Get ready for tomato season by planting your favorite tomato seeds (now or soon)!

Here’s the 411 on growing your own tomatoes:

🍅 Tomatoes take 6-8 weeks to grow from seed into a plant that’s ready to be transplanted into the ground.
🍅 April 15th is the average last frost date for our area, so if you want to get your plants in the ground before that date, be prepared to protect your plants from possible frosting/freezing temperatures. Tomatoes don’t love colder soil, so tomatoes planted before April 15th may be slower to take off.
🍅 If you love tomatoes, we recommend staggering your plantings, so that you don’t put all of your eggs in one basket! Plan to plant some early, some right around April 15, and some even later. There isn’t a rush, since you have a wide window for planting tomatoes, so do what works best for you and your space, sun, and time.
🍅 Keep in mind that if you do start an early crop of tomato seeds, they will need to be transplanted up into larger containers (before going in the ground) when they outgrow their seed starting containers.

Happy seed starting! Stay tuned for a tomato seed variety list, coming soon!

When it comes to making duck bone broth, nothing quite compares to using this scrumptious broth for pho! If you haven’t had pho before, it’s a traditional Vietnamese soup with cardamom, anise, coriander, fennel, ginger, fish sauce, and more delicious flavors. Here’s a great recipe for making pho with the duck bones that you’ll be grabbing at tomorrow’s 30% off sale!

Meet us tomorrow at @cornermarketgso and grab duck bones, duck heads, and chicken necks—all on sale for 30% off!

PRO TIP: Roast your duck bones in the oven before making them into broth… This yields a darker, earthier, beefier flavor.

Here’s a great recipe from Hunt Gather Cook:

Vietnamese Duck Pho

This week’s Seed Feature is the beautiful and humongous Mammoth Sunflower. These sunflowers are the size of dinner plates and average about 9 feet tall but may reach 10 feet +.

They have large, flavorful, black-striped seeds! Sunflowers need full sun to grow well, and they should be planted much later in the season because they like warm soil.

Meet us tomorrow at the Corner Farmers Market and grab a pack!

It’s broth time, baby! This week we’ll be having a sale on duck bones, duck heads, and *a limited number* of chicken necks for broth-making!

This Saturday at the Corner Farmers Market duck bones, duck heads, and chicken necks are all 30% off!

Stay tuned tomorrow for more details about making a darker, more-beefy bone broth (using duck bones) and why duck broth makes the best pho broth EVER!

This week’s Seed Feature is a double! Both of these seeds can be planted this time of year, so if you’re itching to get started, these are great options!

🥬 The Wild Garden Mix is an assortment of over 60 different lettuces with a variety of sizes, colors, and textures. It’s an easy-to-grow starter pack that fun and attractive!

🥬 Ruby Red Swiss chard matures in 55 days and is more frost tolerant than other chard varieties!

Or if you’re looking for 100+ other seed varieties, come check out our selection tomorrow at the Corner Farmers Market (2105 W. Market Street, Greensboro), from 8am-12pm.

We love planting Instant Orchards for clients, but we also love bringing people plants and hearing all about how and where they plan to plant them!

We deliver plants (free delivery for orders over $150 in the Greensboro/Winston-Salem area), and we can also bring smaller plant orders to the Corner Farmers Market! Shoot us an email at kwhomestead@gmail.com to get started on your order!

We might have felt a brief respite from the freezing temperatures, but don’t get ahead of yourself on seed starting!

It’s not quite time yet for starting your favorite spring seedlings, but that doesn’t mean you can’t start picking out your seeds now! We just got the 2024 batch of seeds in from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and we’ve got your old favorites and some new and exciting varieties. Come by the Corner Farmers Market on any Saturday to browse our seed selection and grab 3 packets for $10.

Another client we have have been working with this month just moved into a new, recently-constructed home. She wanted to establish a foundation planting (landscaping near the house) that looks like traditional landscaping but substitutes useful and edible plants instead of the classically used options. She also wanted plants that are low maintenance, and attractive!

During a consultation we came up with a design filled with Yaupon holly, blueberry (which are edible and ornamental), and cold hardy citruses for an evergreen, full-foliage look. This will anchor the planting, add privacy, shade during the summer, and provide a backdrop for annual or perennial herbs and flowers as a useful underplanting and finishing touch.

The client is also adding a mini orchard and four of our laying hens. What a great start to a new property and homesteading adventure!

Here’s to ecological diversity! We have been working with a client who’s asked for an abundant, diverse, edible landscape on a couple acres in the middle of Winston-Salem. They wanted lots of cider apples, but are also interested in a permaculture approach and maximum diversity. For this property, we’ve started by laying out a curvi-linear food forest with easy to maintain rows and double rows of fruiting trees, shrubs and bushes.

For the larger plant selection, we went with maximum diversity of edible species for a unique, resilient, and biodiverse orchard. Some of the plants included are: pomegranate, medlar, yuzu (cold hardy citrus), owari satsuma (cold hardy mandarin orange), sweet mountain ash, peach, plum, cherry, European pear, Asian pear, jujube, chestnut (Chinese, blight resistant), nectarine, paw paw, blackberry, raspberry, honey berry, elderberry, hibiscus, goumi, autumn berry, pineapple guava (cold hardy), aronia berry, yaupon holly (a native tea plant that contains caffeine), dwarf beach plum, rugosa rose (has edible hips chock full of vitamin c), and bunching table grapes. They are layed to ensure cross pollination, minimize disease transfer, and solar capture and efficiency.

These larger species are the backbone of the design, but even more opportunity exists in the underplanting between and amongst the over story species. The double rows we planted are spaced so that 1 roll of ground-cover fabric can effectively tarp the pathway between the trees and smother out the existing grass and weeds. This will make maintenance much easier while the trees establish, and it can then be removed in the future to reveal a weed free zone ready to be planted with herbs, vegetables, ground covers, and pollinator plants. These add-ons inject an even larger amount of diversity of species, yields, and system benefits.

We’re Jason and Emma of KW Homestead and KW Edible Landscaping Nursery and we’ve been farming and operating our nursery since 2013. We’ve seen life, death, sweaty summers, freezing cold winters, and so much more—and we wouldn’t change it for anything. If you’re looking for advice, plants, eggs, seeds, and a couple of friends, there’s no need to look any further—we’ve got you! 😉