Interest in the environment and sustainability is leading homeowners to Homefront Farmers in Redding, where owner John Carlson and his crew design and build handsome raised beds and fenced spaces for growing organic vegetables and berries. Ranging from six-by-eight feet to forty-by-eighty, the gardens cost from $7,000 to $100,000 with amenities, although the plants themselves are extra, as is Carlson’s crew doing the planting and maintenance.
The company also builds and installs covered boxes for strawberries, as well as enclosed patches for fresh, in-season blueberries. In Wilton, Carlson constructed a twenty-five-by-forty-foot garden framed in cedar for durability and fine-mesh wire fencing to keep smaller critters out.
“Organic really is more about the practice than about the products,” he says. “It’s about starting with the soil and making sure that it is healthy, that it has the right structure, the right nutrition. It’s also about having a balance of different crop families, and the right kind of flowers to attract the right kind of insects. Balance will keep the garden fairly healthy.”
“Organic really is more about the practice than about the products.”
—JOHN CARLSON, HOMEFRONT FARMERS