news & ideas for local food producers growing · the !eld, 50 in the hoophouse, and 10 to 15 different rootstocks for grafted tomatoes. It is a daunting task to evaluate 400 varieties

F O R M A R K E T

Volume 21 / Number 2February 2012growingnews & idea s for loc al food producers

continued on page 4

Selling grafted tomato plants / 9

Calculating how much to plant / 17

New flowers for 2012 / 25

The Holistic Orchard / 12

By Andrew Mefferd

Tomatoes are the most pro!table crop on many market farms — if you choose the right varieties. But with thousands of varieties on the market and hundreds of new ones introduced every year, how do you know which ones to grow?

As the owner of a small market farm in Maine and the trial techni-cian for tomatoes at Johnny’s Selected Seeds research farm, I have a lot of experience with growing tomatoes. I want to share my perspective on how to choose the best varieties for your location and markets.

One of the best ways to !gure out what varieties to grow on your farm is to look around at the farmers and gardeners in your area and see what they like. Asking what varieties they are not growing and why will help you learn from their mistakes and not waste production space on something that doesn’t work in your area. It’s al-ways worthwhile to keep a little bit of !eld space devoted to on-farm trial-ing of new varieties to see if they work before going into production.

Most years at Johnny’s we trial roughly 300 varieties of tomatoes in the !eld, 50 in the hoophouse, and 10 to 15 different rootstocks for grafted tomatoes. It is a daunting task to evaluate 400 varieties every year and !gure out which ones make sense for the catalog.

The most important criteria we look at when evaluating tomatoes is "avor. It may sound redundant to say that we consider "avor with some-thing edible, but if you’ve ever eaten a grocery store tomato, you know that much vegetable breeding is devoted to qualities besides "avor. We also look closely at yield, appearance, dis-ease resistance, cracking, blemishes, and all the other factors that affect tomato selection. Being a company that sells to market growers, one of the most important things for direct marketing tomatoes is good "avor since your customer will associate the "avor of your produce with you.

Before talking about individual variety selection, let’s talk tomato types. You probably already know that tomatoes are categorized by two broad plant habits: Indeterminates, which grow nearly inde!nitely, add-ing leaves, shoots, and "owers until frost or something else kills them; and determinates, which grow more like a bush and have a predetermined size.

One reason to grow indetermi-nates is "avor. Generally speaking, indeterminate tomatoes have better "avor than determinates. Indeter-minate tomatoes have three or more leaves between fruit clusters, whereas determinates have two or fewer leaves per fruit cluster. So indeterminates have a higher ratio of leaf area to fruit. If you think of foliage as solar panels

How to choose tomato varieties

GROWING FOR MARKET /FEBRUARY 20122

Call: 800-622-7333 Fax: 864-227-5108Visit: www.twilleyseed.com

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Market Tomatoes from

Plum Regal F175 days. Fresh market large plum tomato. Good disease resistance to Verticillium Wilt, Fusarium Wilt 1 and 2, TSWV and late blight,with moderate early blight resistance as well. Highly resistant to fruit crack and graywall. Determinate plants with heavy cover for vine-ripe or mature green harvest. High-yielding and good tasting Roma with extra thick walls and deep crimson color. It is widely adapted, with vigorous plant habit.

Tasti-Lee F175 days. Tasti-Lee is a very productive, high-quality fresh market beefsteak tomato with exceptional !avor, high lycopene and a long shelf life.It has just the right balance of sugars and acids to give it that “old time” tomato taste. The interior is "rm and meaty with intense red color, making it an excellent sandwich or salad tomato. Determinate plant habit. Retail chain store sales require a marketing agreement.

Mountain Magic F175 days. Campari-type for outdoor produc-tion with good uniformity, high sugar and disease resistance. Highly crack-resistant; uniformly red inside and out; long shelf life. Resistant to Verticillium Wilt 1 and 2, Fusarium Wilt 1 and 2. Resistant to late blight, plus moderate resistance to early blight. Flavor stands in comparisons with heirloom varieties. Produces round to deep round 2 oz. fruit on somewhat compact indeterminate plants. Fruits have a long shelf life.

GROWING FOR MARKET / FEBRUARY 2012 3

Growing for Market is published 10 times per year by Fairplain Publications, Inc.ISSN 1060-9296

Volume 21 Number 2, February 2012

© 2012 Fairplain Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. No portion of this maga-zine may be copied in any manner for use other than by the subscriber without permission from the publisher. Editor/Publisher Lynn ByczynskiAssociate Editor Daniel NagengastCirculation Manager Jozie SchimkeOffice manager Jessica PiersonContributing Editors Erin Benzakein Pam Dawling Josh Volk

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Still trying to get it right

Well, we now know that eliminating the 3-hole punch from GFM didn’t solve the problem of issues arriving shredded. Several readers called to let me know their mag-azines were torn despite the lack of holes. And one person even submitted evidence. I’ll spare you the gory details, but suf!ce it to say it wasn’t pretty.

So this month we are trying the little sticky tabs to hold this issue closed. Getting it tabbed adds a couple of days to processing time, and since I’m always working right against deadline anyway, I hate to slow down the mailer. So I do want to know if this doesn’t work either. Please just drop me an email if your issue still arrived torn. [email protected]

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postal automation is proving to be a lot harder to master. We will keep trying, though, and we welcome your feed-back. We are happy to replace any torn issues anytime, if you will let us know.

See you next month.


Choosing tomatoescontinued from page 1

for the sugar factory, indeterminates have a higher poten-tial for solar panels and thus sugar and other "avor com-pounds.

The main reason to grow determinates is labor. Bush tomatoes have a better ratio of labor to production; it re-quires less labor to grow the same quantity of determinate tomatoes as indeterminate. Instead of the season-long suckering, pruning, and trellising work to keep up with in-determinates, supporting determinates with a simple trel-lis saves a lot of labor. We still recommend suckering and leaf removal on determinate plants up to the sucker below the !rst fruit cluster, mainly to improve air"ow around the stem of the plant. After that, any more pruning on de-terminates will reduce yield and "avor by removing some of the limited number of "owers and branches. Another reason to grow determinates is for those who want a con-centrated yield of tomatoes over a shorter period of time, instead of the steady, season-long yield of indeterminates. Some determinates have a single very concentrated set of tomatoes, and others may have a second set to increase and spread the yield over a slightly longer season.

Besides the variety’s natural "avor potential, a lot of nurture goes into tomato "avor. An average-tasting de-terminate might taste better than an heirloom picked off

a plant that was defoliated by disease and about to die. That’s why we tend to talk about "avor and yield poten-tial— reaching any given variety’s potential is a function of how it is grown.

Heirloom tomatoes One of the most diverse areas of tomato varieties are

the heirlooms. Most of these are indeterminates, though not all. If you spent enough time looking at seed catalogs, you could probably !nd 100 varieties solely of big pink heirlooms that compare to ‘Brandywine’. You could !nd even more if you joined Seed Savers Exchange and looked through their yearbook of varieties that are preserved by members. Before getting into speci!c varieties, I must note there are so many great heirlooms that many favorites will be left out of our discussion. I apologize in advance.

A review of heirloom varieties in general is beyond the scope of this article. I am just going to touch on a few that I think have exceptional "avor and relatively good produc-tion for fresh market sales. I would be interested to hear about your favorites if you want to send your suggestions to me. I look for heirlooms with excellent "avor, vigorous plants, and a manageable amount of blemishes so they make it to market.

In many parts of the country, Brandywine is syn-onymous with good heirloom "avor. With growers, it can also be infamous for unpredictable yields and blem-

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In the green category, Green Zebra and Cherokee Green have done well for us but there are many others. I !nd the green tomatoes to be less popular at market, be-cause customers are not used to tomatoes of that color and may have doubts about their ripeness. We still grow some greens, because we wholesale mixed heirloom boxes, and they look nice with the other colors.

For heirloom sauce tomatoes, Amish Paste is as good as any of them, though there are several like Opalka that are similar. Speckled Roman, though not old enough to be an heirloom, is the stabilized cross of two other heirlooms and will one day be an heirloom due to its good looks and eating quality.

Most heirlooms do not have much disease resistance, and may be dif!cult to grow in areas or years with high disease pressure. One way to dramatically increase the vigor and resistance to soilborne diseases of heirloom to-matoes is to graft them onto a variety bred speci!cally for use as rootstock. We have seen excellent results with both Maxifort and Colosus to boost the yield and health of heirloom tomatoes. Both of them would be worth a try in your production system. Grafting tomatoes is not a simple process, but if you can learn it or buy in grafted plants, it has the potential to signi!cantly increase yields and dis-ease resistance without compromising the quality of the fruit. Whether in the !eld or the greenhouse, each leader of a double-stemmed grafted plant may perform similarly

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ished fruit that is harder to sell at market. If you have a market for a big pink heirloom, it might be worth trying Rose or German Johnson (aka German Pink Johnson). In my experience, these two tomatoes have more vigor-ous plants and higher yield of unblemished fruit without compromising on "avor. As a market grower, I appreciate the slightly smaller fruit size of these varieties compared to Brandywine. Many of our customers at farmers mar-kets don’t want to buy huge tomatoes that can be over $5 a fruit. In some parts of the Southeast, German Johnson has the same reputation for "avor that Brandywine has in the North. There are two strains of German Johnson; we found the normal-leaved strain to be earlier and more vig-orous than Brandywine, with excellent "avor and a melt-ing, creamy texture.

For the “black” brown/red tomatoes with greenish shoulders, I like Cherokee Purple and Black Krim, though Krim seems to bene!t from more heat than we have in the northern tier of the country. In the yellow/orange category, we have had good luck with Dr. Wyche’s Yellow, Valen-cia, Striped German and Gold Medal. The last two have many similarities and one may perform better in a given area than the other. The yellows and oranges are not my personal favorite. I like a tomato with a lot of acidic "avor to complement the sweetness. Yellow and orange tomatoes in general tend to be less acidic than red/pink tomatoes. But I know we have customers who prefer a milder tomato so we grow a lot of them, too. continued on the next page


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to a single-stemmed ungrafted plant.

Greenhouse/hoophouseAt the other end of the spectrum

from the heirloom tomatoes with little disease resistance are the greenhouse tomatoes. We mainly list tomatoes in the “Greenhouse” category at John-ny’s based on the variety’s ability to resist the diseases that are more likely to occur in a greenhouse. Diseases like leaf mold that are rare in the !eld are much more likely to occur in a greenhouse or hoophouse, especially where the lack of proper crop rotation can cause a buildup of diseases. The warm, humid conditions in a green-house are also great for molds and bacterial diseases.

When we trial greenhouse toma-toes, we are looking for varieties that will do well in an unheated or mini-mally heated plastic-covered tunnel. This is in contrast to the high-tech, closely climate and humidity con-

trolled facilities that many of these tomatoes were developed for. More adaptability is required to be able to thrive in the wide range of tempera-tures, growing mediums, ventilation, and pruning regimes that different growers have. Many varieties besides the greenhouse types are grown suc-cessfully in greenhouses, they are just more susceptible to being taken down by disease.

Rebelski is a new greenhouse beef-steak that really impressed us this past year. It hits a sweet spot between looks, "avor, and yield for protected cropping. Many of the greenhouse to-matoes we see are so highly bred for shelf life and disease resistance that they sacri!ce "avor. Rebelski tastes as good as any greenhouse tomato I’ve ever had. It also has good texture when ripe, remaining !rm without being hard like some commercial to-matoes. The bright red, unusually shiny appearance and lightly ribbed top are attractive and make it stand out at market. It might not be quite as heavy yielding as Geronimo but it is


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very productive. On the other hand, if you need very high production of a smoother beefsteak with good "avor, Geronimo might be worth a try. If you don’t want to graft, Arba-son has the most natural vigor of the greenhouse tomatoes and is a good candidate for ungrafted production, though it has less disease resistance than most greenhouse types.

We have been getting more re-quests for a cluster tomato, and we think that Clermon is the best tomato on the vine (TOV) that we have seen. Many customers have gotten used to seeing these types in the grocery store, and it is an opportunity for a local producer to provide a fresher, riper product than what is generally available. In cluster types, we look for varieties that ripen their fruits all at the same time. Otherwise, the !rst fruit to ripen closest to the plant will be mushy by the time the fruit at the end of the cluster ripens. The other thing we look for is fruits that do not easily detach from the vine, because if you want to sell a cluster of fruits they can’t fall off. Clermon does these things well in addition to looking nice and having good "avor and yield. Clermon and most truss varieties do best pruned back to 4 or 5 fruits. If pruned to 4 the individual fruits will be slightly larger than with 5 on the truss. More than 5 fruits may not rip-en together, or the sixth fruit may be undersized.

One of the best greenhouse cherry tomatoes we have seen is Sakura. It has a great combination of earliness, attractiveness, and really good "avor. In a blind taste test of greenhouse cherry tomatoes among Johnny’s staff, Sakura was the clear favorite. The crack-resistant fruits hold well after harvest.

I wouldn’t recommend growing any of these greenhouse types in the !eld. They tend not to be nearly as good outside of protection. If green-house types are the thoroughbreds of the tomato world, their racetrack is the greenhouse. You wouldn’t plow

with a racehorse, and I would keep the thoroughbreds out of the !eld. The more labor you can put into them in the greenhouse, the more you will get out of them. The better you can keep up on a regular schedule of pruning, trellising, cluster pruning, and de-lea!ng below the ripening cluster, the better greenhouse tomatoes will do.

On the other hand, many grow-ers have great results with !eld vari-eties in the greenhouse. Our season is so short here in Maine, I have al-most given up on growing indeter-minates in the !eld. By the time they are ripening in August, it is about to start getting cool again, and we have been plagued by late blight around that time the last few years. So I have moved most of my indeterminate tomato production inside, which is split 50/50 between heirlooms and greenhouse types, all grafted. I know many people have success with de-terminates in greenhouses to take advantage of the reduced labor. In warmer season areas, a spring crop of determinates can be grown under cover to get on the market early, and then removed in the heat of the sum-mer when the !eld tomatoes start to produce.

Field productionAs far as varieties for the !eld go,

selection must be by region in re-sponse to the diseases and pests that are in each area of the country. In-determinate slicers Early Girl, New Girl, Big Beef and Jet Star have all been popular for years, but there are

many other varieties that may taste better depending on region and sea-son.

As far as determinate slicers go, Polbig has unusually good "avor for a very early tomato. Celebrity has long been a popular main-season deter-minate. De!ant PHR is smaller than Celebrity and has the added bene!t of resistance to late blight. Valley Girl, Solar Set and Floralina can do well in hot summer areas where regular daytime temperatures in the 90s can


not know this, a sign or sampling will help turn people on to the grapes. Mixed pints of cherry or grape tomatoes are appealing on the market stand.

Dry farmed tomatoesOne trend in tomato growing that is worth trying is

dry farming. This practice was developed in California in response to over-irrigated, washed out tasting tomatoes. Outdoor tomato crops are established either in the spring with natural rains, or with irrigation. Since it doesn’t rain during the summer in most parts of California, irrigation is stopped when the plants set their !rst "ower cluster. By that time the plants are rooted enough to survive without irrigation, but the lack of any extra water means the fruits develop smaller than they normally would for the variety, and the "avors are concentrated. Dry farmed Early Girl has become a farmers market staple in California. New Girl, Cherokee Purple, and Taxi also are used.

Growers in parts of the country that get rain during the growing season are experimenting with dry-farming by establishing crops in a hoophouse with big irrigations to push the roots deep, and then turning off the irrigation once the plants are well established (after setting the !rst "ower cluster) and letting them fend for themselves the rest of the season. Grafting can help with this practice be-cause the plant develops a bigger, more robust root system. If you have never dry farmed before, keep the irrigation functional, in case the hoophouse gets hot or dry enough to kill the plants or give them blossom end rot. This is not an established practice outside California yet, and it may be a chance to bring something new to market. Dry-farm-ing could probably work well with many other varieties. You could experiment with it by turning off or reducing the irrigation to just a row of tomatoes and seeing what happens.

Besides working at Johnny’s research farm, Andrew Mef-ferd owns One Drop Farm with his wife, Ann. He can be reached at [email protected]

cause the blossoms to drop. Mountain Fresh Plus is one of the most popular market varieties in the East and Mid-west. BHN-1021 has good "avor and nematode and toma-to spotted wilt (TSWV) resistance which may help grow-ers in much of the South. A very leafy variety like Shady Lady is popular in very sunny parts of the country where sunburn of the fruits can be a problem.

For sauce tomatoes, we look at tomatoes with high solids and little juice in addition to good "avor. Meaty, less juicy tomatoes can be cooked into sauce much more quickly. Sauce tomatoes are a great opportunity to grow a determinate and save on labor, since good determinate to-matoes have enough "avor and sugars to make tasty sauce. At least in my market, people don’t want sauce tomatoes early in the season, and then they want a whole bunch at once later in the season for canning and sauce. Monica, Mariana, and Roma have all been popular for determinate plum tomatoes. Plum Regal has the added bene!t of late blight resistance. For markets that demand a San Marzano shape, Paisano is a high yielding bush type. If you want to grow an indeterminate, San Marzano 168 is earlier and a better yielder than most San Marzanos. In general, the longer shaped tomatoes are less prone to many common blemishes, but more susceptible to blossom end rot, so keep calcium levels optimal and watering even if you are growing these types.

In the Saladette category, we select meaty tomatoes that would be great eaten fresh in salads or on sandwiches, for fresh tomato sauce, and good processed. For the smaller saladettes, Juliet has long been popular for its unusually healthy plant and big yields of mini-romas with good "a-vor. Juliet is good enough to eat fresh, and the stem scar is so small you may be able to process it without coring. Mountain Magic is a “cocktail tomato,” the size of a very big cherry, with really excellent "avor and the added ben-e!t of late blight resistance. Granadero is a great indeter-minate plum with nematode and TSWV resistance, and a great example of a versatile tomato you could eat fresh if you wanted a less juicy tomato, or make into sauce.

Growers in many areas have good luck with indetermi-nate cherry tomatoes BHN-624, Sun Cherry, Super Sweet 100, and Sweet Million. Sun Gold is one of the tangiest, most fantastic tasting tomatoes ever but it splits readily, so don’t over-irrigate, or pick it before a big rain! Sun Gold is an opportunity for market farmers to provide a product not available in the grocery store, since they are too deli-cate for shipping. Most determinate cherries are not great tasting but BHN-968 is surprisingly good, and has nema-tode and TSWV resistance.

The good grape tomatoes are not simply oval-shaped cherry tomatoes, but meatier, less juicy, more "avorful versions of the little round tomato. Since customers may



Sales Company

By Lynn Byczynski

Tomato grafting was late to arrive in the United States, long after it be-came common practice elsewhere in the world, and it is only now becom-ing popular among market farmers. But most small growers don’t have the time or facilities to graft their own tomatoes, which involves splicing the top of a desired variety onto a vigorous rootstock variety when the plants are just a few inches tall. So a new niche has opened for greenhouse growers to sell grafted plants to other growers.

“There’s not only a market for it, there’s a great need for it, particu-larly because so many high tunnels are going up and high tunnel produc-tion limits crop rotations,” said Mary Roberts of Windcrest Farm in Mon-roe, North Carolina, who sells cer-ti!ed-organic grafted tomato trans-plants locally and by mail order.

Jack Manix of Walker Farm in Dummerston, Vermont, does cus-tom grafting for other local growers as well as for his own farm. “We’ve been very happy with the custom grafting and I guess the customers appreciate it also as we have several who have been coming to us for years,” he said. “Since we’re running heat from mid-January on, we !gured we might as well !ll up the house to help pay for the heating. Vermont has a great net-work of farmers and once word gets out that we’re crazy enough to run a greenhouse through the dead of a Ver-mont winter, other growers come call-ing for orders. Right now we do about 1,750 for ourselves and 3,000 for oth-ers. I also like to do a few hundred on spec as someone always has a power failure and it’s nice to be able to get them back on the growing schedule.”

Greenhouse and hoophouse toma-to growers are becoming increasingly convinced of the bene!ts of grafted tomatoes. Research has shown that grafted tomatoes resist soilborne

Grafted tomato transplants: a new economic opportunity

pathogens such as Verticillium and Fusarium wilt, corky root rot, root-knot nematodes, bacterial wilt, southern blight, and others. Grow-ers whose tomatoes have suffered from those problems are eager to try grafted plants, and many hoophouse and greenhouse growers use graft-ed plants as a preventative strategy against the potential buildup up dis-eases when tomatoes are grown in the same soil year after year.

Heirloom tomato growers are par-ticularly interested in grafted plants because many heirlooms have little disease resistance. Some report great-ly improved yield, even in the !eld, from grafted plants.

“The !rst year we grew grafted Cherokee Purple tomatoes was the year everyone had late blight,” Mary Roberts said. “We did not have that

issue at all. The tomatoes we planted in May were still producing in No-vember.”

Interest in grafted tomatoes has even spread to backyard gardeners, thanks to several seed companies in-cluding Burpee and Territorial offer-ing mail-order grafted plants.

With so much attention on graft-ing, you might want to consider whether it could be an opportunity for you to make some early-season cash by custom growing grafted plants. Here are comments from the two growers mentioned above about the demands and problems of com-mercial grafting.

Jack Manix in Vermont“We have 20 greenhouses, 10 for

"owers and 10 certi!ed organic for starts and in-ground growing but we want to keep heated plastic at a mini-mum until March. Since we do !ve shifts of grafting about two weeks apart for ourselves to keep our farm stand "ush until the hoophouse and !eld tomatoes come in, we’re pretty much grafting every few days. I have a great woman, Abby, who’s been working for us for almost 20 years and she has doctor-steady hands and can side-graft about one per minute with around a 98% success rate. We’ve re-cently started doing some top graft-ing also which is even faster.



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conditions that are less than perfect. Within the root block or

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their organization out into the field soil. The green leaves

provide the energy to power the outreach and the potting soil

serves as the cultural base. Investing in sufficient media for

ample root balls pays back in improved crop yields.

“Generally growers around here want their greenhous-es to start producing around mid-May at the earliest to supply opening farm stands, markets and CSAs. Trying to get ripe toms much earlier than that is dif!cult because of the light situation in January and February.#Since most of the growers are picking up their orders in late February or early March, it cleans out the greenhouse just in time for our own !eld crop starts and the money that comes in is nice to help with growing labor costs.

“There is, of course, some stress involved. Being re-sponsible for an important crop for local farmers in the dead of winter is a heavy obligation. We have a very good alarm system and backup heaters just in case. One winter the wind chill got down to –20 and –30 for three nights. That’s when I learned that propane can turn to jelly at low temps. I had to wake up every hour and check that the emergency heater was not getting too hot or too cold. Next summer I had a larger gas supply line put in so I could get some sleep.

“We sure don’t want our customers to get plants with problems so we’re religious zealots for Rootshield soakings, at least three times during the growth stages. We also use banker plants and trap plants with bene!cial insect releas-es to keep the bad guys at bay. This all has to !gure into the price. Right now we are charging $4 to $5 depending on whether or not the customer is supplying the rootstock

and scion seed. Prices seem to be going through the roof lately with Geronimo tomato seed selling for around $129 for 250 seeds. That’s over 50 cents each and the Maxifort rootstock is not much better. Luckily I panic bought and have around 10,000 Buffalo seeds in the freezer from 5 or 6 years ago. Turns out it was a lot better investment than the EToys stock that tanked for me a number of years ago.

“We also graft about another 600 for a fall crop that carries us until our farm stand closes on Thanksgiving. The fall toms only produce about half the weight but they’re large and pretty. The spring-summer plants can produce 15 to 20 lbs. per plant and with organic tomatoes selling for $3.49 to $4.49 per pound through the season, that can pay for a lot of grafting.”

Mary Roberts in North Carolina“We are grafting tomatoes but we are limiting the

plants we have available this season because grafting is very labor intensive at a time of the year that is, for us, the most labor intensive time anyway. In addition, we have had seasons (spring/fall) when we achieved a 98% success rate and some seasons we have had a 2% success rate us-ing the same methods. We will be offering grafted plants from an inventory rather than custom growing as we have in the past until we can be certain we can supply grow-ers consistently. For growers planning on a large quantity of grafted plants that they produce themselves or contract from a commercial greenhouse, I recommend that you have a back-up plan.

Plants at farmers marketscontinued from page 11

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#“One of the challenges of grafting tomatoes is match-ing the growth rate and stem diameter of the scion (top) with the rootstock for best healing success. Note that in some of the research they are using growth chambers with daylight length controls. In the real-world farm en-vironment, you will need to pay close attention to make sure you are getting comparable growth rates between the scion and rootstock. Because we are USDA Certi!ed Organic, we do not use PGRs (plant growth regulators) in our greenhouse production. Matching stem diam-eters is easier with older plants but the amount of time growing out two tomato plants for one grafted plant costs more (then add the extra labor and real estate for a healing chamber). Heirloom tomato plants grow differently than hybrid rootstocks (we have even seen different shaped tomato stems!). If you want to try your hand at grafting, start with the tomato varieties that have been used suc-cessfully in research trials. We originally started grafting 128 cell sized plants to make it cost effective for our cus-tomers however the stem size in a 128-cell can be tricky and the failure rate higher. We are now doing 50s and 72s.

“Regarding the SARE article (see Resources at end) and other research papers on tomato grafting, an area of difference has been with regards to the humidity level in the healing chamber. We found that when we pushed the humidity up to 80-90%, water droplets forming on the leaves dislodged the scion from the rootstock and pre-vented healing. However, you can imagine what happens when there is inadequate humidity. The scions wilt and

fail to heal. Again, larger plants will not have as much of an issue, but again they can be rather expensive to pro-duce.

“We are fully committed to ramping this up commer-cially, and if folks want to call us to get on a waiting list for our grafted plants, I’m willing to do it. But I’m not go-ing to guarantee we’ll have 500 grafted plants on a speci!c date — that’s not fair to anyone.”

Mary can be reached at [email protected].

ResourcesUSDA’s Sustainable Agriculture Research and Educa-

tion program has released a new fact sheet about the ben-e!ts and practice of grafting. It includes an extensive list of resources. Tomato Grafting for Disease Resistance and In-creased Productivity, is available free, online only, from http://low.sare.org/Newsroom/Press-Releases/Grafting-Tomatoes-Brings-Better-Yields-Natu-rally

Johnny’s Selected Seeds has a 20-minute video by the University of Vermont Extension about grafting, featur-ing a Vermont grower who grafts for his own greenhouses and for other tomato growers. You can watch it at http://www.johnnyseeds.com/t-video_tomato_grafting.aspx


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The Holistic Orchard: a patient teacherReview by Lynn Byczynski

Occasionally a book comes along that bowls you over with its depth and breadth and authenticity. Michael Phillips new work The Holistic Orchard is

such a book. The author, a longtime fruit grower, shares a vast store of ex-perience about growing tree fruits and berries. The excerpt beginning on the next page is a good example of his approach. He explains in detail how to choose and plant fruit trees, and he also explains the reasons behind his in-

structions. He is like a patient teacher who wants his students to understand his topic on a deep level, so he takes the time to be thorough and answer all ques-tions.

Phillips describes his approach to fruit growing not as organic or biological or natural; those are la-bels, he says, that are limiting. Instead, he thinks of

fruit in a holistic light, considering all the factors that are in-volved in growing healthy food: soil, planting site, fertility, native pollinators, ecological pest and disease control, and so much more.

The Holistic Orchard provides all the basic instruction re-quired to grow fruit, and Phillips has an uncommon ability to also explain the interrelationships that exist in the ecological system of an orchard. He invites readers to listen to what the trees teach, to observe carefully what is going on not just with the fruit but with all the life in the orchard. He provides a calendar of events for fruit growing — what tasks to do when — that only an expert could provide.

The book also contains in-depth pro!les of many fruits: the pome fruits (apples, pears, Asian pears, quinces); the stone fruits (cherries, peaches, nectarines, apricots, plums); and berries (raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, gooseber-ries, currants, and elderberries.)

The Holistic Orchard pushes the frontier of fruit grow-ing into new territory, catching it up to other ecological crop production knowledge. If you have ever felt intimidated by fruit growing, this book will give you the con!dence to move ahead.

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The following is an excerpt from The Holistic Orchard by Michael Phillips, available now from Chelsea Green Publishing.

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago; the second-best time is now. — Chinese proverb

Fruit trees and berries should be planted as early in the spring as pos-sible after the soil has dried out suf-!ciently. Soil preparation the year before helps in getting nursery stock planted that much earlier. Cold soil temperatures will promote the devel-opment of calluses at the tips of any torn roots. Normal spring rains will then settle the soil around the roots before leaf growth occurs. Catch this timing right and your trees will slide into full gear with nary a backward

look. Planting delays do happen, how-ever, and in that case orders from the nursery can be tucked away in moist wood shavings or the like in a cool place for a week or two. If it’s going to be longer (you’re off to the Bahamas!) bareroot plants should be heeled in the garden until proper planting holes can be dug. Trees planted after leaves have started to grow will experience transplant shock, in part because feeder root growth has begun. This can potentially stunt both the upper tree and root development, so don’t wait too long. Heavy pruning can help, and reliable irrigation is bet-ter—but respecting tree dynamics is the best strategy of all.

Growers in Zone 6 and south should take advantage of fall plant-ing. The root growth that takes place in mild winters gets the young

tree established and raring to go by spring. Fully dormant trees can be transplanted from mid-November through December. Larger two-year nursery trees suffer less transplant shock when fall-planted and thus re-tain a head start on one-year whips. Roots continue to grow even though tops are dormant in regions where soil temperatures remain above 40°F (4°C). Damage to the roots is more likely to occur in northern zones from the frost-heaving of recently disturbed soil. Mulching a new tree after the ground freezes can alleviate this concern . . . just be sure to wrap tender young trunks to protect them from voles.

Trees can be purchased directly from nurseries as bareroot stock or already potted up at a local garden center. You might even be able to ob-tain trees of bearing age from a local

Take care when planting fruit


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orchardist (admittedly, a big- bucks proposition suitable mainly for those without patience). I recommend the bareroot option hands down: Young whips do not go through transplant shock like more sizable trees that have been waiting, rootbound, in bundled soil for a year or more. People tempt-ed by the bigger tree right there that very day frequently end up making a less-than-stellar variety choice, transplanting a tree that’s in full leaf (de!nitely not recommended), and then compromising future growth for years to come by not loosening up the roots so they can reach out beyond the matted disaster often found in the pot. Repeat after me: I will plan ahead and arrange for bareroot stock to plant out at the right time.

Prior to planting, you should never allow the roots of any plant to dry out. Soaking the roots in a bucket of sea-

weed solution will help reduce trans-plant stress; do this the night before planting and pledge not to leave roots soaking for more than twenty-four hours. A relatively calm, cloudy day is preferable to a sunny, windy day for planting. Be sure each tree and fruiting shrub is individually labeled to identify who’s who in the planting plan. Brambles often come bundled in tens for planting out in beds. Digging holes ahead of time for a planting ses-sion can be more ef!cient than a “dig then plant, dig then plant” routine.

A proper holeThe tree hole obviously needs to

be large enough to accommodate the root system. However, digging a hole signi!cantly larger than that preps the immediate soil zone for root outreach. A 3-foot-diameter hole generally !ts the bill. I will trench out a channel for an excessively long root rather than curl it in toward the trunk. Loosening the subsoil in the bottom of a 16- to

20-inch-deep hole provides addition-al leeway in setting the height of the graft union aboveground. A buried graft union will eventually establish its own roots, which override the de-sired dwar!ng effect of clonal root-stock. I aim to keep the graft union 4 inches above the soil line, planting only slightly deeper than the tree may have grown in the nursery. Keep in mind that the settling of looser soils may bring the graft union down an-other inch or so. Trees on seedling roots are the one exception: The graft union can be buried if you wish to en-courage self-rooting of the scion cul-tivar.

Do not mix massive amounts of compost with the soil in the plant-ing hole. The roots will soon extend much farther into the surrounding earth for long-term sustenance. A su-per-enriched planting hole gives roots little reason to leave the home base. I prefer to back!ll the tree only with the soil that came out of the hole, with

Planting fruitcontinued from page 13


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the more friable topsoil placed against the roots and the subsoil used to !n-ish !lling the hole. Tree nutrition in the years ahead will come from above in the form of orchard compost and ramial wood chips to build that desir-able fungal duff, where 90 percent of the feeder roots will be found. Exten-sion advice to load young fruit plant-ings up on nitrate fertilizers for the !rst several years will work against the fungal connection we seek for long-term tree health.

Roughly serrating the sides of a hole dug in heavy soil with a digging fork helps fracture a too-smooth clay !nish. Growing roots need to readily penetrate into the surrounding soil; otherwise they may circle around the glazed bowl that can inadvertently result from clay particle adhesion caused by digging the hole. Piling good soil to one side of the planting hole and less loamy subsoil to another side as you dig allows you to system-atically plant without compacting the turned earth as you maneuver about.

I sprinkle a pound of rock phosphate (for early root development) and the same amount of Azomite (for trace nutrients) onto these soil piles and into the tree hole itself, stirring all to-gether in the planting process.

Berries are more straightforward (not having been grafted in the !rst place), because the soil line evident from nursery days marks the very goal for planting day. Preparing the bed during the previous year makes planting a quick task, particularly for brambles. Use a hoe to create a deep-enough planting furrow, then line out cane stock at the recommended spac-ing.

Trees and fruiting bushes plant-ed in containers will require much more frequent watering and feeding with compost tea and herbal brews. Porous-walled pots will lose moisture rapidly compared with a thick- walled tub or whiskey barrel. Drainage holes are a must to prevent roots from sit-ting in standing water; a gravel layer at the very bottom is strongly sug-

gested to facilitate this drainage. Sug-gested soil mix for potting up: equal parts compost, perlite, peat moss, and decomposing forest leaf litter. Ramial mulch atop this soil is the right bio-logical touch. Containerized trees eventually get severely rootbound but can be a fun novelty while the plants thrive. a

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Calculating how much to growBy Pam Dawling

Planning is a cyclical process, and tweaking the plan for better results is an annual task. However, if you are starting from scratch, or if things are going really wrong, where should you start in planning your enterprise?

ATTRA’s Market Gardening: A Start Up Guide has a set of questions to help clarify goals and develop a busi-ness plan, along with links to many other resources. An assessment of your available land, your preferred crops, your customers, your location and your !nancial situation will be the base on which you build your plan. Ellen Poli-shuk of Potomac Vegetable Farms links her success to de-cisions based on her seven core values: Fun (a high quality of life); making a living; no or low debt; enjoying people; enjoying machines; continually investing in capital assets and using organic practices.

Many growers will want to start with the money. The incoming money, that is. See Crop Planning for Organic Vegetable Growers by Brisebois and Thériault, and AT-TRA’s Holistic Management: A Whole-Farm Decision Making Framework and Sustainable Vegetable Produc-tion from Start-up to Market. The Organic Farmer’s Business Handbook by Richard Wiswall includes a CD you can copy and use to create your own budgets, timesheets, payroll calculator, and more, compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux.

Set !nancial goals and then !gure out how to achieve them. Plan your income (gross sales), then your pro!ts (salary), then your expenses, which could be anywhere from 25-75% of your gross sales. Clearly, keeping ex-penses down will boost your income, so long as you don’t make the farm nonviable.

To set your gross sales goal, consider how much pro-duce you can grow and what the !nancial value of that is. If you are brand new, you will need to ask other farmers for help, study prices at the farmers’ market and see what other growers offer. The Roxbury Farm website is help-ful on this. A full time farmer might work 2,000 hours in a year, and average $18/hour gross if things go according to plan. But a beginning farmer needs more slack while learning, and might expect to earn considerably less than the $36,000 of an experienced grower. Perhaps only $5,000-$10,000, according to Anne Weil, quoted in Crop Planning for Organic Vegetable Growers. Out of these gross sales come all the business expenses. So subtract your hoped-for earnings from the gross sales and look at how much will be available for covering the expenses. Consider if this is a reasonable amount, by listing all your expected expenses and then adding in something for con-

tingency expenses (the unexpected but unavoidable). SPIN-Farming (Small Plot Intensive vegetable grow-

ing) is geared to new growers using city plots and prepared to pay for the fairly expensive manuals. The website has a calculator to convert square feet into farm income using their methods. continued on the next page

Par t of the 3 .5 acre vegetable garden that suppies 100 people at Twin Oaks Communit y, showing some of the permanent raised beds and par t of the row crop area. Photo by Pam Dawling.


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Which crops to growSome crops require more skill or are less dependable.

If your climate is marginal for okra, avoid relying on it for a large part of your summer income. Gardening When it Counts by Steve Solomon has a table of “Vegetables by level of care needed.” On his list of highly demanding crops: Brussels sprouts, cauli"ower, celeriac and bulb on-ions. Steve’s list also includes asparagus, Chinese cabbage, early cabbage, cantaloupe, leeks, large fruited peppers and spring turnips and spinach. Although that last set grows well for me, I have challenges in my climate with rutaba-gas, drying beans and shelling peas.

Some crops offer high yields or high market value for a small space. Do you have a lot of labor or a lot of land? In terms of yield per unit area, the best include carrots, summer squash, onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes and tomatoes. Peas, sweet corn, radishes and bush beans are among the worst. But in terms of tonnage per hour worked (“ef!ciency”) the best are sweet corn, potatoes, cucum-bers, cabbage, summer squash, peas, peppers. The worst include pole beans, radishes, onions, carrots, bush beans, lettuce.

Neither high retail price nor high yield is the same as most pro!table. See Richard Wiswall’s Organic Farmer’s

Business Handbook for 25 sample crop enterprise budgets which you can use to make a comparison of costs, sales and pro!t from each vegetable. This is a book about num-ber-crunching that’s accessible and inspiring. (One of the author’s main goals is to help create less stressed-out farm-ers.) Beware preconceived notions on what is most pro!t-able – get real numbers. His highest to lowest net pro!t per bed are: greenhouse tomatoes, parsley, basil, kale, !eld to-matoes, cilantro, dill, peppers, carrots, parsnips, celeriac, spinach, beets, lettuce, summer squash, bulb onions, cab-bage, potatoes, cucumbers, broccoli, winter squash. Peas, beans and sweet corn all ran at a loss. Remember – your results may vary! One lessons from this list is the ability of long season crops such as kale with an extended harvest to provide high yields for the time put into soil prepara-tion, planting and cultivation. Another lesson is that while bunched herbs can bring a good pro!t, people will only use a certain amount, and a diversity of crops is needed to keep customers returning.

What the market wants Contents of CSA shares are posted by many CSAs,

including Roxbury Farm. Sometimes you will want to grow certain crops even if they are not the highest mon-ey-earners, because they enhance what you have to offer. Perhaps they round out your market display or your CSA boxes. Perhaps you’ll grow a crop because it is extra early,

How much to grow?continued from page 15


or eye-catching. If you are growing for farmers markets, you can choose to grow just high value crops, but if you are doing a CSA, your customers may expect to receive some of everything, and you will need to grow some low-value crops. But don’t be afraid to say no to growing a crop such as sweet corn or shelling peas that just doesn’t work for your farm. CSA has the advantage of money up-front and guaranteed customers, as well as avoiding the costs associ-ated with going to market. On the other hand, a farmers market booth can take a "exible range of produce, and so is easier if plans go awry.

Producing crops when you want them and in the right quantities is a complex task, due to many variables, not all of which are in the control of the grower. However, for the best chance of success, make decisions in a logi-cal sequence. Once you’ve decided which crops you want to grow, here is a step-by-step process to determine how much to plant:

Figure out how much of each crop you’d like to harvest, how often, and over what length of time.

Calculate how many plants will be needed. This de-pends on the yield per plant and how long the crop will stand in the !eld. Add a percentage (perhaps 10%) to allow for culls.

Decide the dates for the sowings to meet the harvest date goals.

Likely yields Charts of possible crop yields are available in the

Roxbury Farm’s Field Planting and Seeding Schedule and their Greenhouse Schedule. Some seed companies have tables of likely yields in their catalogs, although these are sometimes more for the home gardener than for market growers. The Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at the University of Santa Cruz has a lot of useful information including a 30-page Crop Plan for a 100 member CSA, with planting requirements including total bed length for a range of 36 crops in its Unit 4.5 CSA Crop Planning. Their Appendix 9 includes the area re-quirements translated into fractions of an acre. A further source of this kind of information is Sharing the Harvest by Elizabeth Henderson and Robyn Van En. A two-page table includes yield per 100 row feet.

How much to grow

If the average person needs 160-200 pounds of vegeta-bles per year, and the average household (=1 CSA share) is 2.5 people, then 1 share will be 400-600 lbs per year, roughly 10 lbs per week for a full year.

The table on page 19 lists 48 crops, along with likely yield; quantity required for 100 CSA Shares; and length of row needed to grow this amount. This !ctional CSA



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(a blend of information I gleaned from the various sources I’ve mentioned), runs for 26 weeks, and has shares sized for 2.5 “standardized” people. For comparison I have in-cluded how much of those crops we grow at Twin Oaks Community for 52 weeks for 100 speci!c people. My point in including both is that every group is different, and no one else’s table will re"ect your group of customers exactly.

If all people were the same, the Twin Oaks list would total about the same amounts (twice as many weeks, less than half the number of people). You’ll see some of our preferences come into play: we don’t grow arugula in any quantity worth recording, and celery and mustard greens are not very popular. Even though we freeze and pickle green beans, corn, eggplant and okra, they’re not as good as fresh crops, so we eat less than the !ctional 250 people have fresh. On the other hand, beets and garlic store well, so we have more than Fiction Farm shareholders, as CSAs often don’t supply for winter needs. Chinese cabbage, mizuna and pak choy bolt too readily to be worthwhile at Twin Oaks in the spring, and so we grow them only in the fall, and most of that in a hoophouse, where yields outstrip those grown outdoors. Kale, leeks and spinach overwinter outdoors here, so we grow lots more than a CSA supply-ing only in the warmer half of the year. I have to wonder how many of the hot peppers supplied by Fiction Farm get used? We make lots of salsa for winter use, but only plant 71’ (22m). Other differences are a matter of scale, and will be relevant to growers supplying institutions. For ex-ample, it’s hard work to prepare scallions for a meal for a hundred, whereas a hundred separate cooks might enjoy adding them to the small meals they prepare. I notice that we grow lots of paste tomatoes and fewer regular fresh eat-ing ones. That might be because our quality standards can be lower because our tomatoes don’t commute to market, and we’re not so picky about looks!

Deciding sowing dates

It might be hard to orchestrate your annual start-up so that you have a generous bounty. It’s OK to tell your CSA members that their boxes at the beginning of the season boxes will be less full, and the summer ones will be more bountiful. Johnny’s Seeds website has a Harvest Date Cal-culator which you can copy and use to calculate sowing dates to meet a target date (e.g. the !rst or last market of the year). www.johnnyseeds.com/t-InteractiveTools.aspx

ResourcesThese books are available from Growing for Market at www.

growingformarket.com or 800-307-8949.Crop Planning for Organic Vegetable Growers, Daniel Brise-

bois and Frédéric Thériault.The Organic Farmer’s Business Handbook, Richard Wiswall

Sharing the Harvest: A Citizen’s Guide to Community Sup-ported Agriculture, Elizabeth Henderson and Robyn Van En

Sustainable Vegetable Production from Start-up to Market, Vern Grubinger

Publications available from ATTRA at www.attra.ncat.org:ATTRA: Market Gardening: A Start Up Guide, Janet

Bachmann Holistic Management: A Whole-Farm Decision Making

Framework, Preston SullivanOther publications: Holistic Management: A New Framework for Decision

Making, Allan Savory and Jody Butter!eld, Island PressRoxbury Farm 100 Member CSA Plan. See Information for

Farmers at www.roxburyfarm.com/content/7211Planning For Your CSA, Mark Cain, Dripping Springs

Garden, www.drippingspringsgarden.com/index.html or at www.Slideshare.net (Search for Crop Planning)

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Pam Dawling is the garden manager at Twin Oaks Com-munity in Virginia. The gardens provide nearly all the fresh produce for the community’s 100 residents. Her book, Sustainable Market Farming: Intensive Vegetable Produc-tion on a Few Acres, is scheduled for publication this fall by New Society Publishing. She can be reached at [email protected].

How much to grow?continued from page 17


How much to grow for 100 CSA shares Copyright 2012 Pam DawlingCrop Weeks of

harvest# of plantings Yield in lbs. per

100’Annual goal per

share in lbs.Annual goal

per 100 shares in lbs.

Row length in feet

Twin Oaks row length for 100

Arugula 20 several 17 3.7 370 2176 0Asparagus 8 1 35 3.5 350 1000 1400Beans 10 up to 6 90 15.0 1500 1667 1100Beets 19 2 100 16.3 1630 1630 2200Broccoli 11 2 80 16.0 1600 2000 3900Cabbage 11 2 190 20.0 2000 1053 1760Cantaloupe 5 3 300 9.0 900 300 300Carrots 18 9 100 66.0 6600 6600 7800Celeriac 2 1 80 3.0 300 375 360Celery 1 1 150 2.0 200 133 44Chard 14 3 90 3.3 330 367 300Chinese Cabbage 1 75 5.0 500 667 43Collards 13 2 100 2.7 270 270 1080Corn 6 up to 6 65 60.0 6000 9231 7200Cucumbers 11 up to 5 260 15.0 1500 577 550Edamame 6 2 20 1.0 100 500 540Eggplant 6 1 140 10.0 1000 714 180Garlic 3 45 3.0 300 667 4260Garlic Scapes 3 1 1 0.3 30 3000 3180Kale 16 2 100 7.0 700 700 3500Kohlrabi 5 2 65 2.0 200 308 540Leeks 4 1 100 5.0 500 500 1500Lettuce 20 weekly 45 20.0 2000 4444 6000Mizuna 20 2 60 3.4 340 567 48Mustard greens 21 2 85 2.0 200 235 0Okra 6 1 75 5.0 500 667 90Onions 1 1 80 8.0 800 1000 1800Pak Choy 14 1 75 5.0 500 667 43Parsnips 1 1 75 3.0 300 400 120Peas, cow 3 1 40 4.0 400 1000 300Peas, snap 3 1 30 2.0 200 667 686Peas, snow 3 1 30 2.0 200 667 180Peppers. hot 10 1 75 1.5 150 200 71Peppers., sweet 10 1 95 20.0 2000 2105 500Potatoes 4 2 110 35.0 3500 3182 5800Radishes 12 9 33 1.7 170 515 712Rutabagas 4 1 120 4.0 400 333 0Scallions 14 about 6 40 6.0 600 1500 206Spinach spr+fall 40 10.0 1000 2500 3840Acorn Squash 5 1 120 7.0 700 583 0Butternut Squash 4 1 250 20.0 2000 800 540Summer Squash 13 up to 6 250 30.0 3000 1200 583Sweet Potatoes 2 1 100 30.0 3000 3000 800Tatsoi 18 2 20 3.0 300 1500 240Tomatoes 9 3 300 40.0 4000 1333 450Tomatoes, paste 4 1 250 10.0 1000 400 1040Turnips 6 3 70 4.0 400 571 1263Watermelon 4 1 700 35.0 3500 500 1080TOTALS 580 lbs. 58040 lbs. 64971 row feet 68129 row feet


By Josh Volk

I’m always looking for clever tools and tool modi!cations for the farm, something that will cheaply and quickly save time and frustration, im-prove production and product quality and maybe even help the farm make more money. I’ve visited farm shows, including one claiming to be the larg-est in the world, that had little to of-fer a farm smaller than 200 acres. In contrast, I see useful farm-built tools whenever I visit successful small farms. Farmers have to innovate be-cause off-the-shelf products usually aren’t adequate or affordable for our needs.

In recent years, several new strat-egies for collaboration on tools have been picking up steam. I want to tell you about them in hopes it will encourage more folks to share their

Developing tools for small farms

Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills , NY, hosted the Slow Tools Summit in December 2011 . Stone Barns is a non-prof it organization that oper-ates an 80 -acre farm and of fers educational programs. Through a Growing Farmers Initiative, children’s education programs, and diverse public awareness programs, the organization’s mission is to improve the way America eats and farms. The farm is open Wednesday through Sunday year-round. w w w.stonebarnscenter.org.

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ideas. Three resources you should know about are the Slow Tools Summit, Farm Hack, and Open Source Ecology.

The !rst was instigated by Eliot Coleman of Four Season Farm in Maine, who has developed several tools that are widely used on market farms. It was supported by Adam Lemieux, the “tool dude” at Johnny’s Selected Seeds, who is also active in tool research and development. The one-day meeting, hosted by the Stone Barns Center, was dubbed the Slow Tools Summit, after the Slow Food and, more recently, Slow Money movements. I felt fortu-nate to be invited to participate along with other farmers, engineers, and tool industry professionals.

One of those present was Barry Grif!n, an engineer who has been connecting students from Harvard with El-iot Coleman. They have been working to develop, among other things, a garden cart-mounted combine powered by a cordless drill. His hope, as was the hope of many others in the room, is to share information globally but to focus on small-scale manufacturing of appropriate technologies locally.

There were about 16 of us at the table identifying tools we’d like to see, talking about projects we’re already work-ing on, and sharing resources that already exist. Much of the time was spent discussing development of an inexpen-sive, lightweight electric tractor. Ron Khosla, who devel-oped an Allis Chalmers G electric tractor conversion, was

the farthest along in this project, but many in the room had similar ideas and thoughts on particular design cri-teria.

One of the most exciting pieces there was presented by Glenn Brendle from Green Meadow Farm in Penn-sylvania. He has made modi!cations to Johnny’s Selected Seeds’ salad greens harvester that will make it much easier and faster to use. It will probably be available soon.

In the wake of the initial meeting there have been a number of e-mails with even more resources and ideas, in-cluding a link to a company in Pennsylvania that is already making an electric harvest platform called the Crop Care Picking Assistant similar to what we discussed (www.cropcareequipment.com/vegetable_equip/picking_assis-tant.php). This ability to stay closely connected with ideas over long distances is something that is relatively new in on-farm tool development and I hope to see more farms taking advantage of the networking possibilities.

A project that is working on a very similar approach is the Farm Hack project of the National Young Farm-ers Coalition. Farm Hack launched in late 2010 as a blog (www.farmhack.net), with ambitions to be a central repos-itory for farm-built tool resources, speci!cally ones that had already been done by one farm and used successfully. The other idea was to take advantage of the young farmer


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generation’s comfort with electronic media and social net-working to get these ideas distributed and to spark more discussion and innovation. Additionally, a lot of young farmers are coming from non-farm backgrounds, but of-ten have expertise in engineering, electronics, media, and other skills.

Farm Hack hasn’t just taken the electronic route. In the past year they have also organized on-the-ground events at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, State University of New York in Syracuse, and at the Lee Grange Hall in New Hampshire. These events bring together farmers, engineers and others for hands-on development. Farm Hack events for this spring are currently being planned in Rhode Island, Vermont, and California, and the volun-teers who run the project are looking for more locations.

Farm Hack is developing a more complete web site, and has just launched a web forum for discussion about tool development. The next step is a Wiki that will be integrat-ed with the forum to allow for long-term documentation of farm-built tools, whether new, old, or in development.

A third project, Open Source Ecology, has its home base on a farm in Missouri, where a team of engineers and farmers seek to develop a comprehensive collection of DIY industrial tools and machines. Their “Global Village Construction Set” is a plan for a set of 50 build-it-yourself machines ranging from a tractor, to a hydraulic punch, to a haybine. Their prototypes are being documented on

their web site (www.opensourceecology.org) and the plans for the machines will be freely available. Their work is guided by a vision of a certain model of self-sustaining, self-suf!cient communities that may or may not relate to a given farmer’s needs. But there is no doubt that many of the machines that they are developing could be extremely useful to the small farmer, and potentially could be built at a fraction of the cost of commercial versions.

These are just a few examples of what I’m sure are many efforts out there to share farm tool information and to work collaboratively on designing tools for small farm-ers. One thing that is clear to me is that a lot of the ex-pertise out there is actually still held in the conventional farming circles, and that many of those folks are excellent resources. Amish farm fabrication shops were mentioned in particular as good resources. If you have more good ex-amples I’d love to hear about them, or even better, share them with the larger farming community through a proj-ect like Farm Hack.

Benjamin Shute of Hearty Roots Community Farm, one of the founders of Farm Hack, contributed information for this article.

Josh Volk lives and farms on the edge of Portland, Or-egon. You can learn more about his work at www.joshvolk.com.


New cut !owers for 2012By Erin Benzakein

Every year about this time I get bitten by the “I gotta have it” bug. Stacks of plant and seed catalogs clutter ev-ery table and I spend hours, even days, dreaming of the season to come. The sting of last summer has faded and while the garden is fast asleep it’s easy to get carried away making plans for the future. I knew this would happen! It always does. I had hoped this year might be different and that by placing my seed orders in November I might out-smart myself. Ha, fat chance! So here I am, scheming up ways to squeeze in a few hundred more of this and maybe a thousand of that into an already over"owing garden. Ev-ery square foot is already accounted for in my 2012 garden plan but I can’t help myself, there are a few more things I’ve just gotta have!

After sifting through towers of catalogs and endless seed websites, I’ve !nally boiled down the most promising new varieties for the coming season.

Probably the most exciting news I’ve gotten this winter regarding new cut "ower varieties is that Gloeckner has now become the exclusive broker for Kordes Freelander Roses. Over the years as interest and demand has grown for these wonderful outdoor cut rose varieties, growers have often struggled to obtain adequate plant stock and cultural information. Now that Kordes has enlisted Gloeckner to oversee the ordering and dispersal of plants, hopefully the headaches of the past will be a distant memory. Green-heart Roses in California will be custom propagating the plant stock, which will be available year-round, shorten-ing the order lead time to 8-12 weeks. Plants are available in 4.5” pots and run $5.80 each. A minimum order of 54 plants is required, with just one per variety. This is great news for all of the smaller growers out there who have pre-

viously struggled to make the minimums but have longed for a chance to test these beauties.

In addition to all of these changes at Kordes there have also been some very exciting new additions to the Freelander Rose Collection. Joining the Antique and Traditional Cut Flower Collections are three new multi -"owered series. The !rst is a beautiful, ruf"ed, partially streaked spray group called the Shakes. Second, the Ork-ans are an early blooming spray type with numerous buds per stem. Lastly and quite possibly the most exciting of all is the Pom Pon collection. With clusters of vibrant, highly doubled blooms that resemble a fully "owered peony or antique cabbage rose, this series looks like it was pulled from a Dutch still life. I will be trialing multiple varieties from each of these new groups and sharing the results here later in the season.

I have been waiting years for ‘Green Ball’ dianthus, shown on the next page and on page 1, to become avail-able. After spotting it on my wholesaler’s truck a few sea-sons back and then watching designers hungrily scoop up bunch after bunch, I knew we needed to grow it. While not particularly "ashy or beautiful, it is de!nitely different and interesting. I’m quite certain that it will be a strong seller as specialty !ller. Plants are said to reach 28” in height with a 3” wide green "ower head held atop a strong, healthy stem. Pinching to 3 sets of leaves roughly 2 weeks after planting is recommended. Crop time from planting


Kordes Freelander Roses are now available from Gloeckner Seed Co. , w w w.fredgloeckner.com. Above, ‘Latin Pompon” and at right, ‘Antique Caramel’.


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New flowerscontinued from page 25

to !rst "ower can be as short as 16 weeks. While this va-riety is listed as being hardy down to zone 4 on the order form, the Ball rep I spoke with suggested growing it as an annual to be on the safe side. Ball is the exclusive broker on this variety, so plants must be ordered through them. Available as a 102 sized plug, plants run about .77 each, 1 tray min. per variety with 4 trays total required per order.

It seems 2012 is the year of the Hypericum (hooray!) with two new series available to growers. My local whole-salers all report that Hypericum is a good, steady seller and it’s easy to see why. Each long, sturdy stem is loaded with colorful berries that do not crush, shrivel or stain. Regularly lasting well over two weeks, Hypericum has molded before wilting in a bouquet. The berried stems are great in mixed bouquets, wedding work, boutonnieres and corsages.

Green Leaf Plants has just introduced a beautiful col-lection of Hypericum called the Hypearl Series. Report-edly hardy down to zone 6 and not requiring vernalization to set fruit, this disease resistant group looks promis-ing. There are four colors in the collection, all of which have good stem length (25”-36”) and pretty little femi-nine names. Jacqueline’s berries begin yellowish orange and mature into a deep red while Oliva’s start out yellow ‘Green Ball ’ Dianthus. Photo cour tesy of Ball Seed.


as well but become salmon over time. Jessica’s are a soft cream throughout the season while Renu’s start out cream but eventu-ally darken, becoming a deep pink. All of the varieties are said to love heat, "ower in July and fruit abundantly by early August. Pinching prior to July 1 is recommended to encourage branching and "owering. Plants are quite affordably priced and can be had as unrooted cuttings for just .18 or as plugs in either a 72 for .67 or a 128 for .47. These prices include the royalty. The minimum order is just one tray and can be sourced through brokers such as Ball, Gloeckner or Germania.

Ball has also released a new collection of Hypericum called the Spirit Pearl Series. This group comes in four colors as well: green, red, red-orange, and red-pink. Said to reach 28” in height and bloom 26 weeks after planting, this collection looks very interest-ing as well. Suitable for unheated greenhouses and !eld produc-tion, plants should be pinched four weeks after transplanting for maximum number of fruiting stems. Plants must be purchased through Ball and are available as 102 plugs for 2.40 each. One tray per variety is required with a minimum of four trays per order.

I spotted the ornamental oregano, Origanum ‘Amethyst Falls’ a few weeks back in the Bluebird Nurseries catalog and it took my breath away. Similar to ‘Kent Beauty’ which produces showy hop-like "ower cones but with a larger overall plant habit (15”x24”), I believe this darling may just be a winner. I’ve grown Kent Beau-ty for a few seasons now and adore its unique "owers and spicy scented foliage but always struggle to get enough height on it to make a truly worthy cut. With some low netting and a sheltered spot in the garden I think ‘Amethyst Falls’ may get tall enough to wow our customers. Plants are said to "ower for several months beginning in late summer and be hardy down to zone 5. Plugs are

available through Blue Bird Nursery, with a "at of 32 costing $48.

I must admit when I "ipped through the newest Gloeck-ner catalog, the Ce-losia Sunday Series were the !rst things to grab my attention. With such vibrant colors and beautiful "ower spikes I almost squealed out loud! Similar to the Bombay series, Sunday Celosia has a short, program-mable crop time and extremely high yield of top-quality stems. Plants are spaced 6 x

6” apart and like the Bombays are not pinched but left to grow a single "ower stalk. There are 6 incredibly beautiful colors to choose from in-cluding three in shades of peach/orange, a fa-vorite with our customers. Seed is available from both Gloeckner and Geo. Geo had the best price, $49.90 per thousand seeds.

While we’re on the subject of Celosia, there are half a dozen new varieties that have just been add-ed to the Bombay collection. While all six are to-die-for gorgeous, both Candy and Bordeaux have stolen my heart! Rounding out the Bombay col-lection perfectly, these new additions are bound to turn heads. Seed is available from Gloeckner, Ball and Geo from $68-84. Be sure to price check for the best deal.

Anyone who grows "owers knows how hard it is to have self-control. During the cold winter months when spring is still a fond vision off on the horizon, it is easy to get carried away plotting and planning for the year ahead. After a few seasons of overzealous ordering and massive over-com-mitment, you’d think I’d have learned my lesson by now but, sadly, this just isn’t the case. I bet you the year I stop getting that wild-eyed, gotta-have-it look while "ipping through seed catalogs in January is the year I !nally retire. Next to hard work and an optimistic spirit, I believe obsession and passion are the keys to surviving the wild and beautiful business of "ower farming.

Erin Benzakein runs Floret, a small, organic !ower farm in Washington’s beautiful Skagit Val-ley. www.!oret!owers.com

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news & ideas for local food producers growing · the !eld, 50 in the hoophouse, and 10 to 15 different rootstocks for grafted tomatoes. It is a daunting task to evaluate 400 varieties