Updates From The Farm
Codling Moth Tracking Tool
It's time to track heat units so you can control codling moth and apple maggot in your orchards. If you haven't set up this tool for yourself at home, I'll walk you through the steps. The past two summers have been hard ones for the home orchardist. Both codling moth...
Salad Greens Production
by Matthew McDermott, production manager, and Rob Jordan, post harvest manager For many people, mixed baby greens are a popular salad choice all year round. As part of the CMFC food production, mixed baby greens are grown for the local wholesale and retail outlets...
Managing Your UFO Cherries
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYO3PQR3a2w In an earlier post we described the fundamentals of growing and training cherry trees to the UFO system. This training system is easy to understand and simple to execute...
My Role as a Second-Year Intern
By Chrissy Hoefgen Cloud Mountain Farm Center is a very diversified organization; growing a number of perennial and annual fruits, vegetables, and ornamentals requires many helping hands. In addition to the twelve full time staff members on site, CMFC also hosts seven...
Grape Grafting at Cloud Mountain Farm Center
As the rain pours down outside and the wind howls off the mountain through this cold and dreary spring, a crew of diligent grafters works away in the little propagation house behind the nursery. They are grafting grape vines, literally building the plants that will...
Native Plants for Your Landscape
By Layla Dunlap, CMFC Nursery Manager As I look out over Cloud Mountain Farm Center’s Nursery from our office window, I see brilliant colors starting to pop-up as spring slowly arrives. It gets me excited about warmer weather, hiking season, and botanizing....
Spring Soil Preparation
These last weeks of March, as winter begins to loosen its heavy grip, many of us get excited to get early ground turned in preparation for peas, oats, and anything else we thing we might get to survive the remaining spring awakening in the still cold, 42°F soils....
Timing Delayed Dormant Sprays
Fruit trees are interesting plants to grow. Humans have been selecting for better fruit for centuries, and in the process, some of the natural resistance to pests and diseases have been lost. A further challenge is our mild rainy climate, which is perfect for fungal...
Renovating an Older Apple Tree
There are many century old apple orchards scattered around Puget Sound. The San Juan Islands had over 10,000 acres in tree fruits in 1900. Whatcom County had somewhere around 5000 acres that were apples, some pie cherries and plums. There were two packing plants, the...
Internship 2016 Reflections
We were just reflecting on the internship season we’ve just finished and thought we’d share one of our favorite memories: In week 28 of 35 we are in the heat of summer, interns have drafted most pieces of a business plan, been through most of the heavy technical...
Inside the Internship: Sean McWay
By Sarah Miller Last month I spoke with intern Sean McWay, a Missouri native, about his time at Cloud Mountain Farm Center. Sean is drawn to the joys of being outside, working with his hands, and the scientific inquiry farming can provide. This is an unsurprising...
The Best Time To Plant
I wanted to expand on my last post about summer planting. A more general question we get in the nursery at Cloud Mountain is "when is the best time to plant?" In our maritime climate, you can plant almost any time of year. But as I discussed in the last post, summer...