Friday, September 9, 2011

Confessions of a farmers market vendor

Well it has been a hectic and busy second half of summer as i decided to take the plunge into the "interesting" world of farm markets by entering into a local market. I thought long and hard about it and decided against it but i had the luck of finding a reliable full time employee who has enabled me to be on the ball with regards to keeping the berries fully picked and for me to actually have the time to be off the farm for a day every week. I have now done three weeks at the market i am very pleased with how it has gone so far and i feel a strong sense of vindication in my farming abilities now that i am directly interacting with the customers instead of just wholesaling. I have been very pleased with both the price that i have been able to get for my produce and the feedback i have been getting from my small but growing customer base it is nice to now have a couple regular customers. I am glad that the berries have been so well received owing to the fact that i am charging a higher price than other vendors selling berries and that my key selling point of them being chemical free and local has been a bit with my customers. I hope that the rest of market season will go well and that i can gain enough experience and insight to be able to start next year at two markets and then enter into another couple as the season goes on as i would like to increase my exposure within the market scene locally. The things that i have learned from my first few market days is that being able to tell the customer "honestly" that you grew the majority of the produce at your stall instead of just growing a little and then reselling non local produce without properly informing the customer of its origin is a key selling point. I have quickly realized how much many vendors are really nothing more than resellers without really advertising that fact to their customers and that bothers me a lot but i digress. Well i should cut this post off before it becomes a full fledged rant i hope you all have a nice last few weeks of summer i will try to post again soon.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Well its summer now and the spring is  just a memory its hard for me to believe how fast this year is going. The last two months have been very busy but now that my lull between the first and second round of strawberries is over i will be even busier since the whole of the expanded berry patch will be producing berries now. I hope to have my first employee start soon now that i will be able to have enough to pick that i can't do it on my own. The rest of the spring has gone fairly well the strawberry season has started off strong this time last year I only had a trickle of berries. This year I had a steady harvest and the plants are still growing great and are about to start producing the second harvest which from the look of the blossoms will be quite heavy. Hopefully if the weather stays good until October I can have three more months of berries. If the plants follow the same pattern of growth as last year then peak production should be at the end of August. The rest of the garden is doing ok better than last season in some ways but some things are quite behind. This is because of the challenging growing conditions that I and other farmers who are suffering worse are facing this summer because of how wet and cool the season started out and how dry it has become now. I hope to have a wider variety of produce within the next few weeks and will be opening my vegetable stand again for the late summer and early fall once i have a steady enough supply of berries again. I would have liked to have opened earlier this year but the reality of being a one man operation is that wholesaling the berries is the most efficient use of my time and energy while still earning a fair return on my product. I hope all your summers are going great and lets hope the weather is great.

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Its been a "berry" busy spring

Hello again i am sorry for how long it has been between my posts but the spring has been flying by while i have undertaken my expansion plans for the berries. this season. The year i have decided to be a lot more ambitious with the amount of strawberries i am growing last season i had 375ft and now i am just shy of 1800ft altogether and that is without buying any plants just thinning the runners out and transplanting. So far my plan or the mental picture i have in my mind depending on what your definition of a plan is progressing great and the plants have been get a lot of rain and cool but still quite comfortable temperatures for a newly rooting strawberry plant. The plants from last year have also taken off quite well this year to be honest the whole patch is doing better than my most optimistic projections considering how hard last winter was. The strawberries have been budding solidly all week and i hope to be picking in about 2 weeks. I will post again soon with some photographic evidence once i have the berry field fully spruced up with new mulch for the season so its looks presentable.

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Winter is just boiling away in the wind





Well it is that delicious time of year when the sun starts warming up and winter begins to fade into memory. More importantly though this means it is maple syrup season again that sweet kick off to another growing season. This year i tapped just over 100 trees so far the season has been ok there have been a few heavy flow days but the cool weather has kept the sap from flowing continually for more than a day or two. I am guessing that it is about the midway point of the syrup season and that if the long range forecast stays the same the second half will be a lot heavier flow since the sap should be building up a lot in the roots. I am very excited for this spring but it definitely going to be a slow start to it because of how long winter has held on. I hope to start my seeds in the next two weeks which will probably be the topic of the next post. I have been working pretty long hours doing boiling it gets to be a little lonely some nights but you get used to it pretty quickly. The pics show me doing some tapping and some scenic shots look out for the last picture its a beauty. Still cant believe i managed to get the pic i hope to get more shots of the wood pecker while i boil. Well that's all that is going on around here enjoy the spring sunshine and get outside.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Time to take a little off the top






































Well it is February and the weather is cold and snowy just like it should be for this time of the year in Ontario. That means its pruning season for apple trees and some frigid afternoons for me as i try to get them ready for another growing season in which i hope to finally get my first actual crop of apples even if its only a handful this year i will be happy. I am glad to announce that out of the 18 apples trees i transplanted last year the majority of them have survived only 4 seem completely dead. This is better than i expected and more than matches the hope that i had for their survival when i dug them up in such a rough way.

The reason why apples trees are pruned in what is traditionally the coldest part of the winter is because it causes the least amount of harm to the trees as they are asleep and do not have any sap running to the branches yet so it doesn't cause any major loss of vitality to the tree. Also the tree has the time to heal the wound before the spring so that it is not as vulnerable to pests and disease. This year i am only doing minor pruning on my trees as they were already pruned back hard last year and now i just need a more strategic approach to help focus there growth in a way that maximizes both root and canopy growth. I hope that in the long term i can get these trees to producing well within the next few years.

The pictures in this post were taken with eye towards showing you how the berries and trees at "rest" during the winter and with all the snow so far this season these pictures provide a perfect example of the insulation that heavy snowfall provides for plants in northern climates. The picture of dougie was included to show you all how are four legged friends struggle to get around in deep snow but it doesn't slow her down to much because she is a farm dog and is used to it. Well i hope you are all enjoying the winter don't worry spring will be here soon.

Monday, January 17, 2011

Berry big plans for 2011






Hello again and welcome to my first in a series catch up posts for the last few months. I caint believe it is already 2011 last fall went by in a flash it seems but it was definitely a busy flash. I am not going to go into to much detail of everything that was happening around the farm but i will provide a recap of the major accomplishments last fall. The weather for fall 2010 was great and it helped to prolong my season and make the late season harvest more comfortable as it was relatively warm and dry for the time of year. At the the beginning of the spring i made picking berries in five different months one of my major goals for the year. Happily i can say that i met this goal and i have to say that the berry patch overall exceeded even my most optimistic predictions for the level of plant growth and production in there first year i still was picking up until halloween. I am amazed that overall the berries were productive enough to more than cover there cost in the first year. The biggest benefit though of how well both the strawberries and raspberries did this year was the amount of new plants an canes that i was able to transplant from them. This allowed for me to double and for a couple varieties of the raspberries almost triple the row length from what i planted in the spring. The main bonus of this is that it saved me probably close to 1500.00 dollars but also it allowed me to begin expanding the berry patch faster and larger than i thought possible when i started out. Originally i thought it would take until the end of my second season to be able to start transplanting and thinning the rows but thankfully the weather helped to speed that along. The only real complaint that i have from transplanting in the fall in comparison to the spring is the weather but it was more than worth it because of the major head start this gave me on my expansion plans for 2011. This year i have decided that the berry patch will be my primary focus as i have a dependable level of demand for them from my wholesale customer and was unable to fully satisfy it for the strawberries last season. Right now my major goals for the berry patch this year is to grow it to about five times its original size by next fall. The other bonus about fall transplanting is that the strawberries especially will be raring to grow as soon as the weather allows as they have had the winter to settle in an lay there roots down firmly and will grow to maturity faster than spring transplants because of the head start. I am still going to be purchasing fresh plants and canes this spring. I have decided that i am more than satisfied with the strawberry variety i have. I will be trying a couple new varieties of raspberries this spring to help prolong their season and provide a steady production level from when the early season varieties start producing till the frost arrives and the ever bearing raspberries finish for the season. I hope that if the raspberries really produce well this year that i will be able to start wholesaling them also by late summer. So overall i am very satisfied with how well the berry patch did this year and that i know it will be profitable in the long term and allow me to make a living while still providing a financial foundation for new ventures on the farm in the next few years which i will post about in the coming months. Pictures from the expanded berry patch will be posted soon. I finally added the pictures these show me doing some of the transplanting and some of the beautiful sunsets an mornings i enjoyed while doing thankfully it was a mild November. I will be posting again soon its almost pruning season for the fruit trees so hopefully i will have something on that topic.