Have you thought about your seasonal workload? On our farm, we grow vegetables for 500 weekly CSA baskets. We also grow seeds for an online store. These are very similar activities: We grow plants, harvest a crop, pack it up, and get it to the client. But these activities don’t happen the same way for … More The Opposite Seasons Of Growing Vegetable vs. Selling Seeds
This is the journey of how the Tourne-Sol co-operative Farm seed scoop collection evolved. It is also a story about how most of what we know as farmers we’ve learned from other farmers. Our First Seed Scoops In the early Tourne-Sol years, we grew seed for our own use and for a couple seed companies. … More The Tourne-Sol Seed Packing Scoop Story
This is the latest post about how we store seed at Tourne-Sol. Today we’ll look at how we label the seed in that room, You’ve likely noticed that seeds of different varieties of the same vegetable all look the same. Tomato seeds look pretty much the same. Brassica rapa seeds look pretty much the same. … More Labeling Seeds In Your Seed Room
These next couple posts will look at how we store seeds and how we manage seed inventory. … More Welcome to the Tourne-Sol seed room!
Let’s wrap up this tour of Fruition Seeds with the highlight of my visit: Packing Seeds With A Stamprite Seed Packing Machine Matthew plugs in the machine. Then fills the hopper with zinnia seed and calibrates the hopper. And action! When things are rolling, Matthew mentioned that they could pack upwards of 1200 packs an … More Packing Seeds At Fruition Seeds
Last night Tourne-Sol farm was featured on the TV show Les fermiers on Unis tv! Les fermiers is a show about what it’s like to be a farmer. The show follows Jean-Martin Fortier and the crew at la Ferme des Quatre-Temps through 2 growing seasons. During this episode I walked Annie-Claude and Justine around the … More Watch Tourne-Sol on Les fermiers TV show!
This is the second part of a series on crop planning for seed production. Seed production planning part 1 covered growing small trials to evaluate whether a variety was worth growing to seed on your farm in your climate. Once you’ve decided the varieties for this year’s seed production, you need to determine how much … More Seed Production Planning Part 2 – Calculating Seed Needs
Another farm Emily and I visited during our winter getaway last month was Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in Mineral, Virginia. I had met Ira Wallace from Southern Exposure at the Organic Seed Alliance conference in 2008. In addition to seed, we’d had a lot to chat about since Southern Exposure is run cooperatively similarly to … More Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
After every seed event we attend, I go through our seed displays and see which packets of what varieties are running low. I make up a list, print some labels, and get ready to pack some seed. SET PACKING STATION UP We lug out the seed. Take out the scales and seed packing scoops. Put … More Filling seed packets
We fill a lot of seed packets in January and February. To speed seed packing up we have a fine collection of calibrated seed scoops. For a long time this collection was just a pile of kitchen measuring spoon with gradations from 1/2 teaspoon up to 1.5 tablespoon. These measurements gave us a certain flexibility … More 15 new seed packing scoops for my collection