Farmers First
Hoes
Posted on June 1, 2026
Hello, farm family! Yesterday, an old memory resurfaced from some dusty corner of my mind. It was of my great-grandfather sharpening a hoe on our old foot-powered wheel grinder. Hoes We used hoes a lot on our farm back then. Naturally, we employed them for transplanting seedlings and weeding vegetab...
Farmers First
Time Flies
Posted on April 1, 2026
Hello, farm family! Have you ever walked by a weedy bench and thought, “I’ll just pull a few weeds,” only to realize you then worked for over an hour? Me too. The positive side of that is that I got lots of weeds pulled rather than just a few. The drawback is I now have less time to do the other thi...
Farmers First
Let’s Hear It For the Girls
Male or female, we’re all farmers, right?
Farmers 12 without a male co-signer. (That?s right: the same year the movie ?Die Hard? was released.) 
Posted on February 1, 2026
Happy International Year of the Woman Farmer, farm family! If someone had told me a decade ago that there would be an International Year of the Woman Farmer, I likely would have said something to the effect of, “Well, that’s the most unnecessary, gender-discriminatory thing I’ve ever heard of.” Some...
Farmers First, News
How much time do we have?
Posted on January 1, 2026
Happy New Year, farm family! As I type these words, I find myself straddling the space-time continuum in a way that I don’t often do. The change from one year to another has heightened my awareness of both the nature and passage of time. What is the nature of time? In my writing present, it is still...
Courtney Llewellyn 
June 1, 2026
In northwest Illinois, where fields flatten into horizon and seasons set the pace of life, Selmi’s Greenhouse & Family Farm stands as both a working f...
News
by Andy Haman 
June 1, 2026
Play is important for children of all ages, and children’s play areas can become an integral part of your agritourism operation – but these spaces mus...
News
by Sally Colby 
June 1, 2026
Jared Hughes’s entry into the plant and greenhouse business happened naturally. During college, he propagated succulents on his parents’ property and ...
News
by Enrico Villamaino 
June 1, 2026
At the most recent Cultivate Conference , growers packed together to soak up smart strategies on a deceptively simple subject: watering. In a session ...