In the thick of winter, perusing seed catalogs and planning for next season is an exciting task. I’ll share a little about our process and how we tackle crop planning and variety selection.
The most important thing about crop planning is being able to reflect on the past season and refer to any notes you might have made about a crop’s field performance or yield. While it can seem daunting or difficult to upkeep during the busy summer months, figuring out a system that works for you to jot down any thoughts when they’re fresh makes the next winter’s crop planning much easier. I usually make notes either in my seeding schedule spreadsheet that I can access via Google Sheets on my phone, on the notes app of my phone, or I take photos of crops throughout the growing season, especially to compare varieties.
As a team, we go through each crop in our crop plan discussing a few things for each. At a very highest level, we first discuss how many beds we want to grow and whether or not we want to add or remove beds, or change the number of successions.This information comes from how we felt the quantities were for our outlets, like CSA, produce donation program, and our one regular farmer’s market.
Once we figure that out, we then can discuss the breakdown of varieties and how much we want to plant of each. When we evaluate a variety, we are also looking at field performance, disease resistance, field holding ability, yields, harvest windows, and a little bit of taste. When we look at new varieties we look for words like “high yielding, prolific, widely adapted, holds well in field, vigorous, easy to grow, big blocky fruits, updated version with improved disease resistance, resist cracking (tomatoes)”. We steer away from words like “heirloom, unique, pleasant flavor, stunning color”. These might be desirable for a different type of farm, but for us, we need to focus on the most productive varieties so we can increase our produce donation program and support our large CSA. We don’t do restaurant or wholesale accounts, which might favor more specialty varieties. We recognize the need and importance of heirloom varieties, but they don’t necessarily work for us in our mission and farm model. We use every bed in our 12 acres, so we have to make each bed count!
Here is an example portion of our crop plan, a little explanation below of the colors:
We color code our crop plan by family, so dark brown is the Chenopods, Yellow is Umbles, Blue is Brassicas, Green is lettuce, Red is Nightshades, Orange is Cucurbits, Purple is flowers/herbs, and dark blue is Chicories. It makes it very easy to navigate when you can find each crop very easily. The light orange shows that it is a direct seeded crop: we transplant all our beets except our last succession for winter, and obviously carrots are direct seeded.
We also discuss any cultural changes like plastic mulch vs. bare ground. 70% of our plastic mulch is Bio360, the biodegradable black plastic mulch. We are going to experiment this year with the white on black Bio360 on a handful of crops. This year, Kirstie and Trent did a deep dive into the scientific studies on the ingredients of the biodegradable mulch. I won’t go into the particulars here, that could be an entire blog post on its own, but I wanted to highlight the amount of dedicated research that is helpful when crop planning. Before changing anything, it is always important to do your own research and be responsible for gathering as much information as you can.
We buy a good amount of our seeds from Johnny’s, Fedco, and Totally Tomatoes, and a few different crops from High Mowing, Uprising, Southern Exposure, and Osborne.
Here’s some of our favorite varieties:
Lettuce – Sierra: amazing heat tolerance grown year round
Peppers – Orano, Cornito Rosso, Cornito Giallo, Biscayne: super productive with good field production
Eggplant – Turkish Delight: Asian eggplant, super productive, and larger and more round than other asian eggplant
Tomatoes – All of our tomato varieties are chosen for disease package. They are all grown outside in the fields: Chef Choice Orange, Chef Choice Bicolor, Big Beef Plus, Celebrity Plus, Lemon Boy, Carbon (our one tried and true heirloom!), Estiva.
Winter Squash: Delicata, Waltham Butternut, Pinnacle Spaghetti, Jester Acorn
Cucumbers: anything with downy mildew resistance like Bristol, Gateway etc. and Supremo or Max Pack pickling
Summer Squash: Zephyr, Dunja, Green Machine, Golden Glory
Beets: Boro, Merlin, Touchstone Gold
Potatoes: Lehigh, Peter Wilcox or Purple Sun, Dark Red Norland
In a future blog post, I’ll share about how we take the information from this crop plan and make it into our master seeding schedule spreadsheet that outlines when we start everything in the greenhouse!