As far as unpredictable weather months go, October might be champion. Each year it brings a guessing game. Will it stay warm, or even hot? Will it rain nonstop? Will the frost come early? And if the cold does arrive sooner rather than later, do you know how to minimize damage to your fruit? That’s w...

If there was a perfect place to hold a Christmas tree summer meeting, it would be in a bucolic setting among rolling hills and neatly trimmed trees. That’s what attendees at the Pennsylvania Christmas Tree Growers Association (PCTGA) were treated to during the organization’s summer meeting hosted re...

There are a lot of options out there when it comes to substrates: soil, first and foremost, but also sphagnum peat moss, coir, perlite, vermiculite and bark. Luckily, growers in the U.S. have an enormous supply of bark coming from the Southeast – or, as one researcher calls it, “the wood basket of t...

Effectively managing the farm family’s finances can make the difference between a farm succeeding or folding. MidAtlantic Women in Agriculture recently presented “Managing Farm Family Finances” with presenters Maria Pippidis and Jesse Ketterman, both Extension educators. Pippidis is with the Univers...

You’re probably scratching your head trying to figure out where I’m going with this column since it’s only October, although your fields are full of pumpkins and the woods are dressing in their finest tapestry of autumn colors. When I was growing up, the time interval between Thanksgiving and Christ...

Without knowing what they’re called, it’s still very likely you’re familiar with radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags. They use electromagnetic fields to automatically identify and track tags attached to objects. In the livestock industry, they’re often found in the ear tags of cows. They’re o...

For many direct marketers, special events account for a large portion of their annual income. Fall festivals, harvest celebrations and corn mazes, to name just a few, concentrate buyers in one place at a specific time. The benefits of these events are large-scale sales. Two other benefits are increa...

When Ken and Mary Jo Dries determined it was time for someone to start taking over the business management side of their orchard, their nephew John Bzdil was ready. Bzdil explained that the family’s interest in growing fruit began with Ken’s father, who cultivated some fruit trees in his yard and so...

A team of researchers has found that existing regulatory and ethical guidelines are not limiting the widespread introduction of invasive plants. Of the 1,285 identified invasive plants in the continental U.S., 61% – a total of 778, including 20 species that are illegal to grow or sell nationwide – r...