The Red Tractor Farm

Okra always seems to be the vegetable that people either love or hate — not much room for something in between. What’s your favorite way to prepare it? We’ve had fans of pickling it, frying it, steaming it, putting it in soup, and even stuffing it with a hot pepper mixture and baking it.

 Elephant garlic! This is one of our favorite early spring crops. It’s more mild than regular garlic, especially because it’s green. But another advantage is that it is so easy to break out the cloves for cooking. Here’s a great recipe for using fresh green garlic – garlic soup! Melissa Clark’s Double Garlic Soup Ingredients […]

The tractors are ready for the Kaw Valley Farm Tour, and so are we. We’ve mucked out barns, moved chickens, mowed fields and picked tomatoes, lined up volunteers and just about anything else we can think of to prepare for the tour, which is this weekend, Oct. 5 and 6, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. […]

We built our high tunnel last year with the help of the Kansas Rural Center, a USDA grant and an army of volunteers. That first year it helped us grow tomatoes during a terrible period of drought and high temperatures. This summer, after the lettuce, arugula and other greens were gone, we planted cucumbers, cherry […]

What’s in the bag? That’s the element of surprise every week for people who sign up to be members of CSAs. It could be lettuces, turnips, radishes, strawberries, spinach, chard and kale. Or maybe it’s July, and you get cucumbers, green beans, and peas, or August when peppers, tomatoes, summer squash, melons and okra begin […]

Squash is a heartbreaking vegetable to grow, especially if you farm without the traditional insecticides most people use in the garden. This year, we tried an experiment — and it worked! We planted a trap crop all around the outside of the rows. The trap crop, Hubbard squash, attracted the squash bugs first. They dined […]

Following on the heels of a freakishly warm fall has been the weird winter. No prolonged periods of low temperatures. Little precipitation. No snow to speak of. So the usual prompt to get started on growing seedlings– lots of gray days– hasn’t happened. But the seeds are organized and the growing has begun. So far, […]

Watering through all those hot days in August has yielded these amazing greens!