By Debbie Wechsler (2003)

Cathy Jones
Perry-winkle Farm
1061 White Cross Road
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27516
perrywinklefarm@aol.com

Years in commercial operation: 13
Total acreage: 33
Acres in organic production: 2.5
Acres in non-organic production: None
Soil type: Depleted sandy loam with clay subsoil
Climate zone: Officially 7a, but acts like 6b

Crops: Diverse mix of flowers, vegetables, culinary herbs. About 50% flowers, 50% vegetables, with potatoes and salad greens as leading vegetable crops. A few chickens for eggs.

Equipment: Extensive hand tools, Troybilt tiller, compost drum turner for mixing potting soil, 1952 John Deere 420 tractor with an array of implements including Muratori tractor-mounted tiller, tobacco bedder/ hiller disk.

On-farm facilities: Old beer truck body (6 x 8 x 10) for walk-in cooler; 27 x 14 passive solar Hebel block greenhouse for raising transplants; storage sheds, wash station with stainless steel sinks and washing machine for spin-drying greens, moveable henhouse and fencing.

Labor: Cathy Jones full-time. Her husband, Michael Perry, works full time off the farm, but helps a lot after work and on weekends. 3-4 paid, part-time laborers, each working 18-30 hours. Beginning labor start at $6, third-year laborer makes $9 per hour, with taxes taken out. No housing.

Weeks/year in production: 48 Total weeks making sales: 35

Certification: Carolina Farm Stewardship Association through 2001

Markets: 20% to restaurants, 80% at three local farmers' markets (Saturday morning and Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons) Market sites are nine miles from the farm. Clientele includes foodies, retirees, and folks into supporting local agriculture.

Value-added products: Mixed bouquets, salad mixes

Special expertise: Marketing; Raising flowers; Labor relations

Cathy Jones started gardening as a graduate student in Georgia. Intending to farm, in 1983 she bought this farm, part of an old dairy farm, and worked to restore its worn-out soils while working as a carpenter, stone mason, and sports referee. In 1991 she took her first crop to market; in 1993 she had her first paid helper; and in 1994 she joined the Carrboro Farmers' Market. She started with a quarter acre; each year, for the last six years, she has added a new quarter- or half-acre section to production.

The 2½ acres of market garden are divided into seven small fields, with an eighth planned for development this year, with 3- to 4-foot permanent beds. Cathy has always rotated plant families and alternated cash and cover crops, but this year planned to start a more ambitious rotation plan based on putting larger blocks into cover crops and more extended fallow periods to build the still-poor soils. However, prolonged wet fields this spring have made it difficult to put this plan-and any crops-into the field.

Cool weather cover crops used include rape (before potatoes), clover, vetch, and rye. For warm weather cover crops, she uses sudangrass, buckwheat, millet, sesbania, cowpeas, and soybeans. Most of the cover crops are disked in--her tobacco bedder, with two adjustable gangs of hiller disks, does a great job of this. She also lays down landscape fabric over some cover crops for three weeks to kill them back, as a form of no-till, and then plants in the residue. She does some small-scale passive composting, mixing farm wastes with horse manure. Purchased soil amendments include feather meal, SulPoMag, potassium sulfate, and lots of rock phosphate.

Plants are either direct seeded with an Earthway seeder or transplanted by hand. The fields are irrigated using drip tape, sourced from a well. Cathy uses very little mulch, except on spring onions, leeks, and broccoli, and instead prefers to cultivate, sometimes with the hiller disk, but more generally with a wheel hoe and hand hoes.

Pest problems include the various beetles: flea beetles in greens she just ignores; for Mexican bean beetles she relies on succession planting and releases Pediobius wasps; for Colorado potato beetles she uses "scout and squash" plus some Bt. Thrips in edible flowers are one problem she is looking for a solution for. She tries to spin them out and uses white containers in hopes they will be attracted to the containers and out of the flowers. Deer are controlled with a 5-strand, slant wire fence. Mildew on flowers is managed by succession planting.

Four or five years ago, the crop mix shifted to a greater emphasis on cut flowers, based on market demand and profitability; now about half the land is in flowers and about 60% of the income come from them. Cathy figures the farm brings in half the family's income, and is "pulling its weight" in the family economy. The highest gross farm income in the last few years was around $36,000. Net profit is about a third, $10,000-12,000. Another third goes to operating expenses, the rest to pay her hired labor. She's concerned that labor expenses may be high, but her leading crops, flowers and salad greens, are very labor intensive. Also, one worker has now been with the farm for three years and she feels it is important to compensate her knowledge and experience as much as possible.

Only another quarter-acre will be added to the gardens, but as they can manage the capital investment, Cathy would like to plant more perennial flowers, fruits, and vegetables. Her long-range plan is to be still selling at the market when she is 90 years old.