1 down, 21 to go. Our first Farm Market
This is our first year farming. We work about half an acre in total, and knew it was going to be a lot of work but I’m not sure we were prepared for our current adventure. There is a lot more involved than I ever realized, and I don’t think that many people know what goes into producing food on a small farm.
One of our first decisions was where to sell our produce. Based on many different factors, one of which was that both of us would be working regular jobs besides working on the farm, we decided to attend one Farmers Market. Luckily we were able to get into the Rosendale Farmer’s market which is right around the corner from our house.
Then the planning and planting began. In order to have produce every week you more or less need to plant stuff every week (insightful, I know). We needed to decide what to plant, how much of each variety to plant, and then we had to plant it in time to mature for the weekly Market.
So a plan as simple as “Hey let’s grow radishes for the market”. Turns into 10-14 separate plantings just so we can supply two different varieties of radish over a 4-5 week period. Since maturity dates depend on the weather, we had to plant things earlier then we needed to because its difficult to tell when they would mature. Those days to maturity on seed packets are based on a standardized day, so if its colder, or warmer, that will affect maturity. Also, there is no way of telling when the weather would get too hot for radishes, so we plant for an extra week or so being prepared for the fact that the last planting may not turn out well or will bolt. We ended up eating a lot of radishes the week before the first market.
The major problem with our small growing area and limited time was choosing the proper varieties. Some things were immediately out of the question. For example, green beans are very time consuming to pick and you don’t really make a lot of money per square foot with them so we decided to leave them out. We also don’t plant corn because everyone does and we can be more productive by planting different things. There are certain decisions we made based on trying to grow things that would stand out more. Instead of growing bell peppers, we chose to grow some hot peppers and lunchbox peppers. These were decisions based on space, time, drawing people to our booth, and developing loyal customers. But there are other factors such as keeping down weeds, ease of planting and time spent in harvesting. There are lots of things we would like to grow, but had to cut from the plan.
Keeping our space filled and at maximum production is enough to make a would-be farmer crazy. For example, most lettuce can be harvested by cutting all the leaves and the plants will grow back for another harvest in 10-14 days (for leaf lettuce). So you can plant two weeks in a row, then wait two weeks till you plant again to account for the lettuce growing back. But with lettuce you need to watch the heat because it will bolt in hot weather, so to hedge our bets we grow a few varieties with different heat tolerances.
As things get harvested, you have empty space. It can’t really be left unplanted, that would be a waste, and weeds sprout quickly. So we constantly need to plan and anticipate what spaces will be available and which varieties we will be wanting 30-60 days from now. We grow whatever we can under lights as transplants and put them in the ground when space opens up. Growing as transplants is a little more work initially, but you can start the seedlings before the space is available thereby getting a jump on their growing time. It is also easier to weed around plants than it is around newly sprouted seeds because they are bigger.
We haven’t come up with a good way to plan all our successive plantings. It’s something we need to work on. We are ending up with open beds that need to be replanted with something, which is why we are revisiting the “no green bean” ruling I mentioned earlier.
So on the Saturday before the opening market, we started to harvest. But you need a system for harvesting and a plan for every vegetable. For example, we use mesh baskets to harvest the radishes because they are dirtier than other produce. I grab three or four radishes at once, pull them out, smack them on the ground to knock some of the dirt off, then toss them in a basket. While I’m doing this, I have a tote filing up with water. When the basket is full I dump it into the tote, swirl the radishes around for a bit, then fish them out and put them in a clean basket and repeat. Every vegetable needs a plan and needs to be cooled quickly to retain its freshness. The radishes then need to be sorted into appealing looking bunches and wrapped in a rubber band.
We had a good array of produce and some things like pac choi and kale just need a quick washing. But lettuce is another matter. We triple wash it because as everyone knows, lettuce loves to hold on to pieces of grit. Since this is our first year, it’s also our first time really washing large quantities of lettuce so we don’t have a good system yet. There are some we are looking at, but luckily the lettuce season won’t last much longer around here. We do the first washing outside in a tote, then bring it in and do the subsequent washings in our kitchen sink, which gets a little messy as you can imagine. But after it’s washed we take it in small batches and use a salad spinner to dry it. For our first market we had about 10 pounds of greens, spinning it in third of a pound quantities can take quite a while. After it is spun we dumped it out onto a clean towel on the kitchen table and blow fans over it. It needs to be dried completely before it is weighed and bagged. Our system is ridiculous, but anyway you slice it cleaning lettuce isn’t simple.
So now we have all the produce cleaned and cool, all the greens pre weighed into plastic bags. It needs to get to the market in good condition which means coolers with ice, but not packed so tightly together that leaves get bruised or stalks of pac choi break off. We also had seedlings and micro greens for sale, with our canopy and display it took us three trips to get set up at the market.
The display is a blog post in itself. Luckily Breanna has a severe Pinterest addiction and found lots of good ideas for us to steal for our booth. We put a lot of time and effort into the booth and I am sure we will be fine tuning it for a while still. Breanna is pretty talented when it comes to this sort of thing, although that is obvious to anyone who has seen the pictures in this post.
Our first market went very well, but it was an amazing amount of work. We were well received and it was very gratifying to see people picking out things we had grown from seed to harvest. I know we will become more efficient with our harvesting and washing over time and that will help, but to be honest, the idea of doing it all again next weekend is a little daunting at the moment, I feel like we have just completed the first mile in a marathon.
54 COMMENTS
I heard you washed all the produce. I did not realize you needed to do that (as the seller). Does everyone? Makes consumer’s life easier. Also KD finished all the pea sprouts and wants more. What should we do with the seeds and pan?
Everyone does things differently but I think the majority of sellers wash their greens. I’m glad she liked the pea sprouts. We will have more again this weekend. As for the tray, you can compost the soil and seeds, and recycle the tray.
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