Market gardeners are always striving to maximize their garden’s efficiency. To be successful, they need to get the most quality produce out of the smallest space and least labor as possible. While home gardeners can take a more relaxed approach, these efficient market gardens still offer some great ideas for your backyard garden. These are five simple garden tools that are popular with market gardeners that can reduce labor and make your home garden more efficient so you can focus on enjoying your garden and harvest.

Push-Operated Precision Seeder

If you direct seed long rows of crops, a seeder with adjustments or seed plates for different crop types is indispensable. Most of these seeders will allow you to precision sow seeds as small as carrots and lettuce and as large as lima beans. They’re excellent for sowing long, straight rows that are easy to weed and manage.

There are a few different seeders on the market, with Jang and EarthWay seeders being popular options. These seeders offer different pros and cons, including very different price points. No matter what seeder you opt for, a push seeder can help you cut down on sowing time and remove the need to bend over for extended periods of time.

Row Cover

Row cover is a lifesaver in any organic garden. Organic market gardeners often rely on row cover in place of pesticides to keep crops like cabbages, broccoli, and kale free from pest damage. At Southern Exposure, we always use it over eggplant seedlings to protect them from flea beetles.

Row cover is also helpful in the shoulder seasons, extending your production window in spring and fall. It’s great for protecting early spring sowings of cool-weather crops like lettuce, arugula, carrots, and mizuna. You can use it the same way in the fall, to protect your crops from early frosts.

Row cover comes in different weights depending on your use. The lightweight row cover is ideal for insect protection while still being breathable and allowing in maximum sunlight. Medium-weight row cover still allows most sunlight through and is good for early spring growth and light frost protection. Heavy-weight row cover is best for heavy frost protection and overwintering crops, but it only allows 30% to 50% of sunlight through and can slow growth.

Typically, we use wire hoops to hold up row cover. They’re easy to place and move each season. Some gardeners make their own hoops with PVC or other flexible material to place over beds.

Silage Tarps

Many market gardeners are switching to no-till operations. No-till can help build soil structure, but it also helps cut down on labor. One effective way to prepare beds in a no-till operation is silage tarps.

Silage tarps are typically black plastic sheeting that you lay down over a planting area and hold down with weights. The tarps terminate vegetation and help suppress weeds to prepare an area for planting. Typically, you use mileage tarps for about 6 to 8 weeks before planting.

Wheel Hoe

Weeding is arguably one of the most labor-intensive parts of gardening. In the Southeast, when we have warm weather and plenty of rain, it can feel like the weeds can overtake the garden in just a day or two. One of my favorite gardens tool that can make keeping up with the weeds much easier is a wheel hoe.

Wheel hoes are manual garden tools that come with one or two wheels and a few different attachments to kill weeds, break up soil, create furrows, or hill soil. Some also allow for a seeder attachment, similar to the seeders discussed above.

One way a wheel hoe can help cut down on weeding time is with a stirrup attachment. Similar to a traditional stirrup hoe, a wheel hoe with a stirrup attachment will quickly cut through young weeds just below the surface of the soil. The wheel hoe eliminates the need for bending and is perfect for staying on top of weeds in long rows.

Popular brand include Hoss, AgTec, Tilmor, and Valley Oak Tools.

Broad Fork

Popularized by Eliot Coleman, broad forks are now a staple among no-till market gardeners. These heavy-duty forks allow gardeners to lift and aerate the soil without turning it over. Many broad forks are wide enough to span one entire bed, depending on your system. They’re a great tool for improving soil health.

Broad forks can be especially helpful for new no-till systems in areas with heavy clay or compacted soil. They’re great for loosening the soil without resorting to tilling.

Today, there are many brands of broad fork like Treadlite (pictured above), Meadow Creature, Johnny’s, and Neversink.  

 

You don’t really need any special tools to get started with gardening, but if you’re looking to make your garden more efficient next season and grow as much food as possible, these tools can help. These five garden tools are simple but effective. They’re popular with market gardeners because they decrease labor costs while improving the soil, eliminating weed pressure, reducing planting time, preventing pests, and extending the season.

What’s your favorite garden tool?

Peppers are stars in the summer garden, but quickly fall to autumn’s chilly frost. If you’ve still got peppers coming in from the garden, it’s time to get picking and preserving before the season ends. Here are a few ways to preserve peppers for winter use.

Note: When working with peppers, particularly hotter varieties, it’s a good idea to wear gloves and safety glasses and work in a well-ventilated area. We sometimes even wear masks when working with large quantities of hot peppers. While you wouldn’t normally do this to cook a pepper or two, processing large quantities of peppers can be extremely irritating.

Preserve Peppers with Pickling

If you love pickled banana peppers on sandwiches or pickled jalapeños on your nachos, this one is a great option. Pickled peppers are simple to make and safe for water bath canning, a straightforward process to make them shelf-stable at home.

You can create traditional pickled banana pepper or jalapeño rings or opt for something with a bit more seasoning, like this recipe for marinated peppers, which works well with bell, Hungarian, banana, or jalapeño peppers.

Ferment Your Own Hot Sauce

Hot sauce is a pantry staple, but few people make it at home. While there are hot sauce recipes that are as simple as blending peppers, vinegar, and salt, there’s also some amazing hot sauce recipes that rely on fermentation. The process isn’t as difficult as it sounds and is part of the flavor of some popular commercial brands like Sriracha and Tabasco.

You can use many varieties of peppers to ferment your own hot sauce. Serious Eats has a great deep dive into fermenting hot sauce at home, including how to select a hot sauce style, choosing your peppers, preparation, and even adding some additional flavors.

Preserve Peppers by Pressure Canning

Peppers are a low-acid food, meaning that if you want to water bath can them, you must pickle in vinegar, as mentioned above. If you want plain peppers without vinegar, you’ll need to pressure can them.

Pressure canning is a little intimidating, but it’s easier than you’d think and is a great way to put up many low-acid garden vegetables like green beans, peppers, or sweet corn. Pressure-canned foods are shelf-stable and ready to go when you need them.

The National Center for Home Food Preservation has instructions for pressure canning peppers and some great resourcesfor folks new to pressure canning.

Create Your Pepper Powders or Flakes

Drying or dehydrating your peppers is a great way to make your own spices or seasoning mixes. Drying works especially well if you’ve grown paprika, chili, or spice peppers, which have thinner, more tender skins and plenty of flavor.

If you’ve ever seen strings of chili peppers, you know that they’re an easy vegetable to air dry, as long as you can keep them somewhere warm and dry. To air-dry them, it’s best to string them. Thread a needle and create a loop at the tail end for easy hanging once you’ve threaded the peppers. Then thread the peppers by pressing the needle through the green stem or cap. Some people prefer to dry them indoors, while other people dry them into the open air and sunlight. Air-drying peppers can take 3 to 4 weeks.

For faster results, you can use a dehydrator. Depending on the variety and thickness, a temperature between 125° and 140°F will work well. Lay your peppers on the dehydrator rack in a single layer with air space between them. Large peppers may need to be sliced.

It can be tricky, but you can also dry peppers in your oven; you just don’t want them to get too hot and burn. Lay your peppers in a single layer on a cookie sheet with space between them. Turn your oven to its lowest setting and then place the peppers in with the door propped open with a wooden spoon. You can also turn the oven on for a bit and then turn it off again for a while, alternating until the peppers are dry.

No matter what method you use, you want your peppers to be dry and crisp. Then you can process them into chili flakes, spice blends, or even hot sauce.

Freeze Your Peppers

Unlike many other vegetables, peppers don’t have high levels of enzymes that cause flavor and color loss in the freezer. This means you can skip blanching! Peppers are one of the easiest vegetables to freeze.

Cut your peppers into strips or chunks that you’ll use in recipes, then lay them on a cookie sheet in the freezer. Once completely frozen, you can transfer them to a container or bag, or vacuum seal them, and they won’t stick together.

Preserve Peppers in Salsa

Salsa and chips are a top-tier snack, and a colorful jar of homemade salsa makes it even better! Depending on the recipe, you can incorporate bell peppers, poblanos, jalapeños, and more.

As salsa typically contains plenty of acidic vinegar, it’s safe for water bath canning; just make sure you use a tested recipe. Here’s a great roundup of 60+ tested salsa canning recipes so you can find one that suits your taste.

 

Peppers are a beautiful and flavorful powerhouse of the summer garden, but a few good pepper plants can result in armloads of peppers that’s tough to use. This fall, as frost approaches, try one of these ways to preserve peppers from your garden.

Many of us have heard of garden journals or seen ads for gardening apps, but few gardeners actually keep garden records. Keeping records sounds like a great idea, but if you end up with a few random notes at the end of the season, it’s not very helpful. While journal-style notebook entries can sound romantic, they may be a hassle to sort through and analyze. On the other hand, keeping track of a few key numbers in an organized system can help you choose better varieties for your garden or maximize crop production. In this post, we’ll teach you what garden records are important to keep and how to organize them.

Why Keep Garden Records?

There are many reasons it’s a good idea to keep gardening records, depending on your gardening goals. Some records can keep you from making mistakes, like planting tomatoes in the same bed two years in a row. Other records can help you improve your efficiency, pointing out which varieties, amendments, or techniques are working best in your garden to save you time and money.

For small farmers and market gardeners, record-keeping becomes even more important. Being able to look back at the inputs and results for each season is a great way for small farmers to analyze their systems and spot issues to improve productivity.

Small farmers must also go further than hobby gardeners and keep records for the IRS and any certifying agencies they belong to, like USDA Organic, Certified Naturally Grown, or other state programs.

What Garden Records Should I Keep?

• Exactly what records you need to keep will depend on your goals. Those gardeners looking to grow as much of their own food as possible will need to track different things than those looking to grow a pollinator-friendly, cottage-style garden. Here are some items you may want to track:
  
  
• Seed and plant varieties
• First and last frost dates
• Planting dates
• Harvest dates
• Pest arrival dates
• Disease issues
• Production per crop by weight
• Cover crops
• Garden layout and rotation
• Maintenance and inputs (ex. Compost application, liming, soil test)
• Weather (ex. Rainfall amounts, temperatures)

While it can be tempting to try to record everything, for most gardeners, choosing a few key items to focus on is enough to make a major improvement in your garden’s efficiency. Sticking with just a few items also lessens your risk of overwhelm or burnout.

If you are market gardening or farming, you should also keep track of these items:

• Any seeds, amendments, or other garden inputs
• Any equipment and tools and their costs
• Sales and other expenses
• Any documentation, like insurance, business licenses, or certifications

Keeping these records on file and easy to access will allow you to provide certifying agencies, the state, or the IRS with documents they may need in a timely, stress-free manner.

How to Keep Records?

Many folks are switching to digital gardening apps, which can provide both accurate record-keeping and design features, even if you’re not artistically inclined. However, many folks still prefer to use their own setup.

Spreadsheets can be extremely helpful for keeping track of number-based data like planting dates or crop yield by weight. You can use a program like Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, or Mac Numbers to quickly record, manipulate, and analyze data. If you don’t want to work with a computer, you can also use lined or graph paper in a binder to keep records.

For garden layouts and rotation plans, having a visual reference is helpful for many gardeners. If you like working by hand, drawing on graph paper and a few colored pencils is a simple way to create a visual plan for your garden. If you’re happy to use a computer, most gardening apps provide visual layouts, or you can use software like Canva, which offers a free basic version to create your own designs.

For on the go note-taking, a small Write in the Rain or similar notebook is handy for keeping in your pocket while you’re out working in the garden. Jotting down a few notes you can transfer into your system later helps avoid forgetting key information, like when the bean beetles first appeared.

 

There aren’t many gardeners who love the idea of dealing with spreadsheets and binders of notes, but a little record-keeping goes a long way in the garden. Your garden records can help you avoid costly mistakes, increase your garden’s efficiency, and improve your harvest.