Longleaf Breeze

February is our big pruning month. I love it, working quietly using no noisy equipment. And pruning is a time to think about the future, trying to guess where the tree wants to gro...

We welcome my brother Dave Borden. He's the smartest person we know about longleaf pines. He describes why he loves longleaf pines, how he prepares to plant them, and why and how h...

Every year we plant about 300 longleaf pines. It’s relatively inexpensive, it’s fun, and it helps prepare the farm for the coming climate chaos. Longleafs are native to our region,...

We in the South are still reeling from a winter storm of historic proportions. We had lots of notice and time to prepare, but our friends in Birmingham got a surprise wallop. We de...

We continue to be blown away at the sheer size of this annual event, attracting 1,000 or so organic and sustainable farmers from across the southeast to mingle, exchange ideas, and...

Last week the temperature stayed below 15 degrees – our killing zone – for more than seven hours. Our first significant damage to brassicas from cold temperatures. Frost blanket ma...

This week we learn about the People’s Food Plan for Australia; we visit with Nick Rose, the National Coordinator of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance. We're inspired to thin...

We reflect on 2013. We had our best harvest ever of muscadines, peaches, pears, apples, and sweet potatoes, and our first harvest ever of persimmons and plums. But we had our fierc...

The hard red wheat that makes the best bread doesn't grow here in the South. So we consider buckwheat, rye, rice, barley, and oats. And then we throw out some more exotic options l...

Start and stay organic, learn from research, start small, grow close to where you live, full sun, drip irrigation, good soil, keep something growing year round, keep soil covered, ...

It's time to buy seeds for the spring. They're freely available online, but Amanda still prefers those paper catalogs. She studies and dreams, carefully calculating the many option...

We play detective. Taking each factor known to affect the cold-hardiness of brassicas, we try to determine what made the difference between the damage to kale, broccoli, and cabbag...