Why Farm Fresh, Local Produce Tastes Better
Or why grocery store produce doesn’t taste good.
When I started Cedar Crate Farm back in 2015 I had one distinct problem that I wanted to solve for people. The problem is that grocery store produce doesn’t taste good. I knew that because I had grown up eating produce fresh from my mom’s large garden. I knew what fresh produce was supposed to taste like. I knew that the grocery store was selling an inferior product. I knew that I could grow better tasting produce and share it with this community in south central Minnesota.
Why Grocery Store Produce Doesn’t Taste Good
The reasons for that are many but we’ll go over a few of the key reasons briefly here. The first reason that grocery store produce doesn’t taste good is that the produce varieties that grocery stores carry are varieties selected for their ability to withstand shipping and shelf life. This is almost always at the expense of flavor.
Take our incredibly delicious and incredibly popular Sungold cherry tomato. It’s known for it’s incredible sweet flavor that’s almost like candy. It’s also known for it’s propensity to crack during shipping. Because of it’s propensity to crack you’ll never find it in any grocery store but you will find it in your CSA shares, our online farm store, and our farmers market stand.
The second reason grocery store produce doesn’t taste good is because it isn’t fresh. Most produce in most grocery stores (even some food co-ops!!) isn’t local. It isn’t even grown in the Midwest and in some cases isn’t even grown in this country. If you think about the steps the produce takes it could be a week or more since that produce was harvested and when it ends up on your table. Here’s what it might look like:
Produce is harvested and spends time on the farms harvest, wash & pack line. 1-2 days.
Produce is shipped to a distribution center. 1-2 days.
Produce is shipped again to the grocery store. 1-2 days.
Produce is in the grocery stores receiving area/walk-in cooler. 1-2 days.
Produce sits on the grocery store shelf until it spoils or you buy it. 1 - ??? days.
Best case scenario is the produce is 5 days old when you purchase it from the grocery store but probably a lot longer. No wonder it doesn’t taste good!!
Our farm solves this problem by growing the best tasting varieties of produce we can find! Further, we always harvest, wash & pack your produce the day before we deliver ensuring you always have the freshest, best tasting produce possible!
How We Dig Carrots
Carrots are one of our most important crops on our farm and something we’re known for. Each year we grow literally thousands of pounds of carrots for our CSA members, online store, farmers market & whole sale partners. When you’re digging that many carrots every season you need a better, faster and easier way to dig carrots than a simple shovel, broadfork or potato fork. We use a tractor attachment called a bed lifter to make digging our carrots much easier.
The bed lifter is a simple tool overall. It works by digging underneath the depth of the carrots and loosening the soil. This enables us to easily pull the carrots out by their tops for harvest. It greatly increases the amount of carrots we can dig and it’s a lot easier on our backs as well.
There are a couple tricks to using the bed lifter. It needs to be deep enough that we don’t slice off the bottoms of the carrots but not so deep that the carrot cling to tons of dirt and mud. The angle of the cross bar at the bottom needs to be gentle enough to not break the carrots but steep enough to loosen the soil. And the soil conditions need to be right. If it’s too dry the soil breaks apart in huge clods breaking carrots and not greatly improving the speed. Conversely, if it’s too wet we aren’t able to use the bed lifter because we’d either get the tractor stuck or not have enough traction to pull the bed lifter.
Why Cover Crops Are Important
Farming in a sustainable and earth friendly manner is one of our primary farming values on our farm. We seek to not only maintain but improve the land we farm on over time. In the grand scheme of things, the time we spend farming this land is pretty small and we want the next generation of farmers to be able to succeed. Not only that but we also want to protect the soil, air and water so that our farming footprint stays confined to the acres we farm. One of the key ways we work towards this goal is by planting cover crops. Today we’ll go over why cover crops are important and what cover crops we plant on our farm.
First, we should define what a cover crop is. For us, a cover crop is a crop that we plant whose primary purpose is to improve our land. Further, a cover crop is not planted with intent to harvest and sell a product.
Our summer cover crop mix. The plants with white flowers are buckwheat. The long slender leaves that resemble corn are millet.
Cover crops serve a variety of purposes on our farms and many farms in general. Their benefits include reducing soil erosion, suppressing weed growth, providing habitat for beneficial insects, and improving soil health. Our primary goals for our cover crop mixes are to suppress weed growth and improve soil health. That’s not to say the other benefits are not important - they are. It’s just that when we look at which cover crops to plant we are seeking to achieve those goals primarily and the other benefits secondarily.
We have two mixes of cover crops that we use on our farm to achieve the goals of improving soil health and suppressing weeds. In summer we plant a summer mix of cover crops. That is, crops that grow well in the heat of the summer. This mix includes species like buckwheat, soy beans, sun hemp, sun flowers, millet & more. In the fall we plant a mix of peas, oats & phacelia. These crops grow better in the cooler temperatures of fall and can grow later into the season than our summer mix. Our winter mix is capable of withstanding frosts.
To suppress weeds we seed our cover crops pretty densely and lightly incorporate the cover crop seeds into the soil. With a little rain the cover crop comes to life creating a thick mat of vegetation that crowds out weeds. In our experience, we’ve observed that the areas where we plant cover crops are generally much easier to weed the following season.
Cover crops improve soil health in a few primary ways. First, some cover crops like peas can pull nitrogen (a primary plant nutrient) out of the air and store it in the soil for future crops to use. Cover crops in general also contribute to soil organic matter which microorganisms in the soil feed on. These micro organisms then metabolize the cover crops and leave behind nutrients future crops can use.
Many of our cover crops also achieve our secondary goals of reducing soil erosion and providing beneficial insect habitat. Because we’re planting pretty densely and minimizing fallow ground by using cover crops we are reducing soil erosion. Additionally, buckwheat - one of our primary summer cover crops - flowers quickly and the bees love it. Buckwheat provides habitat and forage for the bees!
Cover crops are an important part of sustainability on our farm. We’re always looking for new species and new mixes of cover crops to help improve our soil and improve our farm!
Addie (about 2yrs old) and I sitting in our oats & peas cover crop mix!
Our New Vacuum Seeder
We made a large new purchase for the farm recently: a new electric vacuum seeder. This purchase is a huge upgrade for us and today we’ll go through exactly what a vacuum seeder is, how it’s different from the seeders we currently use and the crops we plant to use the vacuum seeder on.
What is a vacuum seeder?
A vacuum seeder uses suction with air to hold the seeds to a plate. The plate rotates based on spacing needs and the vacuum is cut when the plate rotates to the position where the seed is supposed to be dropped into it’s furrow. Our particular vacuum seeder has a multitude of different plates with different spacing and hole sizes to accommodate a wide variety of seeds.
Vacuum seeders have much better seed singulation. That is, making sure a single seed is dropped at the designated spacing instead of a multitude of seeds. That’s because the suction of the air holding the seeds against the plate is easier than trying to have a single hole size that fits a the variability that comes with seeds. Not all seeds are the same size even within the exact same crop and variety!
Our new vacuum seeder! First crop seeded with it was beets.
How are other seeder types different?
Our other seeders, the Jang and Hoss seeders both work similarly. Each have a seed plate or seed puck that has holes drilled into it for different seed sizes and spacing. Instead of air suction through vacuum holding the seeds in the plate/puck only gravity allows the seed to fill the hole. Because the holes need to accommodate the variability in seed sizes even within crops you inevitable end up either jamming seeds or dropping more seeds than necessary.
Which crops will we plant with the vacuum seeder?
One of the things we love about the vacuum seeder we bought is that it can be used for a number of different crops. We plan to use it to seed peas, green beans, popcorn, sweet corn, beets, cucumbers, zucchini, summer squash & melons.
In particular I’ve been very frustrated with our Hoss seeder in our popcorn & sweet corn. The Hoss is just not accurate enough to singulate seeds nor does it achieve the desired spacing. We end up with lots of doubles, triples or gaps which is a problem because we’re either spending labor thinning doubles and triples or spending labor weeding gaps where there are no crops. The vacuum seeder will solve these problems for us!
Garlic Harvest 2025
One big project we checked off the list this week was completing our garlic harvest. Not only is it a pretty big job but also it’s somewhat time sensitive. Leave the garlic out in the field too long and the cloves can start to split apart which negatively affects shelf life.
A grimace for the weeds. You can see at least part of a row of garlic over my left shoulder though. :-/
Overall, we’re happy with our garlic harvest this season. It’s not our biggest and best crop ever and our weed management could have been better but what we pulled up looks nice and tastes amazing. When you consider that our seed stock was grown last year in what was some of the worst weather we’ve ever seen and then add to that a pretty wet 2025 the harvest we got is exceptional. Intense rainfall for two seasons and we’re still getting a good harvest. We’re proud of that.
Pretty good sized garlic bulbs but they seem smaller on average than previous years.
In previous years we’ve used a tool pulled by our tractor called a bed lifter dig underneath the garlic and loosen the soil so we can pull the garlic up easily. We use this tool on our carrots too. But this year we had two problems using that tool. First, the weeds got out of control in our garlic patch so we couldn’t see the rows from the tractor seat. The second problem was that our rows were spaced just a little too far apart. We ended up damaging a few garlic bulbs when we attempted to use the bed lifted.
What did we do instead? Luckily the soil was both damp enough and loose enough that we were able to pull up the garlic by hand without too much effort. Don’t get me wrong, it was difficult and harder than using the lifter but it was doable. We had a very small percentage where the stem broke leaving the garlic bulb in the ground. It might seem like this is a big bummer but there’s a really good chance the garlic bulbs left in the ground will regrow next season for early spring “green garlic.”
Now we wait about 2 weeks for the garlic to cure. That is, dry down the out layers that will form a protective seal and greatly improve shelf life of the garlic. Once curing is complete we’ll have plenty of garlic for CSA members, online orders and our farmers market stand!
Garlic set up to cure!
Farm Flooding: It Takes a Village
The wet summer continues.
I read a book this winter called The Stoic Challenge by William B. Irvine. The book, while brief, gives pointers on how to deal with adversity. To boil it down to a central idea The Stoic Challenge challenges readers to take every problem or setback they face and frame it as a challenge by “the stoic gods.” The goal, is to not let setbacks ruin your mood or your day. The way we choose to frame setbacks determines our reality.
I’m glad I read that book because two summers in a row of intense rainfall, difficult farming conditions, and high disease pressure put my basic stoicism skills to the test. I can’t say I’ve dealt with everything this summer perfectly - the way The Stoic Challenge advises - but I think I’m doing better than last season.
One last bit of context before we get to the flooding: I left on a vacation for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA) last Friday, July 18th. In the BWCA there’s no internet, no cell service, and no way to communicate back home. It’s a perfect way for me to stop fretting about the weather, emails, product inventory and everything else technology related. On Tuesday, July 22nd I got back to civilization and promptly checked my messages, email and the weather. Not good.
On Friday evening I saw a huge spot on the radar right over our farm. I knew it was raining hard but I didn’t know how much. I later found out we got about 3.5” of rain in about 2 hours. Our farm is already overly saturated from the frequent heavy rains this season has brought so that wasn’t welcome news. On top of that, I had just planted our fall storage carrots - one of our most important winter crops. Carrots do not like heavy rainfall just after planting.
Then, on Wednesday evening we got a second round of nearly 4” of rain in about 2 hours. Over 7” of rain in less than one week. Not good. Both rainfalls prompted a community response here on the farm. One of our tunnels flooded and it holds one of our most important summer crops: lettuce. With how saturated everything is we knew that we needed to remove that water as fast as possible.
The lettuce tunnel on Thursday morning. So. Much. Water.
Lara - who did an amazing job while I was away - arranged with our neighbors to borrow a pump on Sunday. Huge thanks to the Millers who not only loaned the pump but also helped get it set up and more. The pump worked beautifully removing all the standing water from the tunnel in just a few hours - likely saving our summer lettuce. Of course, the tunnel flooded again on Wednesday evening so Thursday we did the same thing.
We still don’t know if we saved all of the lettuce yet. Time will tell if our lettuce succumbs to disease before it reaches maturity. We do know we vastly improved our odds.
Here’s hoping for a dry August!
Shallots: A New-To-Us Crop
I’ve been farming professionally for 11 years and gardening my whole life (I’m almost 40) and I’ve never grown shallots. That is, until this year. Most years, we try out a new crop or two and after 11 years and all the things I’ve grown throughout my life the list of things we don’t grow that people ask about is getting small. Shallots were the one thing we still routinely get asked about and so we finally gave them a try this year. Here’s how we tackled this new to us crop.
They’re so pretty! Good size on them too.
We ordered shallot sets from the nearby Albert Lea Seed House. Sets is the term used to describe very small bulbs of shallots (or onions) intended to be planted and grown. I saw a lot of conflicting information about whether to grow plants or sets. We chose to grow sets because we didn’t have the greenhouse space and I couldn’t find a supplier that would mail live plants as we do with our onions. I also saw conflicting information about whether to plant in the spring or fall and mulch them like garlic. Since I decided to plant them over the winter my hand was forced there.
We kept up with the weeds as we try to do with all our other crops and almost 3 months later we’re nearing our first shallot harvest. The advice we saw online says to treat them as we do storage onions: when the tops fall over it’s time to harvest and cure them. Curing simply means allowing the outer skin to dry down and form a protective layer allowing for a much longer shelf life.
We’ll plan to harvest these shallots in the next week or so and after around 2 weeks of curing our very first shallot crop will be ready for you!
Shallot tops have fallen over - that’s how we know it’s close to harvest time.
What the shallots looked like before the tops fell over.
The Tomato Tunnel
Tomato season is juuuuuust about here! In fact, I picked the very first tomato of the season just yesterday and promptly ate it. Farmers treat :-). This week I wanted to share a few photos of our tomato tunnel and talk about our pruning and trellising strategy both of which are very important to getting a good harvest of delicious, healthy, summery tomatoes.
We prune and trellis our tomatoes for a number of reasons that all help us with our goal of harvesting lots of large tomatoes from healthy plants for the duration of the season. Let’s talk about pruning first. When we prune tomatoes we’re pruning two things: lower leaves and “suckers.” We prune lower leaves from the plant to help improve airflow in our tunnel which helps reduce the risk of disease in our tomato tunnel. We prune suckers to both encourage the plant to produce larger tomatoes and to make the plants more manageable.
This years tunnel tomato crop. We’re very happy with the fruit set on these plants.
We’re trying the new-to-us QLIPR system for practicing the lower and lean tomato trellis system. The idea is that the growing season is long enough and that our tomato grow tall enough that we run out of vertical space in our tunnel. Because of this, we need a way to manage that height and lower the plants down and leaning them to one side or another allows us to easily manage that height.
QLIPR is unique in that it utilized two clips that leap frog each other on our weekly prune and trellis system. It also allows us to do all of our tomato management (pruning, leaning, harvesting) from the ground instead of a ladder.
Each plant gets a wire hook and two foam lined clips. The clips move along the vine as it grows allow us to keep the “business end” of the tomato at chest height. Clips can be seen on the far top right of this photo.
Tomato management has become one of my favorite things on the farm and tomatoes continue to be a very important crop on the farm. We hope to expand our tomato offerings in future years including growing some of our cherry tomatoes using this system as well as adding other heirloom tomatoes.
Our Sustainable Farming Practices
If you’ve been following and shopping with us for awhile you probably already know that we are deeply committed to sustainable growing practices on our farm. If you’ve just discovered us or are beginning to learn about us and our farm then this blog post is for you! We’ll go over just some of the many ways we use sustainable and organic growing practices on our farm. And we’ll explain why our tag line - Healthy Soil, Healthy Food, Healthy People - succinctly captures the essence of what and why we do what we do on our farm.
For us, sustainable growing practices mean the following things. First, we are trying to improve our soil over time instead of degrading our soil over time. We want the soil for next season to be better than the previous seasons. Second, we don’t use toxic chemicals for weed, disease & pest control on our farm. Finally, we want to grow a wide diversity of crops and cover crops. All of these, tie into our first goal: trying to improve our soil over time. Let’s dig into each of them.
Improving Soil Health
Soil isn’t just a medium to grow something in. It’s a complex living, breathing ecosystem filled with bacteria, fungi, insects and more. In fact, in just a single teaspoon of soil there are billions of living organisms that are responsible for cycling the nutrients that plants need to grow. We want to foster and encourage that ecosystem to thrive because if that ecosystem is off then the quality of our produce goes down.
We improve soil healthy by minimizing tillage as much as possible on our farm. Tillage disrupts and destroys the ecosystem described above and can cause things to get out of balance. While we are not 100% no-till on our farm for a variety of reasons we are very aware of the damage tillage can cause. We also plant diverse cover crop mixes to grow a wide variety of plants that can foster a diverse microbial community in our soil.
A handful of soil with billions of living organisms in it!
No Toxic Chemicals
This is basically a no-brainer. We don’t use toxic chemicals on our crops for insect, weed, or fungus control. These chemicals safety for humans is questionable at best and cancer causing at worst. We er on the side of caution and avoid their use to protect the health and wellness of ourselves, our children, our neighbors, our community as well as our soil and it’s microbial community. C
Crop Diversity
We grow over 90 varieties of produce on our farm each with their own nutrient needs. By rotating through these crops in our fields and tunnels we’re able to more closely approximate nature’s diversity which helps keep our crops healthy, lowers pest pressure, and helps to improve our soil. In addition to crop diversity we also grow diverse cover crop mixes in fallow areas of our farm. These mixes attract beneficial insects, improve our soil by increasing soil organic matter, prevent our soil from eroding from wind or rain and are a joy to observe.
Our diverse vegetable farm. Kohlrabi, cabbage, onions, tomatoes in this photo of one small piece of our farm.
Healthy Soil, Healthy Food, Healthy People
Let’s tie it all together into our tag ling. Healthy soil is the foundation needed to grow healthy plants. Plants need more than just the standard NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, & potassium) fertilizers sold everywhere. They are complex organisms requiring complex nutrients in order to thrive. It is similar to how humans need more than just fat, carbs, and fiber to thrive. Thus, if you have healthy soil you have a healthy plant which yields healthy food.
There is a growing body of literature that suggests that per unit of mass the fresh produce you find in the supermarket has less nutrients than produce from 50 years ago. Here’s an article for further reading: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/ The reason for this is depleted soil and only replacing NPK instead of thinking of soil as a living, breathing thing. If you have healthier soil then you have healthier produce.
Finally, the typical American diet is generally pretty bad (if you’re reading this blog you probably don’t have a typical American diet.) Worse, even if the typical American is buying fresh produce at the super market it’s just not as good for you (and not as good tasting either) as the produce we’re growing due to the reasons cited above. Eating nutrient dense produce that is nutrient dense because it came from healthy plants which were grown in rich, healthy soil will help you be healthier.
Thus, healthy soil = healthy food = healthy people!
Cover crops on our farm! Buckwheat, millet, peas, sunflowers, sun hemp and soybeans, are all part of this mix!
Snap Pea Trellis Trials
Peas can be a bit of a tricky crop. They don’t like it too be too hot, or too cold or too wet or too dry. The Goldilocks zone - where everything is just right and the peas flourish - is very narrow for peas. Oh, and peas are vine crops in that they like to crawl and climb anywhere they can and don’t necessarily stand upright all on their own. That’s especially true for our sugar snap peas. The vines can grow to be 5 to 6 feet tall by the end of their productive season. With that much height it’s a requirement to trellis snap peas to reduce disease pressure, manage the height, and make them easier to pick. This weeks blog post will go over two methods we tried this year.
Method One: Trellis Netting
This method utilized plastic netting suspending by using fence posts, conduit pipe and zip ties to give the peas a nice net to climb up. In our experience this method works the best but it has some down sides. First, it’s a bit labor intensive to setup. It takes a good amount of time and back and forth trips to get all the pieces of this trellis system in place. Another downside is the plastic - the netting is discarded at the end of each season.
Overall though this method works the best when installed properly. As you can see in the photo above the peas are nice and upright climbing up the fence with ample space for us to get in and harvest the peas.
Trellis netting in action supporting sugar snap peas!
Method Two: Trellis Ropes
This method switches out the netting for ropes that get weaved between peas and fence posts. It’s simpler to set up but requires more labor overall since someone needs to add additional rope every 1-2 weeks for the peas to climb on. Our experience indicates this method doens’t work well for us. We noticed a marked increase in the number of peas that are unable to find the rope and thus just flop over onto the ground. Not ideal.
We trialed the rope method this year just to see if we liked it better. We found out that we don’t. A valuable lesson for seasons to come!
Method Two: you can see in the center of the photo how the middle row of peas is flopping to the right. Not ideal!
Tunnel Bed Flips & Summer Lettuce
Lettuce is one of our signature crops. We strive to grow and sell lettuce for as much of the year as we can. Currently, we reliably have lettuce available every week from early May through late December. A large part of the reason we have lettuce available for such a long period of time is our tunnels. Since we’re starting to transplant our summer lettuce this week into our tunnels we though we’d take a moment to go over our process of “flipping” beds and growing summer lettuce.
First, off: what is a bed flip? It’s a bit of market farm jargon that basically means that we are removing an old crop from a bed and preparing that bed for a new crop. In most of our tunnels we get about 3 crops per year from each bed. This helps us optimize the use of the space in our tunnels so that we can bring the largest amount of the best crops from the tunnel beds.
The photos below (from separate beds/tunnels) show the steps. First is the our finished product - lettuce mix :-). The second photo shows landscape fabric removed and the bed tilled, the third photo shows landscape fabric installation, and the fourth photo shows recently transplanted lettuce.
Here’s how we do our bed flips:
Remove old crop debris/weeds: There’s almost always some left over crop debris and/or weeds when we flip beds. We remove this material to reduce disease pressure and to help us in subsequent steps.
Remove landscape fabric: We use landscape fabric to help manage weeds and disease and keep lettuce clean. We remove landscape fabric and allow it to rest for a period of time before we reuse it.
Prepare the soil: We use a small rototiller to lightly till the soil. This helps to loosen the soil and makes it easy to transplant lettuce into. After we till, we lightly rake the bed to make it nice and smooth and uniform.
Install new landscape fabric: Now we’re ready to put landscape fabric back down and our bed is ready to go!
Summer Lettuce
We grow four kinds of summer lettuce and three of them grow pretty reliable in the heat: our lettuce mix, green curly, and summer crisp lettuces all do well in the heat. We’re experimenting with a romaine variety as well but have had mixed results. The heat of the summer can cause lettuce to both become bitter and bolt (which means is goes into it’s reproductive phase and becomes much less palatable). We use a combination of shade cloth, irrigation, careful variety selection, and landscape fabric to help manage the stress of summer.
Salad tunnel :-)
Meet Our Staff Part Two
Every year we hire a small crew to help us with the work on our farm. Our staff not only work on the farm doing tasks like harvesting, weeding, and transplanting but they’ll also be present at our Farmers Market stand and help with our CSA pickup locations and delivery route. You’ll likely get to know them a bit over the course of this season so we’d like to take a moment to introduce you to two more of our farm staff.
Meet Dalton
My name is Dalton, and I’m currently studying geography and soil science at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Working outside is my favorite way to spend my free time, so I’m most excited about getting to do just that on the farm this summer. My favorite vegetable is asparagus!
Meet Sarah
Hi I'm Sarah and I'm most excited to have hands-on learning experience with sustainable agriculture! I'm interested in how crops are strategically planted and cared for based on the specific seasonal planning. I also hope to get involved with the local farmers market community, meet lots of new people, and make some friends!
Perennial Crop Spotlight: Rhubarb
Here we are at the end of rhubarb season and I’d love to send it a fond farewell and talk about the importance of perennial crops on our farm. Rhubarb season lasts from early to mid May through early to mid June in most cases. The rhubarb yield was on the lower side this year. I think that’s attributable to both the intense rainfall we had in the first half of last season and the lack of rainfall we had in the second half. Many perennials “bank” energy in their roots that they use the following season. Without this banked energy the yield can be lower.
Last year we attempted to expand our rhubarb patch from about 4 plants to around 40 plants. We bought the crowns, transplanted them in mid-May and then they were obliterated by torrential rain. We only had about 3 plants survive of the 35 or so we planted. A major disappointment and a waste of money, labor, and energy. We thought we’d try again this year and here’s what we’ve got so far:
Each yellow flag marks a rhubarb plant. Almost all of them made it!
Our rhubarb planting was a big success this year! We have near 100% of the crowns we transplanted emerge and if the weather is halfway decent this season we’ll be well on our way to have an abundant rhubarb supply! You may notice some spindly grassy looking stuff in between our rhubarb rows. That’s a winter rye cover crop we planted to help keep the weeds down while the rhubarb gets established.
Why are perennial crops important?
Before we get into why perennial crops are important let’s go ahead and define what a perennial crop is. Perennial crops are crops that come back year after year without having to replant each spring. Some perennial crops you may already be familiar with are asparagus, raspberries, and strawberries.
There are two big reasons perennial crops are important. First, because they come back year after year we end up not having to till or disturb the soil around them. This helps to improve our overall soil health and especially in the areas where our perennial crops reside.
The second reason is that we have some obtuse areas on the farm. That is, spaces on the farm where the beds and rows aren’t uniform length and where we have other farm infrastructure set up. It’s difficult to get our tractor and many of our tools in these spaces and it’s difficult to approximate harvests with non-uniform areas. That’s where perennial crops can come in. We can plant perennials in these obtuse spaces to make use of these spaces and not have to deal with the headaches mentioned previously.
The space along the north end of our tunnels is obtuse and perfect for perennials!
Climate Adaptation: Waterway Mix Seeding
In 2024 we experienced catastrophic flooding on our farm. We received a years worth of rainfall in just May and June. You may recall the nearby Rapidan Dam failed, downtown Mankato homes and businesses had flooded basements and many farmers experienced significant crop loss and difficulty accessing their fields. Unfortunately, climate models predict that these types of storms will only happen more frequently as the planet continues to warm.
This year we took action to help adapt our farm to climate change. We decided to take more of our lowest ground out of production and plant a cover crop that consists of a mix of species that can better withstand wet soil conditions. To compensate for the lost ground we took some of our pasture land into vegetable production.
The cover crop mix will provide a variety of benefits to the farm and the environment around us. First, it will help to reduce soil erosion during heavy rainfall events resulting in less soil ending up in the waterway. Second, it will help to reduce the amount of nutrients from our soil that are leached into the waterway. Finally, it will help suppress weeds and be relatively low maintenance - requiring mowing only a couple times per year.
A bit of history on our farm. Before the mid 20th century there was a creek that ran right through our farm. See the photo below. The powers that were decided it would be a good idea to move the creek such that it was square with the section. It wasn’t a good idea. Every time we get a heavy rainfall the creek is formed anew and precisely where it had been. Mother natures wants her creek back.
The green rectangle is where our farm is located. The dark wiggly line intersecting the green rectangle is where the creek was.
Back to the waterway mix. Below is a photo collage of the steps I took to seed the mix including a picture from last year that shows the flooding and if you look into the background of the photo you can see the “creek.” Also, not pictured is the first tillage pass I made to loosen the soil and knock down weeds.
Today, as I write this, it’s raining softly and steadily which will be perfect to get the waterway mix seeds germinated and growing! We can’t wait to see what it looks like in a couple years when it’s well established!
Weed Control 101
Weed control is something every farmer has to deal with. On our farm, we don’t spray chemicals on our crops or use pre emergent herbicides to control weeds which means we have to work really hard to control weeds on the farm. It doesn’t take long for weeds to get out of control and choke out the crops you’re trying to grow. Here’s how we do it.
Flameweeding
We use our flame weeder to burn small weeds just as they’re emerging from the soil and before our crops emerge. Because many weeds will germinate and sprout before our crops come out of the soil we can give our crops a head start by burning the weeds off. It’s been an effective tool for us especially in carrots and cilantro which have relatively long germination periods.
Our flame weeder.
Finger Weeding
No, not your fingers (although we do hand weed too). Finger weeders are discs with polyurethane “fingers” that spin and flick weeds out of the soil when they are young and vulnerable. This tools works particularly well on transplanted crops where the crop is vastly bigger than the weeds.
Finger weeders in yellow. Notice how the fingers penetrate into the soil in the row.
Tine Weeding
Tine weeding is a type of blind cultivation - that is, cultivation that is “blind” to the crop rows - that uses many small wires that vibrate in the soil and help to uproot very small weeds.
Closeup of the tine weeder.
Hand Weeding
Hand weeding is the most expensive and slowest weeding on the farm. All of the tools above help us reduce the hand weeding we have to do. We won’t completely eliminate hand weeding but in many cases we can reduce the time we spend hand weeding by 70% to 90% by using the tools above at the right time.
Finally, we take all of these tools together and apply a couple principles to them and we arrive at our weed control methodology.
Cultivate after every rain/irrigation session.
If you can see the weeds, it’s already too late to be most effective.
Stack cultivation tools as much as possible. Stacking tools means you use more than one method on each crop as often as possible.
Never let a weed go to seed.
Plant cover crops in fallow ground.
A Nice Spring Rain
We had a very much needed soaking rain over the past few days. My rain gauge said about 2.4” of rain and we needed every drop. It probably comes as no surprise that we’ve been busy planting and transplanting the past few weeks. We have a lot of seeds in the soil that were in very dry conditions and since seeds need water to germinate and spring to life we were eagerly anticipating the rain.
We do have irrigation but you may recall that last week we had a very, very windy week here on the farm. We had winds of 20MPH plus and some days as high as 45MPH which makes our overhead irrigation very ineffective. Most of the water evaporates or blows away before it hits the ground. So even though we have irrigation we could use to try to get our seeds to germinate we weren’t able to use it effectively. Further, we planted so many things in the last few weeks that we simply don’t have enough irrigation to water the entire farm. Thus, a rain was very welcome. Not to mention rainfall is always more uniform and seems to germinate our seeds much better than overhead irrigation.
Once things dry out we’ll have a flurry of tasks to complete that have been delayed because of the rain. We have a couple thousand transplants to get out into the soil, we have our next round of direct seeded crops to plant, we’ll need to make a cultivation pass across the entire farm to stay ahead of the weeds and we’ll need to continue hand weeding our crops. Luckily, we have a great farm crew this season and the weather is looking favorable for the next week or so!
Our overhead irrigation in action. You can see how a strong wind would make this very ineffective.
Meet Our Staff Part One
Every year we hire a small crew to help us with the work on our farm. Our staff not only work on the farm doing tasks like harvesting, weeding, and transplanting but they’ll also be present at our Farmers Market stand and help with our CSA pickup locations and delivery route. We’d like to take a moment to introduce you to some of them with additional introductions coming in part two.
Meet Katey
My name is Katey and I’m a recent graduate from the University of Minnesota. In my free time I enjoy anything outdoors including hiking, golfing, fishing, planting flowers, and especially feeding the birds! This season I’m most excited for the Farmers Market. My favorite vegetable is sweet corn!
Meet Maggie
Hi! My name is Maggie I’m currently at South Central College in North Mankato going for Agribusiness. In my free time I enjoy fishing, gardening, baking, and playing cards and games with family! This season I’m looking forward to learning more about sustainable practices. My favorite vegetable is green beans!
Spring projects continue here on the farm and it’s great to have the extra help getting these projects done.
Landscape Fabric
As a team building exercise and also a necessary job the crew laid down landscape fabric yesterday. This job was extra difficult because the wind was a little stronger than we like for installing landscape fabric.
We use landscape fabric in several ways on the farm. Landscape fabric is made over woven plastic “threads” that allow water and air to pass through but smother weeds. We use it on crops that will be in the field for a long time and are difficult to cultivate like tomatoes and peppers. We also use it on our lettuce which helps it to stay cleaner by limiting the amount of soil splash up from rain and irrigation and smothers the weeds. We’re also experimenting with using landscape fabric on our winter squash this season. We’ve always had trouble keeping the weeds out of the winter squash and we hope that the landscape fabric will make our winter squash more weed free!
Direct Seeding and Transplants
We’re on schedule with our direct seeding and transplants as we continue to experience dry weather allowing us to get a lot of field work done. The farm crew transplanted lettuce, bok choy, kohlrabi, napa cabbage, red cabbage, green cabbage, broccolini, and broccoli.
On the direct seed side I planted the next round of sweet corn, beets, carrots and cilantro as well as our vine crops including cucumbers, honeydew melon, watermelon, cucumbers, summer squash and zucchini. We really need a good shot of rain to get these seeds going.
Potatoes Planted (finally)
This week we finally were able to plant our potatoes. This is pretty late in the season for us. Most years we’ve had our potatoes planted by mid-April but the weather had other plans for us. In this blog post we’ll go over the 3 varieties of potatoes we grow, how we plant them, and why getting them in this late really isn’t too big of a problem.
Potato Varieties
There are hundreds (maybe thousands?) of potato varieties world wide. We grow three of them. Our goals are to provide something familiar but more flavorful and also have something new for you to try while having potatoes available for as much of the season as possible.
Red Norland
This is your typical red potato. They’re soft and creamy and one of the first potatoes available in the season. Our ideal size is somewhere between the size of a golf ball and a tennis ball. They are great any way you prepare them - I personally like them mashed or fried the best.
Cascade
This is your typical white potato. Very similar to a russet but with a much thinner skin. We like to grow these larger than red potatoes with ideal size being somewhere between an oblong baseball and softball. Because of their lower starch content these tend to fry up the best but are also great with any preparation method.
Amarosa
This is a fingerling potato which have become quite trendy in the culinary world in recent years. Fingerling potatoes are less round and more oblong and resemble fingers and their namesake. Amarosa fingerling potatoes have a pinkish red skin and pink flesh and they are absolutely divine roasted. They also make really good mashed potatoes. Our oldest daughter, Addie - 4, loves pink mashed potatoes!
How We Plant Potatoes
Prepare the soil: We apply fertilizer and use our field cultivator to prepare the soil for planting.
Make the furrow: We use our potato plow to dig a furrow.
Plant the potatoes. Did you know that the “seed” for potato is actually potato tubers from the previous season?
Cover them up!
We used to do almost all of this by hand but by making use of our potato plow and disc hiller attachments for our tractor we are able to drastically reduce the physical toil of this job!
Planting Late
The reason we were so late to planting potatoes this year is largely on account of the wet April we had. After about April 10th it was too wet to get out into the field with our tractor to plant potatoes. We decided to work on other tasks like transplanting onions and taking care of our tunnel crops while we waited for things to dry out.
This won’t have too big of an impact on timing and availability of potatoes this season. The potatoes will grow quickly now that it’s warm and we pre-sprouted them to help them get a little head start on growing before they went into the ground. We anticipate beginning to dig potatoes in mid-July starting with our red potatoes.
Improving Seedbed Prep
This week we’re going to go over a deep dive into seedbed preparation and go over some steps we’re taking this year to try to improve seedbed prep. Seedbed preparation is critical to the success of the farm. Optimal seedbed preparation gives the seeds we plant the best chance at becoming healthy and productive plants.
Historically, we’ve used a rototiller for our seedbed preparations. There are some big benefits to rototillers as well as some really huge drawbacks. The biggest benefit is that after rototilling you are left with a smooth, flat, and “fluffy” soil that is easy to work with. Unfortunately, that comes with a major drawback. Tilling is incredibly destructive to the soil as it essentially takes the top layer of soil and runs it through a blender which destroys soil health and structure. It also increases the chances that after a heavy rain fall our soil will crust over making it more difficult for our seeds to sprout.
Our tractor with rototiller attached.
We are planning to address this issue by using a different seedbed preparation tool: a field cultivator with harrow section. A field cultivator has many shanks with shovels (sometimes called sweeps) at the end of each shank. The shanks vibrate, dig up, and loosen the soil. While it’s still destructive it is much less destructive than the rototiller. The harrow section runs behind the shanks and levels the surface so it’s a little easier for us to use our seeders. We like to have a relatively flat surface because it makes all the follow-up work like weeding much easier.
We had this small field cultivator that my grandpa had built. It didn’t have a harrow section so we scoured the internet and found a company in Wisconsin that made a small harrow section that would work with our field cultivator. We’re planning to put this to use this year in an effort to improve our seedbed prep.
Field cultivator with ‘goosefoot’ shovels and harrow mounted on back.
The end goal is that we will preserve more soil structure while still having a seedbed that’s easy to work with our manual push seeders. We’ll know if this is successful or not by experience and observation. As we’re planting this spring we’ll be asking ourselves if our tools are easier to get through the soil or not. We’ll also be observing what happens after rain events. Are our seeds able to push through the top layer of soil easier or not?
We do foresee a couple problems and a couple additional benefits. One problem we might encounter is when we’re dealing with plant residue from last season. The rototiller does a good job of chopping up and burying old plant residue. We expect that the field cultivator will not work as well in this case. On the other hand, the field cultivator will be faster allowing us to cover more ground in a shorter period of time and with less fuel.
Our New Winter Tunnel Project
Those of you who have been following us for awhile know that for the past 4 or 5 years we’ve been dabbling in winter growing here in Minnesota. We’ve made some important observations and gained a lot of experience over the past few years and we have a good feel for which crops could survive our sometimes harsh winters and which do not. Combining that experience with work from other farms and farmers like us we’re planning to construct a new high tunnel designed specifically with winter growing in mind. In this post we’ll go over the features of this new tunnel, the crops we expect to grow, and the areas of uncertainty we have with this project.
Our biggest tunnel on a cold winter day.
There are several features of this winter high tunnel that will separate it from our other tunnels on the farm. Let’s go over them.
Double plastic layer. Our winter high tunnel will have two layers of plastic and be equipped with a blower to blow air in between the layers of plastic. This will give this tunnel a small amount of insulation to help the heat stay in the tunnel on the coldest of nights.
Swedish Skirt. This is an additional insulation layer around the perimeter of the tunnel designed to help keep the frost out of the tunnel. We’ll bury foam insulation board around the entire perimeter. The ground is an incredible heat bank and by slowing or eliminating frost from getting in the tunnel we’ll be able to continue growing further into the winter.
“Minimally Heated.” Over the past few years of winter growing we’ve discovered that many crops will survive temperatures below freezing. Crops like lettuce, scallions and bok choy can survive temperatures as low as single digits. By utilizing a high efficiency propane heater, convective tubing, and row cover we will heat the tunnel to 30-35* to keep these crops alive throughout the winter with minimal heating costs.
We’ve touched on this already but the crops we plan to grow include some of our most popular crops like lettuce, scallions, bok choy, cilantro & kohlrabi. Our goal here is to hit the best intersection of popular, high demand crops and cold tolerance. The ultimate goal then is to offer a all winter CSA that combines storage crops like beets, carrots, potatoes, onions & cabbage with winter crops like spinach, lettuce, bok choy to offer a really well rounded share even in the depths of winter.
Winter crops inside our biggest high tunnel
There are some unknowns here. First, we basically no experience with a heated tunnel which brings up some concerns. First, we’ll closely monitoring condensation inside the tunnel which can be a vector for disease for our winter crops. Second, we’ll be closely monitoring pest issues - last season we noticed aphids in our crops and we think that our mild winter combined with the protection of our tunnel allowed the aphids to survive when they normally wouldn’t. Finally, we’ll be monitoring heating costs - we’ve run the numbers through a thermal unit calculator which indicates it will be relatively cheap to run but the numbers are just an estimate and real world experience is what really matters.