SIFT News - Winter 2014

Planning Is the Issue of the Day at the SIFT Farm When you're in the midst of a winter that has seen temperatures free-fall as far as 30 below zero, it's a good time to stay inside, have a cup of cocoa, and sit down to do some planning. At the SIFT farm in Butte, there are strawberries overwintering in a hoop house, and garlic, asparagus, and hedgerow plants overwintering in the ground outside, but they're all dormant and don't need any attention.>>more Maximize Production with Succession Planting When operating on a small scale, growers must do what they can to maximize the production value of the space they have. To yield higher returns per unit area, farmers will employ strategies like growing high-value and highly prolific crops. And to ensure a continuous harvest that will draw (and maintain) a consistent supply of customers and revenue throughout the season, especially for crop plants that don’t produce all season long, small farmers will schedule successive plantings so they can harvest multiple times from the same area over the course of the season and considerably increase total crop yields.>>more Garden Planning: Staving off the Winter Blues When planning a garden, sometimes the options of where, how, and what may seem rather overwhelming. There are multiple methods on how to go about growing yourself some veggies, however, and navigating all these various options should help winter go by just a bit faster. Here are a few things to consider when dreaming about a garden this winter.>>more Keep It Light: Planning, Bleh By nature, I am not a planner, at least not a pencil-to-paper or spreadsheet planner. I am a husband, dad, manager, woodworker, metalworker, house remodeler, gardener, hunter, fisherman, and cook. I've read articles and books on all of these subjects at one time or another. And, the one thing that a majority of the expert how-to authors seem to agree on is that I should have prepared detailed written plans on all of these activities before I ever even think about starting them. But, come on, if I did that I would have paper out the proverbial ying-yang. The forests would all be clear cut. If I had planned everything out to the nth degree I wouldn't have done half the things I've done in my life. I’d still be planning the other half of them.>>more © 2013 - National Center for Appropriate Technology (NCAT).