A home-demonstration “Garden Field Day” is set to take place today (Wednesday) at the I-S-U Armstrong Research Farm near Lewis, in western Iowa’s Cass County. Keith Booth, Director for Research and Development at the farm, says there’ll be some traditional things to see and do as well as new ones, during this Summer’s tour of the facility.
The traditional tours will feature a horticulturist’s home-demonstration garden with the theme “A Plethora of Peppers.” Booth says the “Plethora of Peppers” features more than 40 varieties of bell peppers. There’ll be banana peppers, hot ones, ornamentals and some spicy ones you can taste for yourself.
The next part of the tour covers the “All America Selection.” Bernie Havolic, the manager of the farm, will handle that and the “Pan Am” demonstration of new varieties. You’ll get to see new flowers and vegetables that are being screened to determine if they’ll go into a new seed catalog. And the farm tour will conclude with a stop at the Hoop building.
The “hoop building” increases yield because of the environmental control it provides. Booth says it looks like growers may get double the production and start growing earlier. Right now they’re harvesting tomatoes in the hoop building, and establishing red and black raspberries in “the hoop.”
Booth says the building has been described as an “unheated greenhouse” where plants are put right into the ground under a plastic structure, not grown in containers. The Home demonstration garden field day takes place from 6:30 to 8:30-p.m. at the research farm, located 13-miles southwest of Atlantic, along Highway Six. The evening will conclude with strawberries, and ice cream provided by an organic dairy in Clarinda.
Related web sites:
Armstrong Research Farm info