So what’s next for us?

We’re currently working on several potential routes to secure a 1/4 acre to farm next year! We’re lucky to have two new farmer incubator sites nearby. The incubators provide some basic equipment and infrastructure and, importantly, highly subsidized land.

The applications for the incubator program are forcing us to think through some details that were previously just fun things to think about. Lucky for me, I love the process of making a vague idea come into focus. Going from idea to “how will this work?” is where I excel and something I don’t usually get to do in my day job.

Here’s where we landed after a weekend of lots of talking: We’ll kick off our farm with an opening harvest party at the end of April 2019 and continue to have a monthly harvest party/u-pick opportunity throughout the season. We’ll also launch a 10-12 person CSA.

Once we had a CSA start date, I dove straight into crop planning to figure out how and what we’d plant to fill a box with produce each week. I already had a seed wish list and it was quite the puzzle to sequence these crops into 20-100 foot rows. But I’m really happy with where we landed. Now all we have to do is… all the work :).

I am also very excited to be entering the plan into a pretty snazzy database web app (Airtable) which will make it much easier to start our next step – a business plan.

Many of our conversations this weekend focused on whether or not a crop was worth growing in our first year. Have we grown it before? Is it labor intensive? Would we be excited to get this in our CSA box? Sunchokes and cauliflower didn’t make the cut for 2019 but red curly kale did… just barely.

We’ve been growing this kale in our p-patch this year and at first we were unimpressed. It is beautiful but really tough. Even in a stir fry, it was unpleasantly chewy. I had a feeling, though, that this might be a pretty good kale for kale chips. The red curly kale exceeded expectations in this department! Before I go back to finishing up the crop database, I’ll leave you with the fantastic kale chip recipe that a lovely co-worker passed along.

Kale Chips

• Preheat the oven to 250° F.
• Remove center stems of the kale. I just rip the kale off the stems and into small pieces. Choose whatever size you’d enjoy eating – the recipe is very adaptable.
• Arrange the kale pieces on a baking sheet and toss with olive oil or melted coconut oil.
• Bake for 20 minutes.
• Season with salt. Sprinkle with nutritional yeast if you’d like.