Intention is often used to describe what a person is thinking or feeling, but it more readily defines a person’s aim or plan. Customers visit your business with a plan – to visit, tour, check out the surroundings and, hopefully, purchase a product or service. You and your employees are responsible f...

If your late summer crops of beets, Swiss chard and spinach aren’t looking their best in the humid and overly wet weather much of the country has experienced recently, the culprit may be Cercospora beticola , a major pathogen of Chenopodium family crops. When you are growing a leafy crop such as Swi...

In this month’s column I will be discussing some apple facts and will share the history of some popular apple varieties. Apples can be grown in almost all the U.S. but temperature is a major limiting factor. Temperatures of less than 40 degrees for 900 to 1,000 hours are required to break dormancy. ...

It’s fall harvest time and your hands are literally full. Growers and orchard workers are climbing those ladders, wearing those buckets and carefully harvesting those apples. Other tree fruits and nuts, as well as grapes and berries, share many of the same harvesting concerns that apples do. Falls f...

Emily Holmes’ parents John and Elaine Olsen planted a 500-tree apple orchard in 1983; 35 years later their apple orchard has grown to 1,700 trees growing over 48 different varieties of apples. “When they started out in 1983, it wasn’t like this. They had a tiny farm stand, no trees and no cider pres...

The pop diva Whitney Houston sang “I believe the children are our future/Teach them well and let them lead the way.” This month, Country Folks Grower is introducing its readers to some of the youth that will be leading the way in the field of horticulture in the near future. The two “Grower Sprouts”...

Penn State Trial Garden Advisory Board Chair Andy Brown told Country Folks Grower that “Still the number one item out there in terms of units is calibrachoa [also called million bells]. It has an extremely wide color line, an incredible variety of colors, anywhere from solids to bi-colors, and it do...

Casey Vandervalk admitted that he didn’t know anything about growing Christmas trees when he and his wife Sue planted their first trees in 1984. “I planted Norway spruce,” said Casey, adding that he purchased young trees from a nursery in Maine. “We didn’t really know what we were doing.” Casey said...

It’s time for a refresher from biology class: you remember that animals inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. You remember that plants use carbon dioxide in photosynthesis and release oxygen. But do you remember what the air around us consists of? The air we breathe is only about 21 percent oxyge...