September 8th marks six years since we launched our first Overalls Farm. You may have missed it in the beginning because we didn’t post publicly about it for years. Growing up-an-alley in Jacksonville’s Springfield neighborhood- tucked in a residential backyard (mine, as it were)- it was intentionally kept on the down-low, except as far as the neighborhood was concerned. But then, in June 2023, I shared the origin story on the stage of Florida Theater ending with the dream to replicate our neighborhood farm model. Now, with Overalls Farms One and Two thriving, we’re growing Farm Three to fruition, and we need a little help making it happen. When we started, to ensure we were growing in service of our...
I want you to grow your groceries.
Could you grow enough food to feed your family if you needed?Could we, as communities, sustain ourselves - even temporarily - if there was some major disruption like a cyber attack, supply chain failure, hyper inflation, economic fall-out, or - God forbid - war? Though I'm a fan of salads & tasty treats like sugar snaps, if you're hungry, those just won't cut it.
 With this Arctic blast headed our way, I wanted to share a quick note with a couple resources.
​Growing Year 'Round - video​
​What To Do When It Freezes (pdf)​
​The main takeaways are:
Most cool season crops should be fine; they'll freeze, thaw, and keep growing. It's the warm season crops growing out of season you have to worry about like... tomatoes, peppers...
Make sure your soil is good and moist...
There's something about coming out of the cold, darkness of winter into the warm light of spring that swells our sense of the possible, and so spring is - universally- the most popular gardening season. And for good measure: potatoes, tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, zucchini, green beans, pumpkins, melons and all those other frost-tender crops thrive in the early spring warmth - before the onslaught...
10 years ago, last night - as recorded in my journal ...-"I couldn't sleep all night long because I was up thinking about this food gardening business idea. I settled on a few things: a name and a branded persona ("Man in Overalls") as well as a few ideas on how to use such a persona and business as a food movement platform and how to make food gardening demand viral."-A few months before, once I...
