Grow With Us: Our Farm’s “Tractor” Video

You've probably seen massive farm machinery crisscrossing the countryside the past few weeks as corn and soybean farmers work tirelessly to get their crops harvested while they can. Farm machinery comes in all shapes and sizes. For specialty crop farmers, farm machinery is smaller in size and highly specialized to their contexts. See how one …

Grow with Us: Harvesting Potatoes

Farmers and gardeners all over the state are starting to harvest their fall crops. Though they're not widely grown commercially in Illinois, potatoes are a fun and simple garden crop to grow. It's always exciting to see how much grew underneath the soil all summer long. In today's Grow With Us video, we're harvesting potatoes …

Grow With Us: Baling Hay

It has been beautiful, sunny weather across much of the state the past couple weeks. That means it's perfect time to bale some hay! Chris, our Education Manger, has baled hay with his family since he was in middle school. And now, his own son gets to sit in the tractor with his grandpa to …

Grow With Us: Food Preservation

Today on "Grow With Us" we are talking about food preservation. For those who garden, knowing how to preserve the bounty of your garden's summer harvest is very important if you want to be able to eat your homegrown food year round. For the rest of us, we still eat food that has been preserved …

Grow With Us: Growing with Hoophouses – 5/21

In this edition of "Grow With Us" we look at the concept of growing with "protected culture." Protected culture means growing crops in some kind of a controlled environment. On this small specialty crop farm, the farmers are using unheated hoophouses to extend their growing season beyond the frost free dates of the season and …

Grow With Us: Planting Lettuce

On today's Grow With Us video we are planting lettuce! For our farm, lettuce is a quick-growing crop that is in high demand in local markets. We grow lettuce in 50-foot-long beds using landscape fabric and drip tape for irrigation. The varieties of lettuce that we grow can actually be harvested more than once. This …

Grow With Us: Container Gardening

Check out our newest "Grow With Us" video all about starting a container garden! You don't have to have tons of room in your yard to start a garden. You can grow lots of food and flowers in containers! We even sometimes use recycled containers as well. Now is the perfect time to start your …

Grow With Us: Farm Cooler

When you think about the most important tool on a farm, what comes to mind? A tractor? Some kind of cultivation or tilling tool? Sometimes the most important tools are the ones that aren't even directly related to growing our food. On our small specialty crop farm, one of the most important tools we have …

Grow With Us: Wheat Grinding and Baking Bread

Today's "Grow With Us" video is all about wheat. We don't grow any wheat on our small farm, but we sure do bake a lot with flours made from wheat! Watch our video to learn about the different types of wheat, how flour is made, and how you can then turn flour into bread. Our …

Grow With Us: Growing and Harvesting Tulips

Today's video shows you how we grow, harvest, and sell tulips on our small specialty crop farm. https://youtu.be/i425J4AgTWw Here are the steps we follow to guarantee that we get a hoophouse full of tulips every spring: Step 1: Tulip bulbs are shipped to us in the fall.Step 2: We store bulbs in our walk-in cooler …