The giant killing machine

April 23, 2016 Weekly Updates

What does your family like to do for fun? In our time off, we like to dig giant trenches throughout our front yard! I’m pretty sure our neighbors think we’re crazy. A little over a year ago, we bought this house with a beautifully seeded lawn sloping down to the front door. And now we’re systematically tearing it apart, first breaking the sod up by hand and then with a tiller and now digging trenches as deep as we can get. Well, it’s all in the name of rodent control, more specifically groundhogs. I’ve worked on farms with groundhog pressure in the past and, as you well know if you’ve experienced the...

Tilling, Tilled

April 17, 2016 Weekly Updates

The garden is tilled up at last and, as soon as we get the fencing in, we’ll be ready to go! We had originally planned to till last weekend, but with the surprising April snow we received, the ground was just too wet. When tilling with machinery or even by hand, it’s important not to work on wet soil, as, among other issues, the compaction already caused by feet and tires is exacerbated and turning wet soil can cause large clods to form, making a less hospitable soil environment for microbes and plants. Today, the soil moisture was perfect and, in little more than an hour, our 900 square-foot plot was turned from grassy...

To dig or to till

April 4, 2016 Weekly Updates

Setting up a garden presents a myriad of questions. First, we debated whether to grow in raised beds or straight into the ground. After our soil test came back looking relatively good for nutrients and free of contaminants like lead, we decided that growing directly in the ground was the most cost-effective technique. Once that was decided, the next question was how to transform the ground from lawn to garden beds. We had already done some gardening at the very top of our property, next to a huge stone statue of Poseidon, a relic of the Stotesbury estate that used to stand nearby. Unsurprisingly, the ground next to the statue was...

And here we go!

March 13, 2016 Weekly Updates

Hi! My name is Katie. I’ve been farming professionally since my early twenties, working on farms from urban Philadelphia to rural Michigan. Much of this time has been spent working to solve what I see as the basic problem of urban farming- the need to grow as much food as possible on very little space. As a professional farmer in an urban setting, I’ve worked hard to figure out ways to bring in the most money from the smallest space. But, to me, the most important aspect of this type of farmer is the potential to make our world as sustainable as possible by enabling people to grow as much of their...