In the meantime please check out our facebook page for more recent (though less introspective) updates.

Thanks!

- Pete and Virg

Although February is a tough season to do a story on a farm and the photo shoot was kind of rough, I thought the author did a really nice job with this piece. She teased out some of the best quotes from our interview and weaved in the the human interest/childhood elements in a tasteful way. Maybe I will get a cable TV special?

Read the full article here.

The book is written by two other French Canadians who appear to have their shit together too. Frederic Theriualt and Daniel Brisebois run Tourne-Sol Cooperative Farm, a 250-member CSA farm in Quebec that also sells their own open-pollinated seeds (very cool).

What they have done is put together a really valuable resource for both beginning and veteran farmers (many of whom I suspect do not plan as thoroughly as the authors) which is both practical and enlightening. The ideas that “organization=success” and “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” seem central to their crop planning philosophy.

The book is divided into 11 chapters which take you though the entire crop planning process – from setting financial goals to analyzing crop profitability and planning for the following year. Tucked between these chapters are short farm profiles which give you real world examples of how the principles and practices in the book are practically applied on vegetable farms across Canada.

The first few chapters primarily discussed ideas with which I was relatively familiar: setting your financial goals, devising a marking plan to meet those goals, and then formulating a planting schedule to grow what you need when you need it. One thing which I had never done before was create a separate field planting schedule for each crop that we grow and then use the planting and harvest data from these sheets to feed into a master planting and harvest schedule. I suspect that as the size of our farm grows, I will benefit from this more methodical approach.

One aspect of these crop worksheets that are extremely useful are the formulas that help you determine how many bed ft of each crop to plant based on your desired harvest. By using the handy reference charts in the back of the book you can find out essential information on most crops including days to maturty, rows per bed, yield per row ft, etc. Having all these numbers in one place was extremely helpful and I found myself continually returning to the charts in the back for guidance.

After creating a field planting schedule the authors take you through the process of creating crop maps to diagram where everything gets planted, choose varieties to plant, and fill out a seed order. Because the beds on our farm (25ft) are significantly shorter that the book suggests (1ooft) and we are at least double-cropping all of our beds I found it somewhat difficult to follow the crop mapping methods outlined to such detail. Instead I combined these methods with those I read about in the November issue of Growing for Market.

Another process which I hadn’t gone through before was creating a greenhouse planting schedule. It’s relatively straightforward since your working backwards from your field planting schedule. Nonetheless it was valuable learning and will become more-so as we continue to integrate more transplanted crops into our production plan.

The last few chapters of the book address how to record, monitor and adjust your crop plan as you work through the season. My personal experience has been that this is the area where your plan starts to fall apart. It’s easy to be reflective and sit on the couch for hours with a spreadsheet in the middle of winter – not so much in the heat of the season. That’s why my new year’s farm resolution this year is to pay special attention to my observation and record keeping during the growing season. I look forward to using these chapters as an aid and will report back this time next year on how helpful they were.

If I have one criticism of the book it’s the depth of farm profiles, which are interspersed between the chapters and are supposed to provide real world examples of the principles and practices outlined in the book. Towards the end of the book many of the profiles are only a paragraph or two in length and repeat what’s already been said a few times in the book. Rather than include a profile after every chapter, perhaps it would have been more useful to focus in depth on just a few farms?

But truly this is nitpicking what is otherwise a really great book. At $22 it is well worth the investment.

My two cents: A dense yet concise volume which would be a wonderful addition to any beginning farmer’s bookshelf.

We’re happy to be partnering with the Conservancy, which has been helping farmers grow and market for nearly a decade.

Here are the details:
Peter McDermott and Virginia Houston, farmers at Urban Growth Farms, will discuss their experience growing in the city, using small scale machinery, and urban farm practices. The farm is located at 2049 W. 48th St, Cleveland, OH 44102. Please park in the lot next door. The cost for the event is $10.

Please register online at this link.

Long story short, after an interview over the phone and a photo shoot at the farm the story ended up on the front page, a nice surprise considering that the local food economy is not a beat that Crain’s – a pretty business-as-usual publication – has covered much in the past.

I thought the article was very well done. I was especially glad to see that she included this quote:

“We’re going to need tens of millions of farmers over the next few decades as energy to generate industrial farms becomes more expensive and scarce. Industrial farms use a lot of natural gas and oil, but we’re going to see to transition into farms that rely more on human and animal energy.”

It probably would have been more accurate to say that industrial farms rely on a system that is heavily dependent on fossil fuels, since only a portion of energy use in the industrial food system occurs on the farm, but you get the gist. Let’s hope this coverage signals a shift in thinking that is beginning to ripple out beyond “the choir” and into mainstream thought.

Most of the Crain’s website is subscriber-only but you can download the full article here

The first half of this year – from late April to early July – was pretty smooth sailing. The crops looked and tasted good, we were hitting our revenue goals at the farmers market while more or less managing to keep our sanity.

Then the heat came.

When it’s this hot and dry nothing happens. Seeds don’t germinate, greens go to seed and if you don’t rise at the crack of dawn good luck working outside for more than an hour or two. We’re growing on a small amount of space and we don’t dedicate much of it to fruiting crops, since they tend to sprawl out and take more time thus limiting their earnings potential on a square foot basis. What we do grow a lot of – all sorts of greens and root crops – have a hard time in the heat and we’ve been suffering along with them.

Our frustration peaked this week when we got back to our packing shed to wash and store the harvest. I was in a foul mood, seeing how little was growing in the fields. In an attempt to wake me up, Virginia turned from her carrots and sprayed me with the hose. I picked up a handful of salad greens and hurled them her way.

It got ugly.

Earlier in the week I built a compost screen that fits on top of our garden cart. Using a couple designs on the internet and lumber laying around the farm it was a satisfying project that only took a few hours.

After the salad greens hurling incident I ventured into the afternoon heat to test it out with a compost pile we built in early spring. No matter how many times you’ve witnessed the magic of finished compost it never gets old.

Last night I started reading a book called Topsoil and Civilization, which links the rise and fall of history’s great civilizations with the degradation of their soils and food production capacities. This is why ancient civilizations that produced enormous cultural achievement and agricultural surplus are now desert wastelands subject to archeological excavation. Makes sense to me.

I mention that because in the swing of our day to day it’s too easy to forget that life on land comes from the soil. So perhaps the most spiritually fulfilling and practical act we can take is in its regeneration. At least that’s what life feels like with homemade compost running through your fingers.

Last night a big rain came and from the looks of the forecast it may have taken the last of the deep summer heat with it.

We can always dream.

Back in October we planted about 13 beds – or about 650 row feet – of hardneck and softneck garlic. The hardneck variety “Music” faired the best in our trials, it grew vigorously and produced the largest heads. The softneck faired the worst, with relatively poor germination. Perhaps it was mulched too heavily?