Weed Management

May 16, 2019 Garden techniques, Market newsletters, Tips & Tools, Weekly Updates

Although pest and disease management are the issues that most readily come to mind when thinking of organic farming, keeping the weeds in check is actually a more consistent challenge. Starting in early spring and continuing into the fall, we spend time every week making sure that the crops stay ahead of the weeds. In order to do this both effectively and efficiently, we rely upon a variety of techniques and tools. While we certainly do more than our share of pulling weeds by hand, we aim to minimize our time spent doing this by taking preemptive measures to help the crops outcompete the weeds from the get-go. Cover cropping...

Planning your garden

March 12, 2018 Garden techniques, Tips & Tools, Weekly Updates

This is the first farm that I have set up from scratch, so we’ve had to make decisions about things that on previous farms had already been established. If you are getting ready to set up your own garden in anticipation of the coming growing season, here are two bits of advice from what I’ve learned: First, think carefully about how wide you want your beds to be. I have almost always worked on farms where the beds are 4 feet wide. However, in doing some reading in advance of setting up our farm, I was convinced to try 2.5-foot-wide beds instead and, let me tell you, what an amazing...

Winter’s knocking

December 9, 2016 Garden techniques, Tips & Tools, Weekly Updates

As the weather continues to cool off, things are slow in the garden, which made it easy for us to take a week away to visit family after Thanksgiving. Overall, we’ve had an pretty mild fall, but this week winter is getting real! The day after we got back from our trip, lows were forecast to drop into the 20s for the first time and that looks to be the trend for the coming week. As a result, it was officially time to do the full fall clean up in the garden. Yesterday, I harvested off everything that was left with the exception of the carrots. After doing some research, I decided...

Peppers galore!

October 21, 2016 Garden techniques, Tips & Tools, Uncategorized, Weekly Updates

Fall is the time of year when most people think of harvesting greens and root crops from the garden. However, one thing that I always have a huge amount of in the fall is peppers. Because I like to harvest sweet peppers when they “color”, as opposed to what we think of as green peppers, it takes a good while for them to ripen. Therefore, I end up bringing in a majority of the harvest from mid-August onwards. And by this point, our fridge is more or less packed with peppers! Over the years, as with many other crops, I’ve narrowed my focus to growing the pepper varieties I particularly like- Carmen and...

Sweet potato greens

September 29, 2016 Garden techniques, In the Kitchen, Other recipes, Tips & Tools

In a small garden space, I always aim to grow as many crops as possible that allow me to plant the bed space more than once a season. However, there are certain veggies we love enough that it’s worth growing them even if they do take a while. Sweet potatoes are one of those crops that take up bed space for a long time, from mid-May until at least mid-September. The upside is that you usually get quite a hefty harvest of tubers at the end of this time. And, even better, sweet potato plants actually offer a second harvest option that many people don’t know about- the greens. All you...

Panisse Lettuce

September 10, 2016 Garden techniques, Tips & Tools

Yes, I couldn’t resist using this picture again! One of the benefits of participating in the City Harvest program is not just that I get free transplants in exchange for our donations, but more specifically that this pushes me to try new varieties of crops that I may not have grown otherwise. After years of farming, I have a personal list of my favorite varieties to grow. I know which types of lettuce do best in summer heat, the sweetest carrots, and the heaviest-producing tomatoes. This is great on the one hand, but in another sense can limit me from trying other, potentially even more amazing varieties. When I got the...

Vertical gardening, simply

June 30, 2016 Garden techniques, Tips & Tools

Using the vertical space in your garden is a great way to get the most yield out of a small area. There are tons of inventive, more complex vertical gardening systems, but you can still take advantage of vertical space while staying simple. It’s common to provide trellis support for crops like tomatoes and beans, but other crops like cucumbers, winter squash, and melons can be trellised vertically as well. All of these plants are expansive growers, creating a lot of green leaves and stems in proportion to the amount of fruit produced. Because of this, they can take up a significant amount of ground space, which can easily be freed back...

Harvesting lettuce greens

May 26, 2016 Garden techniques, Tips & Tools

After a fun night awake with a baby with stomach flu, I got out as early as I could this morning to harvest the first of the spring mix! It’s important to harvest lettuce as early in the day as possible to keep the bitterness down. Surprisingly, lettuce contains latex, in the form of that milky liquid that leaks out of the stem when cut. At night, lettuce plants pull much of the latex down into their roots. As the sun rises and the heat of the day increases, the bitter latex is gradually sent back up into the leaf, explaining why lettuce harvested earlier in the day tends to be sweeter....

Hardening off seedlings

April 27, 2016 Garden techniques, Tips & Tools

“Hardening off” is an important part of the process of getting your home-grown seedlings prepared for life outdoors. Seedlings grown in a greenhouse, under lights (as mine are), or even on a sunny window sill need time to adjust to the new conditions they will experience outside. These little plants have never been exposed to wind, have always had exactly as much water as they want, and have been protected from direct, unfiltered sunlight. In order to help them begin to adjust to their new environment, it is important to start putting seedlings outside a week before you plan on planting them in the ground. Put them out for just a few hours...