Beech Grove Farm

Beech Grove Farm Beech Grove Farm | 20 acres | Seymour, TN | Pastured eggs and broilers | Forest raised pork | Beyond organic fruits and vegetables | Regenerative Agriculture

05/11/2026

Here’s a real quick talk on how to differentiate between male and female American persimmon trees.

05/09/2026

It was a real pleasure learning from the past two days. It really underlined the past six years of work we’ve done planting perennial soft and hard mast-producing trees into our pasture for our chickens, pigs, humans, and wildlife. Thank you for hosting us.

If you want help designing or implementing tree plantings into your pasture, field, or yard, please let me know. and I would love the opportunity to facilitate such an endeavor!

05/08/2026

coming on strong!

We put in a lot of winter work based on soil test results. This offseason saw us amending with non-animal manure compost because our phosphorous is high from years of chickens gleaning the fallen berries. We also added in some elemental sulfur and calcium sulfate to acidify our soil and ensure calcium was available to the plants. Then we topped all that off with some 12 month aged sawdust for mulch.

Dormant season pruning is an obvious task to hit each winter, but less known is post-harvest pruning before the bush goes dormant. This is still a skill set I am working on, but essentially I try to remove apical dominance (terminal buds suppressing lateral bud growth) by pruning the ends of one year old wood. This encourages lateral shoots out of dormant buds. And if the plant is healthy enough and has enough energy and nutrition, these buds will receive hormonal cues to differentiate into flower buds before the onset of winter dormancy. In turn the bush should produce more fruiting laterals next season.

I do not fully comprehend the workings and interplay of plant hormones like auxin and cytokinins. I just know enough to be dangerous. But my first trial of post harvest pruning has yielded positive results. Now to see if I can replicate that again this post harvest and next season’s growth cycle.

Do any of you prune your immediately post harvest? I would love to learn more from others here.

A fellow farmer friend and I were comparing notes on how we plant potatoes recently. Since lots of people grow , I deci...
05/06/2026

A fellow farmer friend and I were comparing notes on how we plant potatoes recently. Since lots of people grow , I decided to share our methods here. Boring post incoming.

The first thing we do is cut the potatoes in half or thereabouts, ensuring at least two eyes are present on each piece. We do not cut our fingerlings. The pieces then harden off overnight in our basement. We do not chit our potatoes. (New verb alert!)

Next, we trench into a w**d free bed, trenching about as deep as we can with several passes of our zipper tool. We place potatoes or potato pieces about 10-12” apart in row, firmly pressing the potatoes into the trench.

Then it’s time to make that “tillage” event worth it. In that trench we sprinkle a little bit of elemental sulfur to stave off common scab which does not like the slight acidity provided by the sulfur. We are working with about a 7.3 pH in our , so some localized acidifier can help us keep our potato crop healthy. Moisture is also medicine as it relate to scab, so don’t let that soil go bone dry!

Next into the trench is a drench of our vermicompost tea. We make beautiful worm compost in our worm bin, put a few cupfuls of the finished castings into a brew bag, and then brew that with rainwater, humid and fulvic acids, seaw**d extract, unsulphured blackstrap molasses, and fish hydrolysate. We let that brew for 24 hours with a bubbler going to oxygenate the water. And then we apply to our potato trench.

After the plants are 4-6” tall we will hill with finished compost. And then when they grow another 4-6” we hill again. We aim for a wide, flat top of a hill instead of a sharp, upside down V. This helps capture more water, and it gives more space for the potatoes to grow.

This has helped us grow beautiful potatoes over the years.

05/03/2026

Needed to buy a couple days for a proper brooder clean out, so the day old chicks went into the trailer in the garage. Here they are being unloaded from the trailer by the Scalf boys. After a brief slide down the kids’ old playground slide, the chicks come to rest on a bed of shredded paper and dried rice hulls. This batch will be in the brooder for about 2 weeks before heading out on pasture. Speaking of pasture, we will be restocked on all our in two weeks.

04/30/2026

Chickens densely foraging, laying down pasture grasses, inevitably feeding the soil biology to help further improve the savanna down by the creek. Can’t wait to have some ruminants in the shape of cows to help turn this sunlight into grass-fed meat!

We are capturing water! This is a rainwater catchment out at the Seymour Farmers Market’s market manager’s (that’s a mou...
04/28/2026

We are capturing water! This is a rainwater catchment out at the Seymour Farmers Market’s market manager’s (that’s a mouthful!) fruit and vegetable garden.

She had no way to irrigate her sizable grow space, so with the help of a few vendors and lots of re-used materials, we threw together a long term watering solution. After we add another IBC tote, she will have about a 1,000 gallon rainwater holding capacity. This should ensure she can give those plants a drink through even the driest stretches of summer.

This is also a low tech solution with no electricity, fancy filters, or anything that requires serious maintenance or complicated fittings - just rain, gravity, and some old items we had lying around.

Happy gardening, Marjie!

04/25/2026

We are planting these swales tomorrow, rain or shine! Want to join us? Come learn about and . These three swales, about 300 linear feet, will be planted with fruiting trees, bushes, herbs, flowers, and ground cover. The next few decades promise to be loaded with food, fiber, fuel, and medicine for this young family! Message me if you’re interested in joining us at 1PM tomorrow for a convivial planting and learning session.

Soooo much perennial food in the way of fruit popping off at BGF! Systems that were put in place as many as six years ag...
04/19/2026

Soooo much perennial food in the way of fruit popping off at BGF! Systems that were put in place as many as six years ago really coming to fruition(😉). In these photos we have, mostly in order:
Goumi berries
Figs
Peaches
Apples
Mulberries
Currants
Pears
More apples
Apricots
Asian persimmon
More mulberries
Strawberries
Limes
Haskap/honeyberries
Grapes
Blueberries
Nanking bush cherries
Juneberries
Pawpaws

These are our first fruits on the farm! This group of pawpaw trees was planted four years ago as two year old seedling...
04/15/2026

These are our first fruits on the farm! This group of pawpaw trees was planted four years ago as two year old seedlings. They flowered really well last year, but we didn’t get any fruit. This year I decided to hand pollinate the two largest and most productive trees. It looks like my kids’ little watercolor paintbrush did the trick!

Pawpaws are the largest indigenous fruit in North America. Some people call it the “tropical fruit of the temperate forest” because its flavor is similar to a banana crossed with a mango.

The trees in fruit are native seedlings. Our improved genetics from Kentucky State University are a couple of years younger. We look forward to those flowering in the coming years.

Address

1210 Estates Drive
Seymour, TN
37865

Telephone

+18655918923

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