These hand forged iron and walnut handle garden tools are made in the USA.   Beautiful and pleasantly useful, these tools are well cared for and stored carefully, too. Reading The Founding Gardeners by Andrea Wulf, I come across this quote by Benjamin Franklin:  “I do not know a single article….that the colonies couldn’t either do […]

Garlic for the southern region of the USA:  Choose the softneck types including Cuban Purple, Inchelium Red, Ajo Roja, Siciliano, Susanville.  Note:  if you are reading about garlic scapes on the garlic crop,  it is probably a hardneck type of garlic which do not grow as well in the south as do the softneck types. […]

In 1945  4.5 million honeybee hives existed in the USA.  By 2007 that hive count was down to 2 million hives.  What happened post World War II? Industrial Agriculture.  Mechanization, factories and war time chemicals needed a new outlet after the war.   Big Ag supplied it.  Larger farms using machines planted mono cultures of […]

Raising chicks is not especially difficult if we understand what they need and don’t need in the first few weeks.  It is rewarding and satisfying to care for creatures beyond ourselves and our pets.   For us, Barred Rock chicks were our first livestock.  We were living in a neighborhood and preparing to move to the […]

Heritage Breed chickens fit our farm model.  Hardy with the ability to reproduce.   Over the past 5 years, we have kept Wyandottes, Barred Rocks, Plymouth Rocks, Dominiques, and Americaunas.  Each of them worthy of keeping.   However, we decided to become the steward of a more threatened foundational type breed and so we  narrowed […]

Monarch populations dangerously close to disappearing from the earth.  The winter of 2013/2014 saw their wintering grounds in Mexico shrink from a high of 30 acres covered in monarchs to approx 3 acres.  And they were late arriving.  We are late in understanding the importance of saving a flagship pollinator species like the monarch.  Two […]

Gardening is both utilitarian and pleasurable.  We know it and our founding fathers knew it, too.  Andrea Wulf’s book, The Founding Gardeners,  is a story of two countries, the gardens and the gardeners/statesmen.  The story moves from America to England, and back again, just as the plants and seeds of Philadephia farmer and plantsman John […]

The dairy barn where we gather as a community.  Sometimes it is a community of beekeepers, family, friends,  UGA students, historians.   This was a lunch meeting occasion.  The cow painting, created by local artist and friend Chris.  She painted a cow that she saw in a pasture.  The flowers are bachelor buttons grown by friend […]

Local history was a topic at yesterday’s lunch with neighbors.  An aerial view of Hedgerow Farm in the 1940’s was duly examined for buildings and barns now disappeared. A land deed from 1888 described the farm boundaries by forestry narrative. This historic article turned the talk to trees such as the Chestnuts that once thrived […]

At Hedgerow Farm we plant heirloom, open-pollinated seeds.  We buy these seeds from companies that have signed the safe seed pledge.  The Texas Red Hill Okra planted this summer grew from such seed.  Vigorous,  proven, and with traits that fit our farm’s environment, it thrived without the use of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides.  The […]