This week Allison and I attended the 2019 New England Fruit and Veg Conference. It included three intensive days of seminars, trade shows, and talking with farmers from all around. We saw many familiar faces along with meeting some great new contacts.

Here are some great take-aways for the 2020 season:
– For long season crops such as onions (we plant 1800 feet of them in a season!) planting clover in the aisles instead of cultivating them weekly could be a viable option.
– leaving your cover crop to grow in June can double its biomass in ten days
– High snow fall in the winter can insulate your soil from freezing. without a deep freeze, more weed seeds will survive in the spring.
– If you are dealing with a high heat summer, covering some of your heat sensitive crops in a kaolin clay can help with heat stress.
– You can plant onions in the fall under a low tunnel for April – May harvests!
– In strawberries, it’s not hours of sunlight, but heat itself that keeps your strawberries growing. So covering them early in the fall right after planting will yield a better spring crop.

This list could keep going for a long time but I’ll leave it there. It was so nice to connect with all the other amazing farmers striving for knowledge and ways to make their farms run more efficiently. Now It’s our turn to head back onto the farm, turn on our computers, and apply all the new knowledge to our 2020 planting season!

Checking out some innovative new hand tools at the fruit and veg conference.

A warm thank you to everyone who came out to support the farm this season!

We’ll see you all in Spring!