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I am Bob Due and believe that ones health has a lot to do with what we eat and don't eat. Good tasting vegetables are a joy to have in ones diet and I am doing what I can to provide high quality, clean and safe local food via several Farmers Markets in the Knoxville, TN area.

The name for my farm reflects my concern about soil conservation. On most of the cultivated slopes in Eastern Tennessee farm land, soil erosion can be severe. So I have terraced all the cultivated slopes. This gives me a level "field" on my hills and goes a long way to help keep the soil where it is.

The above image shows the farm of 5.7 acres the year after I purchased it. The pink dashed lines are the farm property lines.

I constructed the first terraces to be 10 feet wide. After working with that width for several seasons, it became apparent to me that a narrower terrace would be much more efficient and would lessen the depth of the exposed lower edge. During the late summer and fall of 2010 I rebuilt all of the terraces to a width of 5 1/2 feet. This gives me a working path on the back side of 20 to 24 inches and a growing bed about 3 foot wide.

Most of my fall crops in 2010 were grown on the new terraces and I am very pleased with the results of this new format.

These are a few of the new terraces that have just been plowed with my BCS tractor and it's rotary plow. The rotary plow is an excellent tool to make the terraces on this scale. If you are doing this for a small home garden, you might use a shovel or spading fork.

Before building any terraces, you will want to be sure that you do not have any Johnson Grass, Quackgrass or any other grass with rhizomes growing where you are making the terraces. If you build them with the rhizomes embedded in the terrace, they will be a constant problem for you.

The fall 2010 growing season was ideal for growing the cool weather crops after the heat of a very hot summer passed. This is me at the Knoxville Market Square farmers market with some of the Hakurei white salad turnips that Johnny's sells. They are normally havested when about 2 inches in diameter. But this fall they ballooned to about 4 inches in a matter of a few days and they were still very solid, sweet and tender.

To the left is my power point presentation given at the 2013 SSAWG conference in Little Rock. I have the full video on You Tube and that is available to the right.