Fruition: Local Foods Blog

April 15, 2022Juli Pomainville

Create a cut flower garden Part I: Planning

“Don’t wait for someone to bring you flowers. Plant your own garden and decorate your own soul.” -Luther Burbank

Walking through my gardens, sometimes it’s hard to think about cutting the flowers to bring them indoors, but the idea of a designated area for plants that are expressly grown to be cut is appealing. Whether you find a spot to fill with flowers or you add a few flowers to your vegetable garden doesn’t matter; what matters is that you get the flowers in the ground and enjoy them.

Zinnias are a popular annual for cut flower bouquets

If it’s your first year, you may want to start with annuals rather than committing space to perennials. Do a little research to find an array of plants that bloom throughout the summer. You will need long-stemmed flowers, some blooms to serve as focal points in your bouquets, and maybe some with a particular scent that you love. You’ll want some smaller blooms with accent colors, some filler plants with small, spread-out blossoms (think dill, or baby’s breath), and some plants with beautiful foliage. My mom always liked some spikey greens in there, too. I did a little homework for you and included a chart below with bloom times.

March 23, 2022Lauren Olson

First Ever Ag and Food Producers Academy: Complete!

On March 12th at the Learning Farm, we wrapped up the first ever Ag & Food Producers Academy. Over the course of 8 weeks Academy participants had the opportunity to attend a variety of business and marketing classes tailored to small scale food and farm businesses. Four courses were held online during weeknights for 3-4 weeks. Topics led by specialists and educators included, Social Media Management, Business and Financing, E-Commerce For Producers and Food Businesses and Making Food Products in New York State. As a fairly new Educator here at CCE, who works with food producers and farmers looking to boost their marketing, I found myself teaching and leading the social media course. It was a great opportunity to blend the online social media marketing world with the realities of running your own food and farm business. You can read more about the specific topics and instructors HERE. While the majority of the learning took place online, the closing event allowed us to meet each other in-person and share conversations over some delicious food.

Participants talking over some freshly brewed tea

We had a wide range of guest presenters and speakers such as Lissa Goldstien of Wild Work Farm talking about her ECommerce platform and Chrissy Claudio of Simply C Farm explaining how she organizes her finances. Participants were also able to watch an interview with Food And Ferment co-owner Carly Dougherty explaining how they’ve scale their value added food business and hear from Dillion Kleepetar of Farmstead catering talking about how to best approach a social media strategy, just to name a few. It was a pleasure to hear all of their insights and stories and allowed for some great questions and conversations, and proved to be some participants favorite part of the classes. One participant shared, “The guest speakers were very inspiring, and hearing how they incorporated different e-commerce platforms into their businesses was very informative.”

March 14, 2022Carolyn Filippi

Start Seeds Outdoors Now with Winter Sowing!

Winter Sowing means starting seeds outdoors in Winter. Yes, even here in zone 4, you can winter sow seeds from January through early April. I had heard that winter sowing was an easy and inexpensive way to start plants without the expense of an indoor growing setup. And that winter sowing produced sturdy plants and eliminated the time-consuming process of hardening off (transitioning your plants from indoor growing conditions to outdoor conditions). And it also helps cure that itch to be gardening when the world outside is cold and white.

It may sound crazy to sow seeds in winter but if you think about it, lots of plant seeds overwinter outdoors and then germinate when conditions are right. And not just cold-hardy plants. How many times have you found “volunteer” tomatoes or squash or annual flowers growing in your garden from the previous year’s planting?

To show winter sown jugs in the snow — These jugs are each winter sown with different seeds.

Curiosity got the best of me, so I decided to do some research and give it a try. I’ve been starting seeds indoors for several years, so I am eager to compare the results of some winter sown seeds to those started indoors under lights.

As this is my first year to winter sow, I can’t share my experience, but I’d love to share some of what I’ve learned from my research. As with any gardening method, there are various opinions on the best way to accomplish a given task but I hope to give you enough basic information in this article and additional resources to enable you to try this on your own.

There’s still time! As of this writing in mid-March, one look outside tells you it’s still winter!