Growing for Skan

GROWING FOR SKAN ONLINE MARKETPLACE
Dates and Hours of Operation

The online market opens on Saturday 8AM and closes at 11:59 on Tuesday.
Pick Up/Delivery Options: Home Delivery (available with CSA), Pick up at Farm or Pick up at the Mill (home of the Skaneateles Brewery and Last Chance Distillery)

Doce Lume Farm offers this online marketplace to serve the Skaneateles community by providing delicious locally grown organic food to families in a safe manner. We’ve added native perennial plants to the market as they serve essential ecological functions and are so very gorgeous for our gardens and lawn conversions!

This site is set up so that other local growers/producers may participate and list their inventory. As a startup business ourselves, we have not aggressively sought out new producers, knowing full well it would be too much to manage at this time. However, as we are able to manage it we intend to seek out partnerships with other local producers so that we can augment this market with their delicious foods and products such as breads, butter, yogurt, cheeses and locally roasted coffee.

Learn more about Doce Lume Farm at: docelumefarm.com read more...

Gardening for Life

(Source: Wild Ones / Habitat Gardening in Central New York handout:
https://www.hgcny.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tallamy-Gardening-for-Life.pdf)

By Douglas Tallamy

Chances are, you have never thought of your garden – indeed, of all of the space on your land – as a wildlife preserve that represents the last chance we have for sustaining plants and animals that were once common throughout the United States. That is exactly the role our suburban landscapes are now playing, and will play even more critically in the near future. If this is news to you, it’s not your fault.


We were taught from childhood that gardens are for beauty; they are a chance to express our artistic talents, to have fun with, and relax in. And, whether we like it or not, the way we landscape our properties is taken by our neighbors as a statement of our wealth and social status.

No one has taught us that we have forced the plants and animals that evolved in North America (our nation’s biodiversity) to depend more and more on human-dominated landscapes for their continued existence. We have always thought that biodiversity was happy somewhere out there – “in nature” – in our local woodlot, or perhaps our national parks, or best of all “in the rain forest.”

We have heard nothing about the rate at which species are disappearing from our neighborhoods, towns, counties, and states. We have never been taught how vital biodiversity is for our own well-being. Read entire handout here: https://www.hgcny.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tallamy-Gardening-for-Life.pdf read more...

Check out these interesting studies.

The Power of the Plate from Rodale Institute, covering the intertwined roles of agriculture and healthcare

https://rodaleinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/Rodale-Institute-The-Power-of-the-Plate-The-Case-for-Regenerative-Organic-Agriculture-in-Improving-Human-Health.pdf

Follow this link to Rodale Institute's site to learn out more about the relationship between recovering from Covid-19 and reforming our food system:

https://rodaleinstitute.org/blog/to-recover-from-covid-19-we-must-change-our-food-system/ read more...

According to this research study native trees, especially oaks, host the bulk of the Carolina Chickadee’s insect-intensive diet.

"It's a basic idea, but it makes a whole lot of sense: Native plants are better for native birds than introduced flora. More specifically, because these trees and shrubs have evolved with the local wildlife, they harbor more insects or yield more berries and fruit than non-native plants, providing greater amounts of food for certain critters. This seemingly obvious idea has been buttressed by years of research by Doug Tallamy, whose published work has shown that these plants host many more caterpillars, and that yards with more native vegetation host more native-bird species." Read the entire article on the Audubon website: https://www.audubon.org/news/new-research-further-proves-native-plants-offer-more-bugs-birds

Find your bird friendly plants here:https://www.audubon.org/native-plants read more...

Read Amara Dunn's blogpost here:

https://blogs.cornell.edu/biocontrolbytes/2021/02/09/finding-plants-that-feed-friendly-insects/

"... if one of your goals for your 2021 garden is to provide good habitat for beneficial insects that eat pest insects (natural enemies of pests), here’s some advice…

Look for pollen and nectar producers
Flowers that provide plenty of pollen and nectar make great habitat for natural enemies. This is because some natural enemies also eat pollen or nectar (or both). For example, this adult hover fly feeds on the pollen and nectar produced by this bachelor’s button..." read more...