Fruit and Vegetable News

Dehydrating produce provides growers with an opportunity to utilize extra produce, and to extend the growing season with value-added products. As part of a project exploring the viability of chile pepper production in MN with Latino farmers, we chose to explore solar dehydrators because many fresh market vegetable farmers have plots in rural areas that are not connected to electricity. We developed a dehydrator that could successfully dehydrate fresh fruits and vegetables, and wrote a guide with instructions. The guide can be accessed here.   

Photo: Reading the Midwest Fruit Pest Management Guide to find the right herbicide for a new strawberry field.   Author: Annie Klodd, Extension Educator - Fruit and Vegetable Production    I received a good question in my email inbox this week. The grower asked (I am paraphrasing):  What herbicides can I spray before planting strawberries this spring? And how long before planting should I spray them? This grower is planting three acres and is aware that the field already has a large weed population. With that large of a space, they cannot only rely on hand- or mechanical weeding without risking significant weed competition with the plants. Therefore herbicides are the most economically sustainable solution in this case.  To answer questions about pesticide recommendations, I always direct Minnesota growers to the Midwest Fruit Pest Management Guide. It includes herbicide recommendation tables for strawberries (and the other major fruit crops of the Midwest). We ...