Having a large enough space to keep your veggies adequately cool until delivery is incredibly important. With all of the painstaking labor that has gone into planting, protecting, harvesting, washing, and packing your beautiful produce, the last thing you want is for it to spoil due to an insufficient cooling space! Different Cooling OptionsStandard RefrigeratorCommercial Refrigerator (“Two-Door...
Having an efficient wash/pack station on your farm is one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure to have in place when you first design your farm. When the first harvest starts, you don’t want to be scrambling around piecing something together last minute. You need to be able to wash, package and cool your product. Otherwise, all your hard work to finally reach the point of the harvest...
Over the last 10 years or so, the use of black silage tarps on small farms has become more and more common. This growing popularity of using tarps can largely be attributed to Jean-Martin Fortier from his book, The Market Gardener. JM was, and is, a huge proponent of the benefits of tarping when it comes to weed management and no-till soil preparation for new plots. Occultation is the term for...
A 30” wide bed is the most common standardized width in the world of market gardening today. It’s an easy width to straddle for most body types, doesn’t hyperextend the back when reaching into the center of the bed from the pathway, and most tools and supplies are built to accommodate this size. If such is the case, it would seem that it would be counterintuitive for a grower to deviate...
For those of you who have worked with a BCS walk-behind tractor, you have learned that the heavier your implement is, the harder it is to turn the machine around at the end of a bed. The Power Harrow, for example, is an extremely heavy implement. In order to turn the tractor at the end of the bed, the operator will typically disengage the PTO for safety, lower the handles for leverage, and then...
Deep Compost Mulch: A No-Till Approach The deep compost mulch system has been most used and promoted by many well-known farmers in the no-till farming space. Jesse Frost of Rough Draft Farmstead and the No-Till Podcast, Richard Perkins of Ridgedale Farm in Sweden (author of Regenerative Agriculture), and Josh Sattin of Sattin Hill Farm have all provided fantastic models of successfully...
In this article, we will go over some different systems for flipping beds in preparation for the Paperpot Transplanter. From full-till to low-till, to no-till, different approaches require different systems and tools. What is Bed Flipping?Bed Prep Depends on What’s Being Planted NextPaperpot Transplanter Needs Prepared SoilFull-TillFull-Till bed Flipping System:Flail MowAdd Soil Amendments...
I was in the house the other day when my wife called and said that our neighbors were there and wanted to talk with me. We had gotten to know them a bit over the past few weeks. The husband runs a local company and he breeds horses as a hobby. When I got outside, they told me that their company was getting rid of a bunch of old stuff and that some of it might be useful for our homestead—old...
Yesterday I built our first fence. I spent about 90 minutes pounding in 7/8-inch fiberglass posts and stringing it with polywire to create two paddocks along either side of our driveway. In total it’s about 2.5 acres. Over the past year, during my internship at a farm in Alabama, I strung a lot of polywire. If there’s anything I’m good at right now, it’s putting up portable electric fencing. So...
The farm I worked on in Alabama owned a very nice John Deere zero-turn mower. It was incredibly easy to use and could turn on a dime. You could maneuver into whatever space you wanted easily, but it also went about 10 miles per hour. I taught my daughter how to use it and she picked it up quickly. Lawn mowing is one of those things that, on the one hand, I enjoy doing. It’s fun to smell the fresh...
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