I’m going to share some I picked up this month.

First I’m going to share my half-day presentation on Hoophouse Production of Cool Season Crops. To view it full screen, click on the diagonal arrows icon. Use the forward pointing triangle to move to the next slide. There are a lot! It was a full afternoon!

Here are some of the Actionable Nuggets:

Asparagus Beans (Asian Long Beans, Yard-Long Beans) as a summer hoophouse crop.

Purple-podded asparagus bean.
Photo Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

I got this idea from a Year-Round Organic Vegetable Production workshop at the Virginia Association of Biological Farmers Conference. It was presented by Rick Felker of Mattawoman Creek Farms on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Rick said that Asian long beans are a star crop for them, and  produce extremely high yields compared to outdoors. Yes, they need trellising, and yes, they need frequent harvesting.  On the plus side they are a legume, so they are adding nitrogen to the soil the whole time they are growing. At Mattawoman Farm, they harvest these from June to October.  In recent years we have not been growing bean seed crops in the summer hoophouse as we used to do. Last summer we grew Iron and Clay cowpeas as a cover crop, but were disappointed to need to cut them back every 6 days, because we’d decided not to stake them in any way.

Trellised Liana asparagus bean.
Photo Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

Sulfur: The Forgotten Nutrient, Secret Ingredient for Healthy Soils and Crops.

At the Future Harvest Chesapeake Association for Sustainable Agriculture Conference, I much appreciated this workshop by Ray Weil. A whole workshop on one element! When deficient, the plant has symptoms resembling nitrogen shortage. It caused me to wonder how often I have made this mistake. Brassicas and legumes are the crops to pay closest attention to. I learned that the standard soil test for sulfur is fairly meaningless – I have been putting my faith in a poor source of information. The key piece of information from Ray Weil is that with a S shortage, the yellowing starts on the younger leaves, which is opposite to nitrogen shortages, when the yellowing begins on the older leaves.

S-deficient plants will be thin, spindly and slow-growing. The leaves will be high in nitrates, because the poor plant can’t use all the N it has absorbed from the soil. I already know from winter hoophouse growing that high levels of nitrate are not healthy. Legumes cannot do a good job of fixing nitrogen if S is too low. Sulfur shortages can affect the nutrient density of the crops, the protein level in beans. Now I know what to look for and what to do if I find the problem. Add 5-10 pounds per acre of S if plants seem deficient.

Cucurbit Blossom End Rot

Is this an unpollinated squash or one with Blossom End Rot?
Photo Pam Dawling

At the same FHCASA conference, I learned about cucurbit BER in a workshop by Emily Zobel. I had not known cucurbits could suffer from blossom end rot, which is a problem caused by limited calcium uptake, often in cold weather and when water supplies are too variable. I do see a little BER on our first hoophouse tomatoes to ripen, but the plants quickly grow out of it as the weather warms up.  The photos of young yellow squash Emily Zobel showed  looked just like what I have been thinking was lack of pollination!! Now I will need to see if encouraging the plants to take up more calcium can solve the problem. This “actionable nugget” arrives in good time for this growing season!

I also learned that duct tape can be used to remove squash bug eggs. (I’d given up trying)

Yellow Shoulders on Hoophouse Tomatoes

Hoophouse tomatoes with yellow shoulders. Glacier or Stupice.
Photo Pam Dawling

From a workshop on Organic Soil Management for High Tunnels at the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group Conference, presented by Krista Jacobsen, I learned some valuable tips about dealing with salt build-up in hoophouse soils. – she referred to hoophouses as “irrigated deserts”!

I also learned  about yellow shoulders on tomatoes. Previously I had read that the green/yellow shoulders were (unfortunately) genetically linked to good flavor in some varieties. At this workshop I learned that yellow shoulders (as opposed to green), can be a sign of potassium deficiency. Temperatures above 90F can also be a factor. The determinant hybrids have less of a problem than other varieties. Excess magnesium can be a factor, as can the choice of variety, a virus infection, pH over 6.7. Our pH isn’t over 6.7. Ideally, the grower would increase the magnesium to calcium ratio to 1:6 or 1:4, and/or increase the potassium. Perhaps we are short of magnesium. I will need to study our soil tests more carefully.

Organic Weed Management

A carpet of weeds, but the crop is easily seen!
Photo Bridget Aleshire

In this SSAWG workshop by Daniel Parson, I learned a technique for training newbies on weed control: Make them get down on the knees and point to and touch the crop plants before hoeing or pulling weeds. He says : “If you can see the weeds without getting down on the ground, you’ve waited too long! ” Weeds should be dealt with while tiny. Bring your trainees back in a week to to see the results of their hoeing. I like this idea! Too often it is hard for new workers to learn from their experience because they don’t study and critique their work as they learn!

Lean Farm Ideas

Ellen Polishuk gave this workshop, and I went because I had both enjoyed and been challenged by Ben Hartman’s Lean Farm book. I wanted to hear someone else’s perspective and remind myself of the best bits. To my surprise, one idea that stuck out was to work in 90 minute chunks, with short breaks (or longer meal breaks). I’m not sure I fully embrace this idea, but I’m mulling it over.

Storage Vegetables slide show, Diversify your vegetable crops slideshow again

Well, we are getting back on the horse/bicycle after being hacked, and hoping to return to normal. Here is my other presentation from the SSAWG conference: Storage Vegetables for Off-Season Sales.

And in case you missed last week’s post before it got attacked, here’s Diversify Your Vegetable Crops again:

The three presentations I gave this past weekend at the PASA Conference can be found at SlideShare. Click the link to get directly to the first of the pages with my presentations on it, or go to the SlideShare site and put my name or that of the presentation you want in the search box. I presented Growing Sweet Potatoes from Start to Finish, Crop Rotations for Vegetables and Cover Crops and Succession Planting for Continuous Vegetable Harvests


Dealing with the hack has taken a lot of time and energy, so this post will be short. Today has been unseasonably warm, and atypically windy. We have been pruning blueberries, preparing raised beds and harvesting spinach, leeks and garlic scallions, our first “new” crop of 2017. Usually I reckon on starting to harvest these March 1st, but they have grown a lot recently. They are about 6″ tall. A very flavorful fresh taste for this time of year (the Hungry Gap) when we mostly get leafy greens and stored roots.

Simply set aside all the tiny garlic cloves when you do your main planting, prepare a series of furrows close together. Tumble in the cloves, shoulder to shoulder, any way up. Cover the furrows, mulch over the soil and wait for early spring. When the garlic scallions are at least 6″ tall, start digging them up. Use them raw if you are inclined, or chop and cook them in omelets, stir-fries, soups, anywhere you’d like the taste of garlic. Pow!

Garlic scallions in April.
Photo Kathryn Simmons

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

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

SSAWG Conference, Mother Earth News and Eat-All Greens, Growing for Market

I’m home from a very successful Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (SSAWG) Practical Tools and Solutions for Sustaining Family Farms Conference in Lexington Kentucky. It was the biggest so far, with 1400-1500 participants. My workshop Intensive Vegetable Production on a Small Scale ran out even of standing room, so I was asked to repeat it in the afternoon. I did that and the new room was half full. I gave out over 230 handouts. The impossibly broad topic was a challenge for a 75 minute workshop, but I did my best. Last week I blogged the info on Bio-intensive Integrated Pest Management that I had to drop from the slideshow.

I love the SSAWG conference. I learned so many useful tips that will improve my farming this year and in the future. Such as another way to tell a ripe watermelon: stroke it and feel the texture of the skin. If it’s slick the melon isn’t ready. When it becomes a little rough, it is. Such as, yes a 60cfm inflation blower really should be adequate for a 30′ x 96′ hoophouse, so we almost certainly have holes in the plastic. Such as ways to deal with tomato diseases in the Southeast (thanks Joe Kemble of Auburn University).

If you are now wishing you’d been there, go to SlideShare.net and search for SSAWG. There are so many valuable presentations from conferences over the years. Also the audio of this year’s presentations (and last) are available from Rhino Technologies. Wait a few days for them to get home and load everything on their website.


Eat-All Greens on October 19 Photo Bridget Aleshire
Eat-All Greens on October 19
Photo Bridget Aleshire

And while the soil outside is waterlogged and you can’t do much gardening or farming, what better than more veggie-reading? Mother Earth News Feb/March issue has an article by Carol Deppe,  on How to Easily Grow High-Yielding Greens. Carol is the inventor/discoverer of Eat-All Greens, which I have been writing about on this blog. Her 20 years of trialing this method of growing cooking greens quickly with very little work has led her to now recommend seven greens as particularly suitable. Green Wave mustard, Shunkyo and Sensai radishes (I was interested to read that Carol also harvested the radish roots as we did with ours in December), Groninger Blue collard-kale (must get that this year), Burgundy amaranth, Tokyo bekana (check!), and Red Aztec huazontle. No mention this time of peas. Peas provided our earliest harvests this fall. Keeping them tender was a challenge though. The article includes information on where to buy the varieties she recommends. Carol also has her own seed company Fertile Valley Seeds, selling varieties and strains that she has developed.


Potato harvest in November Photo by Lori Katz
Potato harvest in November with our Checchi and Magli harvester
Photo by Lori Katz

In the same issue of Mother Earth News is some of what I have written about dealing safely with green potatoes.


GFM_February2016_cover_300pxLastly for this week, the February Growing for Market is out. This is the first issue from the new editor, Andrew Mefferd. He tackles the thorny topic of hydroponics and whether it can ever be considered Organic. (Many organic and biological growers believe it is important to Keep the Soil in Organic)  As well as the Organic status of hydroponics, he describes the various types of hydroponic production for those that want to grow food that way, and for the rest of us to understand what we are talking about.

There is an article by Nick Burton about his hydroponic system and developing a trust-based sales system in a gym for people on a “paleo diet”, who eat lots of vegetables. Then a salad mix kit. He had moved from running a plant nursery to selling produce to selling convenience for people short of time and enthusiasm for shopping and preparing food. I admit to being skeptical about the paleo diet. Didn’t those paleo people spend all day scavenging for food?

Gretel Adams writes about running a bouquet business efficiently. (I’d be no good, I would dither for too long!)

My own article this issue is very down-to-earth: growing oats as a cover crop. They are easy-care and in climates in zone 7 or colder, they reliably die in the winter, making for easy early spring cultivation. We like to undersow oats and soy in our last sweet corn patch. This saves us from having to disk up the patch to establish a winter cover crop (it’s already there!), and means we can follow the late sweet corn with an early spring crop the next year. In our case it is the March potatoes.

Late season sweet corn undersown with oats and soy Photo Kathryn Simmons
Late season sweet corn undersown with oats and soy
Photo Kathryn Simmons

 

Sustainable pest, disease and weed management

I’m off to the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group Conference in a couple of days. I’m presenting Intensive Vegetable Production on a Small Scale. At the link you can view a version of the slide show with lots of bonus material! (It was hard to cut the show down to 75 minutes!) I also had a lot of material on sustainable management of pests, diseases and weeds which I couldn’t even fit in the handout, so I’m posting that here.

A ladybug on a potato leaf, looking for pests to eat Photo Kathryn Simmons
A ladybug on a potato leaf, looking for pests to eat
Photo Kathryn Simmons

Biointensive Integrated Pest Management

The goal of IPM is to deal with problems in a systematic and least toxic way. Biointensive IPM goes further in emphasizing non-toxic methods.

There are four steps of IPM: prevention, avoidance, monitoring and suppression.

Sustainable Animal Pest Management

  1. Prevention: Focus on restoring and enhancing natural balance and resilience to create healthy plants and soil, better able to withstand attacks. Maintain soil fertility, good drainage and soil structure; plant resistant, pest-tolerant, regionally adapted varieties; grow strong plants; practice good sanitation,
  2. Avoidance: The next stage is taking actions to reduce the chances of a specific pest taking over. These actions are also known as physical controls. All these methods reduce problems without adding any new compounds into the soil. Use good crop rotations, remove pest habitat, deter known pests, use rowcovers, ProtekNet, low tunnels, high tunnels. Provide habitat for bats, insectivorous birds, spiders, birds of prey and rodent-eating ground predators (snakes, bobcats). Physically remove pests by hand-picking, spraying with a strong water spray, flaming, vacuuming, or by using a leaf-blower to blow bugs into a collecting scoop; solarize soil in the summer to kill soil-dwelling pests, as well as diseases.
  3. Monitoring (is action needed?) : regularly inspect your crops, find out when conditions are right for an outbreak of a particular pest, set traps and lures (sticky traps and pheromone traps) so you know when pests arrive or hatch out. Identify the pests you catch, keep records each year. Be prepared.
  4. Suppression: When the established action level for a particular pest has been reached, and prevention and avoidance strategies have been exhausted, bio-logical, microbial, botanical and mineral control measures can be used to reduce pest damage of crops to an economically viable level, while minimizing environmental risks. There are four types of sustainable bio-intensive control measures to choose from, starting with the least toxic solution:
    1. Biological control involves either introducing beneficial predators or parasites of the pest species, or working to boost populations of existing resident predators and parasites.
    2. Microbial controls refer to the use of fungi, bacteria, and viruses to kill pests.
    3. Botanical control uses plant-based products for pest control. An example is neem oil,
    4. Inorganic (mineral) controls, also known as biorational disease controls, make use of oils and soaps.

 

A zipper spider on a tomato plant, catching anything that lands on its web. Photo Wren Vile
A zipper spider on a tomato plant, catching anything that lands on its web. Photo Wren Vile

Sustainable Disease Management

Diseases need a susceptible host and the presence of a pathogen and suitable environmental conditions. Plant pathogens can be soil-borne, foliar-borne, seed-borne, or a combination of seed-borne with one of the others.

A. Soil-borne pathogens can live in the soil for decades, so long crop rotations are needed. Club Root is one. Fusarium oxysporum and Verticillium dahliae are two soil-borne fungi. Fusarium survives a long time in soil without a host, and can also be seed-borne.

B. Foliar pathogens need foliage! They die in soil in the absence of host plant debris, so practice good sanitation. Late blight (Phytophthora infestans) is a good example of this type of disease: it does not carry over in the soil, on dead plants, the seeds or the stakes. Cucurbit angular leaf spot (ALS) bacteria (Pseudomonas syringae) overwinter in diseased plant material and on the seed coat

C. Seed-borne pathogens: Lettuce mosaic virus is an example of a disease in which the seed is the main source of the pathogen and if seed infection is controlled, the disease is prevented. Other seed-borne pathogens may start life as a foliar-borne or a soil-borne pathogen. Infected seeds will produce infected plants even in clean soil. Pathogens can infect the seed via several routes: The parent plant can become infected by drawing soil pathogens through its roots up into the seed; Pathogenic spores can float in on the air (Alternaria solani, early blight of tomatoes; Anthracnose fungus that affects nightshades, watermelon and cucumber); Insects that feed on the plant can transfer the disease (striped cucumber beetles vector bacterial wilt, which is caused by Erwinia tracheiphila); Insects that pollinate the plant can bring infected pollen from diseased plants.

Rolling biodegradable plastic mulch to prevent weeds, warm the soil and prevent splash-back which can spread diseases from the soil. Photo by Wren Vile
Rolling biodegradable plastic mulch to prevent weeds, warm the soil and prevent splash-back which can spread diseases from the soil. Photo by Wren Vile
  1. Prevention and Avoidance (cultural controls)

Apply good compost and maintain healthy, biologically active soils; Optimize nutrients and moisture for crop vigor;

Practice good soil management (eg timing of tillage) to preserve maximum diversity of microorganisms; Use rotations to minimize disease and improve the environment for natural enemies of diseases; Time your plantings to avoid peak periods of certain diseases; Practice good sanitation of tools, plants and shoes; Use seed hot water and bleach treatments; Plant locally adapted, resistant varieties; Provide good airflow; Use mulches to reduce splashback from soil to plants; Use drip irrigation to reduce moisture on foliage; Use farmscaping to encourage beneficial insects.

  1. Monitor crops for problems

Make a regular tour of your crops once a week to monitor growth and health. Keep good records. If you see a problem, identify it. Plant Diseases Diagnostic lab can help. The mere presence of a disease does not automatically require spraying. The economic threshold (ET) or action level is the point at which losses from the disease warrant the time and money invested in applying control measures.

  1. When control measures are needed
    1. Physical controls: Removing diseased plant parts, protecting vulnerable plants with rowcovers or sprayed kaolin barriers, mulching to isolate plant foliage from the soil, tool and shoe sanitation, soap washes for foliage, hot water or bleach seed treatments, and soil solarization to kill disease spores are all methods that reduce problems without adding any new substance into the mix.
    2. Biological controls: Beneficial animals and insects are more common in insect pest reduction than in disease control, but the use of milk as a fungicide qualifies as a biological control. Plants in danger of developing powdery mildew can be sprayed weekly with a mix of one volume of milk with four volumes of water. When exposed to sunlight, this is effective against development of fungal diseases.
    3. Microbial controls: Homemade microbial remedies employ liquids (simple watery extracts and fermented teas) made from compost. For a simple compost extract, mix one part mature compost with six parts water. Let it soak one week, then strain and dilute to the color of weak black tea. Fermented compost tea can deal with many maladies. If your strawberries are prone to Botrytis, apply fermented compost tea every two weeks, starting when the berries are still green. See ATTRA or the Soil Foodweb site for how to make fermented compost teas.
    4. Botanical controls: Using plant-based products to reduce disease. Neem oil, as well as being a pesticide, forms a barrier on foliage that prevents some fungal diseases from establishing. It degRolling biodegradable plastic mulchdegrades in UV light in four to eight days and must be reapplied if the disease organisms are still around. Like all broad-spectrum insecticides, neem can kill beneficials as well as pests, so caution is needed if it is used. Garlic can be used against fungal diseases: blend two whole bulbs of garlic in one quart (one liter) of water with a few drops of liquid soap. Strain and refrigerate. For prevention, dilute 1:10 with water before spraying; for control, use full strength. Kelp sprays are also used to generally boost the resistance of plants to pest, disease and weather-related problems. Biofumigation by incorporating Ida Gold and Pacific Gold mustards into the soil
    5. Inorganic controls, also known as biorational disease controls: These include Bicarbonates (baking soda) one teaspoon (5 ml) in one quart (one liter) of water, with a few drops of liquid soap as a spreader-sticker against fungal diseases. Oils and soaps copper and sulfur products, as part of a prevention program (not a cure). Several of these need to be used with caution if the plants and the planet are to survive the treatment.

Sustainable Weed Management

Weeds compete with crops for sunlight, water and nutrients, and can encourage fungal diseases by reducing airflow. Too-frequent cultivation to remove weeds can leave the soil more prone to erosion. Each tilling or deep hoeing stirs air into the soil and speeds combustion of organic matter. Most weeds respond well to nutrients, especially nitrogen. If you give corn too much nitrogen, even as compost, its productivity will max out and the weeds will use the remaining nutrients.

Remove weeds at their most vulnerable stage, or at the last minute before the seedpods explode —ignore weeds doing little damage. There are different types: annuals and perennials; stationary perennials (docks) and invasive perennials (Bermuda grass); cool-weather and warm-weather types; quick-maturing and slow-maturing types; “Big Bang” types (pigweed) versus “Dribblers” (galinsoga).

  1. Preventing weeds from germinating
  • grow vigorous crops adapted to the locality,
  • close spacings, leaving less space for weeds,
  • switch between spring and summer crops in rotation,
  • drip irrigation rather than sprinklers,
  • mulch to bury short-lived weed seeds
  • plant promptly after cultivation,
  • transplant rather than direct sowing,
  • Multiple cropping, relay planting
  • Cover crops, including no-till, reduced till
  • Encourage seed-eating birds, insects, worms, mice
  1. Reducing weed seeding
  • Reduce weed seed banks to 5 % of original levels when weeds are not allowed to seed for 5 consecutive years.
  • Timely cultivation, Mowing, Flaming, Grazing by cattle, chickens, ducks, geese
  • Using post-emergence organic weed killers: corn gluten, vinegar, flaming
We use flaming to kill quick germinating weeds in our carrot beds. Photo by Brtitany Lewis
We use flaming to kill quick germinating weeds in our carrot beds. Photo by Brtitany Lewis
  1. Reducing seed viability
  • Most weed emergence happens within two years of the seeds being shed.
  • Seeds lying on or near the soil surface are more likely to deteriorate or become food for seed predators than buried seeds, so delaying tillage generally reduces the number of seeds added to the long-term seed bank
  • If they do not get eaten, dry out or rot, seeds on top of the soil are more likely to germinate than buried seeds.
  • Small, short-lived seeds of weeds with no dormancy period, such as galinsoga, will almost all die within a year or two if they are buried a few inches. Till and mulch to bury short-lived weed seeds
  • Longer-lived seeds (pigweed, lambsquarters, velvetleaf) if buried, may remain viable and dormant for years
  • Avoid deep tillage if you have long-lived-seed weeds
  • stale bed techniques draw down the seed bank in the soil
  • Solarization
  1. Reducing the strength of perennial weed roots and rhizomes
  • Apical dominance: when a rhizome grows a shoot, chemicals from that shoot prevent other nearby nodes from sending up shoots.
  • On long rhizomes, after a certain length, the dominance effect is too weak and another node can grow a shoot.
  • When rhizomes are cut into pieces during tillage, the apical dominance is lost and each piece can grow a shoot
  • But such shoots may be weak – Cultivate again before the new shoots have grown enough to send energy back to the roots, or pull out the pieces to dry on the surface: the depleted pieces of root or rhizome may die.
  • It’s more effective to wait time until the new top growth has drawn down the plant’s reserves (in the roots) before hoeing or pulling, than to go almost daily after every sprig.
  • Removing top growth whenever the weeds reach the three- to four-leaf stage can be most effective

 

CFSA report, SSAWG plans, a quiet time in between?

Carolina Farm Stewardship Association Sustainable Agriculture Conference
Carolina Farm Stewardship Association Sustainable Agriculture Conference

I’m home from the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association conference, and I had a great time. There were 1200 attendees and this was their 30th anniversary! I gave two workshops: Cold-hardy Winter Vegetables and Succession Planting for Continuous Vegetable Harvests, which I updated and you can view here:

I attended three good workshops by Steve Moore (High Tunnels/hoophouses), Ellen Polishuk (Coaxing more profit from your farm) and Laura Lengnick (Resilient Agriculture). It’s nice to have enough time at an event to attend other farmers’ workshops.


 

GFM-NovemberDecember2015-cover_300pxThe November/December Growing for Market magazine is out. This double issue has 28 pages, with my article on succession planting in the winter hoophouse, and other articles on ginger, farm finances, and diseases in the winter flower greenhouse.


 

Right click on image above to download and use on your website or blog.

Practical Tools and Solutions for Sustaining Family Farms Conference
Lexington Convention Center ~ Lexington, Kentucky

You can see the full conference program with session descriptions at: http://www.ssawg.org/2016-conference-program

Pre-Conference Courses and Field Trips: January 27-28, 2016

General Conference: January 29-30, 2016
Visit www.ssawg.org for complete details

My workshop:

Intensive Vegetable Production on a Small Scale

Friday, January 29, 9:45 – 11:00

I’ll also be signing books on Thursday evening January 28, 7-8.30pm

Virginian Eat-All Greens on November 8 Photo by Lori Katz
Virginian Eat-All Greens on November 8
Photo by Lori Katz

 

 

Virginia Festival of the Book Update . And more event updates.

Virginia Festival of the BookI will be a presenter at the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, Virginia, March 20-24 2013. I’ll be talking about my book Sustainable Market Farming, and growing vegetables sustainably to feed ourselves and our community.My panel discussion, the Locavore track, will be on Thursday March 21 at 6pm, at the JMRL Public Library, 201 East Market Street. It’s free! See you there.

I’ll be signing and selling copies of my book, so if you want a signed copy, and you want local authors to get the money they’ve earned (rather than have it go to that cheap online store!), come and get one. Of course, you also get the chance to leaf through and see it is the book for you!

Also on the Locavore panel will be Jackson Landers, author of The Beginner’s Guide to Hunting Deer for Food and Eating Aliens (about hunting invasive animal species for food). Here’s an interesting interview with Jackson Landers from 2010 and his blog The Locavore Hunter.

Here’s my list of upcoming events:

I’ll be taking part with Ira Wallace in teaching a module of the VABF Farm School on Monday 3/18/13 at J Sergeant Reynolds college. We’re talking on Sustainable Farming Practices. The purpose of this program is to help beginning farmers and ranchers in Virginia to make informed farm planning decisions as part of a whole farm plan.  This six week comprehensive program (Monday evenings from 6:00-9:00pm) will introduce students to these curriculum modules:

  • Introduction to Whole Farm Planning (2 sessions)
  • Marketing
  • Sustainable Farming Practices (2 sessions)
  • Holistic Business Management

On June 27 2013, I’ll be giving a presentation on Planning for Fall Vegetable Production at VSU’s Randolph Farm, as part of the Annual Summer Vegetable and Berry Field Day, which runs from 9am to 3pm and includes a field tour, a chef competition and then a choice of educational sessions.

I’ll be presenting two workshops at the Heritage Harvest Festival at Monticello, Friday September 6 and Saturday September 7.  it was a lovely event last year, with perfect weather. let’s hope for similar again. I’ll be presenting my workshop  on Producing Asian Greens on Friday Sept 6 and one on Succession Planting on Saturday Sept 7.

I’ll be at the Mother Earth News Fair at Seven Springs, PA September 20-22, 2013. If you haven’t been to a MEN Fair before, consider going. They’re a lot of fun and a lot of useful information, all at a very reasonable price. Weekend tickets are $20 if you pre-order by March 31, 2013: (Price at the gate: $35). There are workshops on renewable energy, small-scale agriculture, gardening, green building and more. There are vendors of books, tools and organic foods. You can book a room at the Seven Springs resort, or camp nearby. Read more: http://www.motherearthnews.com/fair/SevenSprings.aspx#ixzz2F3JVesVm

My books are selling well. I’m selling them by mail order and via my website (see the front page) and in person at events I attend  People wanting e-books, go to New Society Publishers.Trade orders go to this link.

southern-sawg-producing-asian-greens-for-market-pam-dawling

I’ve gathered my presentations from the SSAWG Conference and put the slideshows on Slideshare.net.

Producing Asian Greens for Market.

 

southern-sawg-intensive-vegetable-production-on-a-small-scale-pam-dawling

Intensive vegetable production on a small scale