 While transplanting some fennel last week, I noticed some lacewing eggs on one of the baby plants. Unique among insect eggs, lacewing eggs are attached to a long silk thread protruding off the plant. This gives them a whimsical look (pictured below). This helps prevent predation and cannibalization when the first hatch in approximately five days.
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 We've been having a very dry few years on our Fort Wayne uncertified organic farm. Let's time travel back to 2024. After a very dry summer, we finally got a bit of rain over a weekend in September: around 3/4” all told. Seems like a fever dream with all the rain we've been getting this spring, but this was our reality for about two years.
This was bad news because, newsflash: plants need water to grow. Irrigation solves this issue during a drought, but one of the main concerns during drought is plant nutrition. Conventional fertilizers developed using fossil fuels work so well for two reasons:  Pleated inkcap mushrooms (right) have a short but glorious life, often fruiting at night and drying up in the morning sun. Here on Hungry Dog Farm, we add tons of woodchips to the gardens, primarily to the walkways as a mulch. However, these woodchips serve as more than landscaping eye candy. They are also a food source for plants, though they need an assist from fungi a access the nutrients.
Unlike nitrogen, the carbon in woodchips is a slow release of fertility. It can take a year of more to break down! In fact, fungi are the only major organism that can effectively break down of modify woody material.  Let's travel back in time to 2023. That year, there was a point mid-June when I thought we would lose our cucumber crop on our Fort Wayne farm. It wouldn’t have been a disaster--I have a second round of cucumber planting in midsummer, and they are fast to grow. But there would have been a break in the cucumber action.
It was a particularly bad year for aphids, likely due to the warm winter in combination with a hot and dry spring. Aphids are tiny little green bugs drawn to the sugars in vegetables. They hide on the undersides of leaves and don’t harm the fruit. But left unchecked, they can stunt and ultimately kill the plant.  Hungry Dog Farm started in 2020 with a small group made up of friends. Since then we've expanded to sixty CSA members (learn more about the CSA model here). Just a few years ago, to fill those spots, I was flyering downtown and asking for referrals.
In 2025, we turned a corner when the summer CSA sold out within two days of opening public signups. Then, in 2026, we sold out the summer CSA in 18 hours. What is going on here? Are Fort Wayne CSA memberships the next Taylor Swift tickets? And how can you secure a spot in our vegetable farm share even if you missed the deadline? Here's what's happening behind the scenes--and how you can still sneak in. Note: At the time of writing, we have 4 spots left in our Fall CSA. You can sign up for that and for our Spring Egg Share (and get on the summer waitlist) here.  This is a a deep dive into one of or staple crops that transports us to a time of cold fingers, long winter shadows, and freezing water lines. Onions have been tricky for us in the past. They are one of the more labor-intensive crops to transplant and are susceptible to a myriad of diseases. They enjoy a long, cool spring to grow their green tops followed by a hot and dry summer to size up their bulbs. If you have been following Indiana springs over the last several years, you know that “cooler” springs are increasingly rare, and our humid summers facilitate a lot of disease pressure. In order to get an earlier crop and to avoid the weather issues, we have taken to a new schedule. Since 2022, we’ve planted onions in the late fall, overwintered them in an unheated greenhouse, and harvested them in June just in time for our first Fort Wayne CSA pickup.  While all onions are extremely hardy in cold weather (they can survive outside uncovered just fine), they are especially sensitive to daylight hours. This means they “bolt,” or flower and set seed, after the winter solstice. Therefore, it’s the lengthening days, not the cold, that’s a concern for overwintering onions. Luckily, these onions have been selected to withstand bolting and have been reliable for us going on three years now.
We start the onions from seed in early September and plant them in late October after the first frost and following tomatoes. They are essentially dormant all winter, growing only after Valentine’s Day, when we get over 10.5 daylight hours. The warmer temperatures in March and April bring rapid growth to the tops, while the bulbs begin to grow in May. By early June, the leaves have flopped over, indicating that they are ready to harvest for our Fort Wayne farm share. Note that we grow our onions in clusters, which saves time planting; the bulbs simply push away from each other as they grow under the weed mat. Bonus points if you recognize the tall plants in the background of this photo. That will be a topic for another time.  We’ve added wood chips to all the walkways on our Fort Wayne farm, which required a lot of manual labor. However, we know this will pay off in the years to come. Wood chips have so many benefits. They reduce soil compaction, reduce wedding, keep the soil moist, and provide food for insects and mycelia (mushroom “roots"). As an added bonus, the wood chips decompose into compost in a year or two. This can be shoveled onto the vegetable beds to help all your Fort Wayne CSA goodies grow! Wood chips also mark the growing beds, which is integral as we move to a no-till system with permanent growing beds. In traditional row crop farming, the entire field is mechanically plowed and tilled to remake the beds each year. However, there are a lot of benefits to permanent beds:
 In the photo above, the broccoli and cabbage were planted into straw mulch, which was left over from the previous garlic crop. These were planted just days after the garlic was harvested (I added a bit of added compost from our chickens). The year after, there was some remaining straw mulch, and I planted potatoes into this in the early spring. That's three crops with just one mulch application on our Fort Wayne farm!
From July through the first frost, we have a lot of peppers in all sizes and colors at our Fort Wayne farm stand. Some of them, like bell peppers, you'll recognize. However, we often get questions about how to best use the more unusual varieties, so we created some blog posts! This one goes over some of the less common sweet peppers.
Our offerings do vary from year to year, so be sure to stop by our Fort Wayne farm stand to see what we've got! Peppers usually start going crazy around July and last until the weather turns.
We grow a wide variety of hot and mild peppers for your culinary needs for our Fort Wayne CSA. Here, we've listed our hot peppers from hottest to mildest. Hot peppers are easy to preserve whole as pickled or dried peppers, or you can make pepper powder or hot sauce. I have provided my favorite use for each variety below.
When designing the initial layout for our biodiverse Fort Wayne farm, I knew I wanted to incorporate several hedgerows into the design. Hedgerows are essentially perennial beds spaced every 100 feet that incorporate dozens—if not hundreds—of herbs, flowers, fruits, and trees. Hedgerows are designed to flower most of the growing season. Their occupants span from a fifteen-foot pear tree to creeping thyme (a six-inch ground cover).
Hedgerows accomplish three main goals for our Fort Wayne farm:
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