Thursday, December 20, 2012

Farm Blog Posts

I have an idea for this blog for next year (which starts in a week and a half).

Farmer Cam Flaherty's Great-Uncle Albert is going to write some posts on farming. He actually suggests that to Cam in A Tine to Live, a Tine to Die. (Today's exciting news is that the book is up for pre-order with its gorgeous cover on both Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Whee!)


I already have a garlic-planting post planned out, one on battling woodchucks, and another on planting fall greens. Albert can talk about pruning fruit trees in early March, about planting buckwheat as a summer cover crop, and about putting the fields to bed in late fall. Composting is already at least partly covered in TINE, but that's a possibility, too.

The posts will likely show up every other week so as not to over burden the author (me!) who is writing furiously on the second book in the series, so far titled 'Til Dirt Do Us Part.

What farming or gardening topics would you like to read about? If you are a grower of food, what's your most challenging crop, and your most enjoyable? If you don't have that much success with your green thumb, what would you like help with?

6 comments:

  1. Hi Edith ... we know each other from the Guppy list. I love this idea of having your character blog about farming. That sounds like a lot of fun!! :)

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  2. I've interviewed a lot of farmers in my work with farmland preservation in New England, but I'm not sure that casual readers would want to read about some of the issues most important to real farmers -- costs of fuel, feed, and fertilizer rising faster than the prices they can sell their goods for, the farmer's retirement being wrapped up in his/her land creating the incentive to sell to developers, the US losing 1-2 acres of farmland per minute to development, necessity of subsidies because the public isn't willing to pay the true cost of some foods -- I could go on. Farmers live with a lot of risk.

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    1. I agree, Llyn. I think I'll stick to cheerier topics like growing great garlic.

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  3. How about something on growing flowers, herbs, or vegetables on a deck that does not get a lot of sunlight? For example, I would like to try something other than tomatoes, impatiens,violas,etc, all of which I've done in the past. What more unusual items do well in boxes on decks?

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