Avoid crops that are hard to tell when ripe and don’t continue ripening off the vine

Pickers generally like plants that are upright, where the produce is exposed and easy to reach. Consider the tomato picking experience. We always start double the tomato plants we need as insurance against late frosts, then give away and/or compost the ones we don’t end up needing. In 2020, we were faced with unprecedented demand to come pick

This variety produces abundantly so we have grown it since we started farming. The only drawback is one light rain shower and the skin on every ripe Nugget splits. For the farmers market this was no big deal, I would simply pick around them and let the split ones go soft and fall off. All my customers saw were tills of perfect cherry tomatoes on

If a crop is unappealing if not sorted or prepared in some way for market it should be dropped from the crop mix, or risk bad reviews about the quality of the produce at your farm. We don’t grow corn, but an example we deal with at Pure Land is Golden Nugget cherry tomatoes.

ripe piece of produce out of the field, and we do have customers more interested in the produce than the picking (particularly older folks). If the effort brings in more than it costs to execute, having a staff member harvest, prep, store, and market surplus produce in a farm stand on site may be the next most efficient means of sale.

With enough manpower, storage, and production, a farm stand could be an effective means of dealing with surplus produce. We lack two of the three, but increasing production is leading us to consider adding manpower and storage. No matter what, pickers do not get every

we planted half our normal short-day varieties and half similar intermediate-day varieties, and it worked like a charm. The intermediate-day onions were ready a few weeks later, so we concentrated pickers in the short-day varieties first, then let them into the intermediate ones as they matured, leaving hardly any short-day onions left for us to

To increase the number of onions that would be available for guests to pick, we needed onions that matured a little later so they could stay in the ground longer. The following year,

In climates where weather conditions can be harsh and swing dramatically during the season, variety selection can be critical to good production. Over the years we’ve experimented with growing over four dozen varieties of tomatoes, but we now only grow the same handful every year. Find the best-suited varieties for your unique soil, pest and