My first real taste of market gardening was in 1959 when I was twelve. My grandfather had three acres of green beans, two acres of sweet corn, several fruit trees, milk cows and chickens. He paid me five cents per row to hoe weeds. My best day was 11 rows for $.55. I didn’t like the work much, but I loved my grandfather. Some of the best knowledge of my lifetime came in the cookie breaks under the pear tree. Those stories are too big for this page.
My professional life took me many places, and nearly everywhere we had a garden, sometimes because of necessity. Retirement brought us to our present home where I took up gardening in a big way. I took up the hybridization of daylilies as a way to keep fit and do something useful and contribute to the family income. The dream of breeding high performance plants with great beauty was hampered by very poor soil.
Frustration drove me to soil science. This led me to study with the Bionutrient Food Association where the focus is growing truly nutritious food achieved by attention to soil minerals, microbes, and natural solutions. The grower’s task is to discover and address all limiting factors that would hinder a plant from growing to its full genetic potential. This practice solves most pest problems naturally and yields the tastiest most nutritious food with the longest shelf life. Check them out at www.bionutrient.org
So we do soil remediation with compost, compost tea, worm compost, biochar (carbon for the soil to act as a hotel for microbes and sponge for water), rock dusts, soil testing, specific minerals, and practice no till–low till farming. In our improved soil we plant mostly organic seed and avoid GMO seed or seed grown in a Roundup context.
This journey has improved my results with the daylily plant performance, so that in recent years my plants were winners at the RADS Daylily Show held at Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens each June.
However nice winning shows is, my interest has returned to growing food. So we are transitioning from perennial pleasure plants to grow the most nutritious salad possible. Microgreens, baby greens, salad greens, carrots, beets, radish and basil in our first year, and consider other vegetables as we go. All these crops can be produced ten months of the year, and a few crops can grow year round, especially microgreens.
We chose the name “Bring Forth” because the phrase suggests exactly what our mission is, in the words of Noah Webster in his American Dictionary of the English Language of 1828, “ To bring forth is to produce, as young or fruit; also, to bring to light; that is, to make manifest, to disclose.” This, to me, describes a teaching farmer, who teaches his customers and fellow growers a better way to live and eat.
We welcome you to join this hard working effort to “make things right” by the purchase of what we produce. We believe that the food we grow is of superior nutritional value. We cannot afford to register as “Organic” but our practices are well beyond what is required to be organic. All natural inputs, organic non-GMO seed, no chemicals, man-made fertilizers, and minimal tillage in the effort to make our food our medicine.
Email us at bringforth4u@gmail.com or call 804-919-4054
