By Cheryl A. Wixson By the time this harvest season is over, our cellar shelves will be lined with jars of spicy peach chutney, crisp bread and butter pickles, rainbow-colored marinated bean salad – even rows of canned applesauce varieties: ‘Sweet Sixteen,’ ‘Liberty,’ ‘Spencer’ and ‘Tolman Sweet.’ Quarts of dilly beans and kosher dill spears,
Roberta Bailey collecting seed from ‘Kniola’s Purple’ morning glory. Rob Lemire photo. By Roberta Bailey Have you noticed that you can’t buy ‘Lutz’ beet seed anymore? ‘Lutz’ was the victim of a few seed company mergers and a lack of attention in the seed industry to low-profit, open-pollinated varieties. A few companies listed it, but
Corn is an important part of the heritage of Central America and appears in art throughout the country. English photo. Report of MOFGA’s 2010 delegation to its sistering organizations The rugged mountains of El Salvador are great for growing organic crops – especially perennial crops – but should not be subjected to mining for gold,
By Roberta Bailey The wild nut forests of North America are gone, having succumbed to weather, blight, and the heavy harvesting of their valuable lumber. No longer can families go into the woods and gather burlap sacks full of nuts for winter keeping. Yet many nut trees are hardy in the northeast, and a few
By Sue Smith-Heavenrich Certain plants, when grown in combination, enhance each other’s growth, repel insects, and increase fruit production. Called “companion planting,” the idea has always intrigued me. So every spring I carefully map out a garden plan complete with successive plantings and companion plants neatly pencilled in. Along with my usual beans and greens,
By Nicolas Lindholm This is the second of five articles covering some of the most commonly produced and potentially profitable seed crops being grown by small-scale organic and biodynamic farmers in the Northeast. Supported primarily through a grant from the Maine Dept. of Agriculture, I studied almost 30 farms in New England and New York,
Jack Kertesz spearheaded the alley cropping demonstration at MOFGA’s orchard in Unity, showing how annual and perennial crops could be interplanted in a young orchard to gain income while waiting for fruit trees to mature. By Jack Kertesz Imagine working with a blank slate of ground and feeling that the outcome might look like some
By Diane Shivera Because animals have been indoors for much of the last four months, they are more likely to have developed skin problems than in spring, summer and fall. Not only is sunshine the best cure for skin diseases or parasites, but it may “brighten” animals’ spirits – as it does for many of
Anne and Eric Nordell have perfected a system of cover cropping and crop rotations that virtually eliminates weeds. In addition to the video and collection of articles noted at the end of this article, the Nordells are putting together a manual that goes into more detail on the rotational principles and practices of their weed
Jim Amaral of Borealis Breads. Leavening the “Taste of Maine” Experience By Jean English Jim Amaral and his wife, Dolores Carbonneau, started Borealis Breads in 1993 in Waldoboro. What began as a “Mom and Pop” operation, with 12 breads and about 12 wholesale accounts, quickly grew, so that by 1995 Amaral had bought a bakery
