Flower Field with Row Covers
February 12, 2015
Farmers are always talking about the weather and this February is no exception. What started out as a mild but cloudy winter has turned into a bitterly cold winter in February. Since we don’t have a high tunnel or a greenhouse for growing winter crops, we use low tunnels or hoops covered with row covers to protect the plants. February night tempera...
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Meet Jenny
February 09, 2015
Jenny our Sheltie is a valuable member of our farm team. She chases marauders like deer, rabbits, ground hogs, and squirrels with great enthusiasm. We discovered she was an avid vegetarian when we found her chomping on fallen fruit and pulling out some of our spring veggies. To discourage her, Ray installed low fencing around our field and fruit or...
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Hand Weeding
February 08, 2015
On warm winter days, the plants and the weeds continue to grow under the protective row covers. Ray hand weeds the rows to make sure the weeds aren't winning the growth contest!
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Low Tunnels
February 08, 2015
So, let's jump in time from past years to the present, 2015. Most of the flowers that we cut in the spring are actually planted in the fall and protected from harsh winter weather by low hoops. We use pvc pipe to form the hoops and they are then covered with light weight row cover. On warm sunny winter days, we remove the row covers so that we can...
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Ray Creating our Flower Field
February 08, 2015
To apply our newly acquired Breeze Farm skills, we needed a field for growing plants. Renting land was out of the question. The logical but painful answer was to take down about an acre of trees in our backyard. That permitted lots of sunshine to reach the land and provided firewood for several years. Over the next year, Ray tilled leaf mulch, wood...
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Breeze Farm Crops
February 07, 2015
At Breeze Farm, we learned about growing crops organically, how to nurture the soil and minimize disease and pests using environmentally friendly techniques. The soil at Breeze was wonderfully rich and all our crops grew amazingly large, which at times, created a challenge in harvesting.
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Breeze Farm Incubator
February 03, 2015
As a result of my internship at Breeze Farm, I was transformed from a backyard gardener into a flower farmer. After completing 2 months of workshops led by local farmers, writing a business plan for growing crops at Breeze, Ray and I rented a ¼ acre of land on which we grew flowers and vegetables. Growing crops in a field is significantly different...
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