Richardson Farm

06/15/2026

Sweet fruit for upick test growing! Part 3

06/14/2026

Check out the tiger stripe butterfly on my native wildflowers!

06/14/2026

Secret Edible bamboo garden!

06/14/2026

Edible Bamboo forest garden!

06/10/2026

We made farms look "efficient."

Straight rows. Perfectly trimmed edges. Endless fields. No wildflowers. No hedgerows. No untamed corners.

Anything that didn't seem useful was removed.

Then the birds stopped singing.

The frogs disappeared.

The pollinators vanished.

The soil grew quieter.

And suddenly, the farm needed more fertilizer, more pesticides, more irrigation, and more intervention just to keep producing.

We were taught that nature competes with farming.

The truth is, nature was doing much of the work all along.

Birds controlled pests.

Insects pollinated crops.

Microorganisms built healthy soil.

Biodiversity wasn't clutter—it was the farm's life-support system.

A farm stripped of biodiversity may look productive today, but over time it becomes increasingly dependent, fragile, and expensive to sustain.

We didn't lose nature because farming failed.

Farming became harder because nature disappeared.

We made the land look cleaner.

And in the process, we cleaned away the life that kept it alive.

Credit

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06/10/2026

Once I have established all the fruits on my u-pick fruit farm, I will start to grow these ground roots!

At some point in the last two centuries, we quietly stopped growing the most productive food crops in human history.
Not because they stopped working. Because they were not profitable to sell.

- SKIRRET was a medieval dietary staple, sweet and dense, that vanished almost overnight when commercial agriculture standardized around carrots and parsnips.

- SCORZONERA takes a full year to mature, which is too slow for commercial production. It stores for six months and tastes like a mild oyster. Almost nobody grows it.

- HAMBURG PARSLEY gives you an edible root and edible leaves from one plant. It was bred out of existence in favor of leaf-only varieties.

- OCA is the second most important food crop in Peru after the potato. It has been available to Western gardeners for centuries. Almost nobody outside the Andes grows it.

- CELERIAC is easier to grow than celery, stores better than almost any other vegetable, and is more versatile in the kitchen. It is still considered exotic in most garden centers.

- MASHUA is one of the highest-yielding tuber crops on earth per square meter. It was reportedly suppressed in Incan royal diets deliberately. It barely exists in Western horticulture.

- YACON tastes like sweet apple and feeds gut bacteria rather than blood sugar. Unknown outside the Andes until the 1990s.

The forgotten root vegetable did not fail. It was just never profitable to sell you seeds for it every spring.

06/08/2026

Changing the oil on the farm truck, with the front of the truck pointed downhill.

06/08/2026

The black plastic is frying the strawberry roots in the summer sun. I have been trying to warn people about this my whole life! We use no plastic on our berries, because it always gets over 100 degrees in the desert North-West every summer! Even when we had recent terrible harvest years due to volcanic smoke, we still got several months of quality strawberries. Day neutral varieties let us harvest into every fall as well!