Earlier this week, I spent an entire day clearing off my kitchen table. No, I wasn’t cleaning up from a gourmet seven-course dinner. I was reclaiming it from a mass of paperwork. My kitchen table is my favorite all-purpose multi-tool. I occasionally serve meals on it, of course, but that isn’t its m...

Well-planned farm tours can be mutually beneficial for schoolchildren and the farms they visit. Students gain insight into where their food comes from, and the experience builds a foundational understanding of why farms matter to their communities. Farms are also a great place to reinforce STEM (sci...

Poinsettias may be the poster plant of the holiday season, but behind those brilliant bracts lies a production process packed with potential pitfalls. During her presentation “Poinsettia Pest Pointers” at Cultivate , Janna Beckerman, Ph.D., Green Solutions Team specialist at Envu, walked growers thr...

At the most recent Great Lakes Expo , a team comprised of Hannah Cushman, Alex Engelsma, Alaina Cavin, Rebecca Grumet, Randolph Beaudry, Ning Jiang and Courtney A. Hollender from the Department of Horticulture at Michigan State University shared the presentation “Mutations Matter: Apple Sport Resear...

Ox Heights Farm and North Star Chestnuts is a diverse 180-acre farm in the northeast corner of Michigan’s lower peninsula, about five miles from Lake Huron and Rogers City. Abby and Nick Johnson and their five children produce tree crops including chestnuts from 1,000 trees and peaches. They also ra...

“Better eat that peach on the kitchen counter before it draws fruit flies.” Nearly everyone has either heard or said that. Although common fruit flies are easy to manage in the kitchen, genetically similar spotted wing drosophila (SWD) adults are close to the same size and also seek fresh, ripe frui...

Two research teams are tackling one of the trickiest puzzles in apple production. In the presentations “EverCrisp, but not everlasting: Addressing internal browning issues in ‘EverCrisp’ apples” and “‘Honeycrisp’ internal browning: Chilling or CO2 injury?” Özge Horzum (Ankara University), Nobuko Sug...

State of the Industry keynote tackles tough topics at Cultivate‘26 Once again, the place to be the morning of Monday, July 13 in Columbus, Ohio, was the State of the Industry keynote session at AmericanHort’s annual Cultivate . A standing-room-only crowd was introduced to the organization’s new pres...

Until six years ago, Cassie Wipperfurth and her family were living on five acres in central Minnesota. Each year, the lawn became smaller and the gardens larger. She was a math teacher but longed to be gardening and spending more time with her three young children. When her husband’s job relocated i...