Our Routine

So I think we're well established enough to be able to say that we have a 'routine'. Granted, it is always changing. But I thought it was fair to spell out the basics here:

Our most successful endeavor so far has been home and office delivery. It started by calling our friends at their homes and places of work and asking if they, their families, and their coworkers were interested in a delivery. We got a lot of positive responses, and we've made a list of people and places that we visit about once a week. The list seems to grow every week, and now we have three businesses and five homes that deliver to regularly!

How the delivering works: Dan and/or I load all the veggies into the back of the car after making some phone calls to see who is interested in veggies today. Then we drive over, and depending on the place, we bring all the veggies inside for people to browse, or we let people come out to our "portable farm stand" in the back of the car.

We also have done special deliveries, such as meeting people at a public location for a delivery. We really strive to be accommodating (I mean, if people want our veggies, they should be able to get them!) and we've made a lot of progress through this method of sale. Even with the farmer's market and whatever else happens, I still see home delivery continuing to be a big part of our future at the farm.

Other methods of sale? Not as much. We are starting the Greenfield Farmer's Market (or "trial market", this year..) which has not been very profitable yet, but seems to be growing! For the past two weeks, it has been just Dan and I, our small vegetable stand, and a couple posters, but this coming Tuesday holds promises of two more vendors -- one who sells goat milk soap and lotion, and one who sells gluten free baked goods!! I am so excited to see who shows up this week.

And our very last, teeny-tiny idea? We are hoping to get a farm stand. We've called a business with a currently unused farm stand set-up and asked for permission to use it and do maintenance on it. We're still waiting on a reply, with crossed fingers!

AND NOW.... Photos!! Just like I promised!

Here's our very first stand at our trial market!

This is how our veggies stay when they are not being delivered or in any other use. It makes our porch quite lovely!

Here's a dish my mom made from multicolored veggies AND pasta! It was so beautiful, and just as delicious!

Another shot of the stand, with a signage-close up. Dan looks so chill. :)

Our little helpers, displaying our veggies! They are so helpful.

So, I know it's not pictures of the garden itself yet... But those are coming soon! VERY soon, now that I have a useable camera! Promise!

-Terra

Schedules...

I find it VERY helpful to have a schedule when I need to get things done. So, just to get a better idea of what goes on around here, this is my schedule in-the-making:

5:00 am - Wake up, get breakfast

5:30 am - Go outside, do heavy work (raking beds, rototilling, mowing) before it gets warm.

8:00 am - Do transplanting, sowing, weeding, or other less strenuous work as the day gets hotter.

9:00 am - Water the seedlings and the hoop house plants as the sun has probably dried them out by now. Take a water break!

9:30 am - Continue with the lighter work.

11:30 am - Come inside. Make lunch, wash dishes, and do other indoor things as necessary. Perhaps write a blog post.

Sometime between 12:30 and 1:00 pm - Back outside! More lighter work. Nowadays its generally a lot of transplanting... later in the season it will probably be more weeding and pruning, and then harvesting and cleaning!

My afternoon is flexible. I might have other jobs to do or things to get done (you know... with my other life). But if I am on the farm, I will generally just be doing whatever needs to get done. Today it was transplanting more onions. (SO many onions!!)

Around 5:00 pm - As the day starts to cool, I can resume doing heavier work.

6:00 pm - The sun is no longer directly hitting the garden, so I give everything a good soak of water for the night.

8:00 pm - Time to bring in all the tools and equipment from the field and put them away for the night.

8:30 pm - It's probably dark, so it's time to head in for the night!

Obviously, these times are going to change as the days get shorted and longer, but thats the gist. More photos coming soon, I promise! Things are crazy right now, and it takes three days just to finish a post. But I'm serious, I HAVE pictures, I just need to get them up!

~Terra

Dan Learns Time Management

I consider myself to be an organized person. I keep my living spaces neat, I arrange my possessions into categories, I wash my clothes with like colors. However all of these are spacial organizations; when it comes to organizing and managing my time I'm a mess, and as luck would have it I'm rapidly learning that farming draws heavily upon that very skill. So I'm presented with a choice: give up on being a farmer and take on a job where my time is organized for me or learn better time management. So far, I've opted for the latter.

This weekend presents an interesting time management challenge. If all goes well, I'll be up at the farm for two days, working on all the various things that need to get done, by myself. Terra, who has enough on her plate with school work, won't be around to help this time. Compounding the challenge is the fact that several things need to happen in a specific order. If all goes well, the end result will be our first round of plants in the ground, but between now and then is a juggling act of testing, improving and conditioning the soil. In order to make sense of this process, and accomplish everything in the time that I have, I did something I rarely do; I made a schedule.

It's a little strange to me: all throughout my years in school, I never made schedules. For large assignments I'd let deadlines be my motivator, and had I been inclined I could have plotted a very nice logarithmic function relating the closeness of the due date to the amount of work I did. I'm not proud of this method, and I've handed in some truly dreadful work because of it, but It served me well enough to earn a college degree. So trying to suddenly develop better time management skills is exercising a part of my brain that hasn't gotten nearly enough attention in the past. And it's actually a pretty good feeling.

-Dan