Sunday, February 28, 2010

Too Much of a Good Thing

Yes yesterday's Market was rockin. I new it was going to be a busy one when I was quite busy at 8:00am. It stayed busy most the market, just slowing a bit at the end. Sold just about every Carrot we brought. Which is good cause we have lot's of them. I planted extra cause I was hoping that the schools veggie of the month program was going to have carrots on the list. Nope. Next year. So now either I find a place to sell a couple thousand pounds or till them in. Maybe Ben's Carrot wine will be a place to put them. Anybody want to buy some unmade, untested, untasted, Carrot wine? Well maybe I should get off my but and make some calls and just sell Carrots. Anybody out there want to buy a couple of tons of Carrots.

Actually the overage is a good thing. In two ways. One I always want enough to satisfy the demand at Farmers Market. Not enough Carrots make grumpy customers. Second way of a good thing is actaully I have so many extra cause I tried a new technique in seeding them and it worked out gangbusters. Yes David, if you read this you are the only one that knows. You know, a Farmer and his secrets. So end result is to much of a great thing. Good. Cause now I can grow my Carrot volume for years to come without taking space away from my other crops. It was getting tight but now I got a few years of growth.

Too much of a good thing/ blessing in disguise/ yeay!

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

It should be easy

I'm on the Board of the Nevada County Certified Growers Market and my pet project is getting a EBT ( food stamps ) program up and running. You'd think in this day and age, the information/internet age I could just go to a website and submit our application. But no the USDA is in the dark age's. No direct links to a website for each state's application page. Just bit's and pieces of somewhat useful information. So after a phone call where I actually reached a human on the other end, I got another phone# where I can leave my information and have a application mailed to me. I certainly hope that it gets mailed. I'd Love to get a program running as even struggling people should have access to Fresh, Local, Food.

On a positive light I was in the truck today and the producer/director for Food Inc. was on NPR talking about the fact that they've been nominated for an Oscar for best documentary. I've seen it, Loved it, and hopefully it will win, and bring to even more light our little food revolution. It's these things that brighten my day, it's been a long time coming ( I've been full time for 13 years ) but I'm glad there here!!

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Back to Market

Yes I"ve been back to Farmers Market. After being on vacation it was nice to see all my regular market friends, and of course all of our regular market customers. Some are both. Both friends and customers.

I did win the parking lottery and had a car squarely in my stall space and I decided to take one for the team and instead of causing a chain reaction unload everything and set up in my usual stall. It's pretty easy to do at this time of year, as this week all we had was carrots, but lots of them packed in really heavy 60# bins, I didn't wreak my back after a month off, and set-up went well.

The weather was supposed to be not including rain but then about 8:15 it started to rain, not a tiny shower and not a downpour but a good amount so then the topic of conversation starts to be is it going to keep raining which could really kill the market or stop and give us Farmers all a break. Well it stopped, but did put a lull in the customer flow, but all in all we had a pretty good market, did actually come home with some carrots.

The seed orders are starting to come in and I've started prepping coco peat for starting them in, and I've gotten my fertilizer quote ( which of course has gone up in price, more on that later) and tommorrow I'll start in greenhouse #1 getting ready to plant. And no I didn't get any planting done in the field during the February window, I'm very sse against screwing up my tilth and running my tractor the the field just so that I can make a few more bucks. And most the time when I plant this early in the spring the slugs eat it all anyway!

Fertilizer. Yes of course it's price has gone up again. Usually always does. It's one of those costs that slowly eats away at my profit until I finally am able to raise my prices. Want to know what the extra cost of fertilizer for the year will cost me if I don't raise any prices? $782.32. That ain't chump change. But it's a bit challenging finding a way to pass that on to my customers, as I would find it next to impossible to charge an extra penny for something or the other. Oh the travails of being a small Farmer!!

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

I'm Back

Yes, Yes, Ive been gone for a while now on our annual vacation to somewhere warm and sunny.
We went to Little Corn Island a tiny little island off the carribean coast of Nicaragua. It was fantastic, relaxing, fun,recharging, healing,and a whole lot more. The island has no roads, no cars, and a small village, and some really good food, nice people, and some good scuba diving. And the diving is about the cheapest place in the world to dive so that fits my bill. We made some new friends, met some very nice people, ate lots of good food, drank some beer ( and they even have some good wine), dove, and had lots of naps, and hammock time. And I do have to thank Ben & Laura and Phil for taking such good care of the Farm and making it a worry free vacation.

So now it's back to work. Today I did my seed order, which can be fun, exciting and a bit stressful.

The fun part is placing all the orders,as it's the start of the new planting year. The exciting part is when one of my seed companies dosn't have what I need. The stressful part is finding someone who does. All in all it all came out good. My famous pretty purple pepper variety was on back order till past when I intially plant so that was the first scramble. I substituted another pepper which could actually be the same variety with a different name. Hope it works out. Then the scramble came. One of my other pepper varietys has been discontinued, and it's one of my premium peppers. I Love them and our customers Love them so off to the races I went looking for other companies that might have some left. I found some, yay!! Now I also have to replace it, so I'm going to trial quite a few others looking for it's replacement. I'm also going to breed it myself and see if I can stabilize the hybrid. Wish me luck!

Also my favorite watermelon variety has been discontinued so I've made a replacement which should work out well if I can educate my customers on it's different exterior color than they are used to.
Then again another discontinuation. My cucumber standby, but I did find some still available from another company but will trial another variety.

So now my heart rate has come down, I'm feeling pretty good, and tomorrow I will do my fertilizer order. Let's hope for no surprise's