Companion planting is a management strategy of planting crops together. The idea is that each of the crops will benefit one another. Perhaps one repeals insects that attack another. Maybe one of the companions provides nutrients that the other plant can use. One plant could keep sun from the soil...
In the last couple of months, we have been ramping up work on the planned commercial kitchen in Freeport. You can read about some of our activities here in the Journal Standard. Two public meetings were held in Freeport in...
I apologize for the delay in getting back into the blogosphere. As most of you have dealt with this fall, there is unevenness. Some weeks are still allowing for tomatoes and peppers to cling on. Then the first very, very light snow mixture occurred in Freeport on Saturday, October 4. This week has...
In June, Governor Quinn signed into law HB5657 which modifies some of the farmers' market rules and regulations. New regulations included future streamlining of farmers market rules statewide, require a vendor to state the address where the vendor's products are grown, cap the fee a county health...
Recently I was giving an opportunity to speak to a group of community economic development educators and stakeholders at a conference in Dubuque, Iowa. I was part of a mobile bus tour along with UW and Iowa State Extension where we took a bus to Hook's Cheese (...
As I mentioned last week, I wanted to wait and talk about both Early and Late blights in a separate post as both of these can have serious consequences if they make it into your yard/operation. Late Blight is such an important disease that the USDA has a website for the mapping of Late Blight in...
The last week has proven a large infiltration of these disease causing pathogens of Fusarium/Verticillium, Bacterial Spot and Speck, and Septoria Leaf Spot. As I talked about previously on water, some of these can be worse than others and spread much easily. When it comes to diagnosing what you...
In the last couple of weeks, we've been experiencing a good amount of rainfall that has fulfilled most of our crops' water needs. This is in comparison to last year when we saw drought conditions at this time. So you might think it's misguided for me to bring up irrigation management at a time...
To kick off Pest of the Week , let's talk about a pest that you may be seeing. This past week I visited a grower that while we were looking at their potato plants we came across juveniles of the Colorado Potato Beetle (CPB).
Source: NC State University
It's a reddish, cream striped beetle seen...
What perfect timing it was to begin the blog for local foods in Northwest Illinois then to also have a great overview of local foods and agriculture written up in the Rockford Register Star's Rockford River Valley Insider's Agritourism section on June 22 (http://...