Colin McCrate is the founder and co-owner of the nationally recognized Seattle Urban Farm Company (SUFCo), which builds edible gardens for families, restaurants, and businesses and helps teach first time gardeners the techniques of organic food production.  Colin learned organic crop management while working on a series of small, family farms and teaching garden-based environmental education.  Colin and SUFCo have been featured in The Seattle Times, Seattle Magazine, Bon Appetit, GQ, Sunset Magazine, Grist, and numerous other publications and online news sites. SUFCo constructed display gardens in the Northwest Flower and Garden Show in 2008 and 2010, winning a Gold Medal, Silver Medal and Pacific Magazine Horticulture Award. Colin and SUFCo co-owner Brad Halm will have a book on home vegetable gardening for beginners, Food Grown Right, In Your Backyard: A Beginner’s guide to growing crops at home, to be published in April of 2012 by Skipstone Press.
Follow Colin online at:
Website: www.seattleurbanfarmco.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/seattleurbanfarmcompany
Twitter: www.twitter.com/urbanfarmingusa

The Peak of Perfection
How to Harvest Your Edible Garden Like a Pro
Fri, Feb 10 at 2 pm / Hood Room
Even after successfully building and planting a home vegetable garden, beginners can still be confounded by the development of their crops. We are constantly answering questions like: How big should it be before I harvest it? Where do I cut? What is that long, curly shoot coming out the side?  A series of garden harvest photos and specific instructions on harvesting your crops can help eliminate “harvest anxiety” and ensure that plants are picked at their peak and enjoyed to their fullest. 

Simple Edible Garden Design
Design Primer for Edible Gardening Success
Sun, Feb 12 at 11:15 pm / Rainier Room
Home vegetable gardens don’t need to be overly complex to be beautiful. Colin will show a series of small, medium and large sized home food gardens and talk about the decisions he made in the design and construction process of each garden.  He has found that nearly every home has a space for vegetable gardening.  Finding the right space and coming up with a manageable design can make the difference between garden success and garden paralysis.