Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Farm Share Blog
I just posted 3 (three) new entries to the Farm Share Blog I have over at Local Harvest. These newsletters (I have the whole season to date) should give you a good idea of what goes on with our Farm Share Initiative-what kind and how much food, farm events, etc.. Check it out.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Summer Summary
Fall is here which means the summer of 2009 is officially history. It was a really good summer growing and marketing season for us. the weather was cool and for the most part dry. but when we did get rain it was generally a lot and at just the right time. Still we are down over 4" on rain for the year but perhaps this fall will be wetter than normal and we will make it up.
We grew the best melons ever (and Eugene is an excellent melon grower). Maybe 2% of them were not absolutely excellent. we had several customers (and these are people who's opinions about such things I respect) tell us that our water melons were the best they have ever eaten.
The alliums out did themselves again this year, meaning they are better this year than last and last year they were incredible. Sublime garlic, gigantic leeks (and so far, all we have harvested are the small fall leeks, the winter leeks which should be 2x to 3x larger won't be ready for another month or so), beautiful onions and wonderful scallions.
The tomatoes, despite the plants succumbing to some sort of local blight (not late blight but rather something we contend with every year) fairly early, still produced a lot of huge fruits. Or at least most of them did. We did have some failures such as Black Krim which gave us few very cat faced fruits. I believe we got about 4 usable maters from 15 plants. I do not believe we will grow these again. The Paul Robeson did not do well for us but when the plants did produce typical fruit it produced some gorgeous tomatoes. I saved seed early on and this will get a second chance. The Green Zebra was something else-I believe a small red saladette type mater, something we have far too many of already. Baker Creek messed up on that and as this was about the 7th time they have messed up with us, we will not be ordering from them in 2010. I do like their philosophy but they will have to do far better with selling us correct seed, good seed and getting orders to us in a timely fashion. There are several other seed houses that do heirlooms that give us better service such as Seed Savers Exchange.
Ah enough ranting, back to maters. The great White tomato, while a bad seller, was a great producer of beautiful ivory white fruits with a good acid bite. they came on early and produced longer than just about anything else except early girls which, while early and prolific were a bit of a disappointment this year. The early girls were not as big as last year and found the flavor lacking. fortunately we had GL-18 (AKA Glick's Pride) as our mainstay red mater and they far exceeded our expectations. they were far bigger than they have been before. The shape was about perfect and they rarely cracked and had zero cat facing. It would have been nice if they could have held on a week or two longer but they got us through most of September and we had big red maters when no one else did at the farmers market, cha-ching!. The other reds we grew-the canners did really well for us but I don't think as well as last year (or was it two years ago?). We grew Amish paste and Opalka again. The Amish paste out produced the Opalka about 4:1. We grew enough of these to make and can ourselves plenty of tomato sauce, ratatouille and salsa plus we sold about 300 pounds to others so they could put up tomatoes.
The cherry tomatoes were only so so (which is actually a good thing since when they do really well that means someone has to spend several hours daily picking them and than we have to figure out what to do with the excess). We have decided never to grow green grape again since it does not sell. This means it will produce hundreds of volunteers all over the farm in the future. It is hard to get people to try the green maters. Though it seems when I can get someone to try a green grape they get hooked quickly. they are a very nice mater but for most it is hard to get past the color. The yellow pear barely produced and a lot of them were green again this year. I think it is time to get new seed. the Sun sugar did well for about 3 weeks than quit producing much and the plants now look like hell. This is good as everyone at the farmers market(s) grew this kind this year so the market was flooded and sales were way down. I think next year we will cut back a lot on the cherry tomatoes. We do not need all that many for the farm share-maybe 20 to 30 plants and it seems they have become passe at market. that will free up beds for something else next year.
Unlike last year, we have a lot of ripe peppers. Last year the peppers were very late and we got a killing frost before they got ripe. It did not help that on Sept 14th 2008 we had hurricane force winds for about 6 hours that knocked down all the pepper plants. This year things are completely different. We have a lot of huge bell peppers and they are getting ripe well before it gets cold. I have also learned to take them off the plants when they show color and they ripen up just fine indoors away from pests and diseases that tend to ruin about 50% of the ripe peppers (which is why red, yellow and orange (ripe) peppers cost twice as much as green peppers).
the raspberries out did themselves again this season. The Lathams, our early summer raspberry, was spectacular again. Heavy production and excellent quality. My only complaint was we did a piss poor job of pruning in the early spring which made parts of the raspberry patch almost impossible to harvest. Next year I am cutting back a lot more than Eugene will deem necessary (he has a problem with thinning out plants and wants to leave a lot more than should be left). The Heritage raspberries, which we mow down in early spring, had quite good production and the flavor has been sublime, far better than the Lathams (which, as I said were excellent). Eugene has this crazy notion that we should let the heritage grow and produce in spring. I have this crazy idea that he can do all the harvesting as well as tilling, seeding, transplanting and other spring chores if this happens. You see we do not need a second kind of spring raspberry when the Lathams are pumping out over 30 gallons of fruit. As it is we do not sell all the Lathams produce (we come close but in order to get rid of them we have to sell in bulk and drop the price 33%). We do sell pretty much 100% of the Late summer berries and if we allow the Heritage to have 2 crops we will lessen the fall yield by about 60% and not have enough for the FSI, store and farmers market in August and September. In other words, Eugene's idea of more spring/summer berries is a bad one on many levels.
The strawberries have not been the best. I don't think we have them in the best place and they need to be replaced this fall with new day neutral berries. the yields have been down and disease problems up. We did get a very nice crop of April may berries because we put a hoop house over them. Granted, the hoop house got nailed twice in the winter-once by heavy wet snow and than a month later by high winds. But neither incident seemed to have any effect on the berry production. it is ironic that the first year the berries have been less than great we do a farm tour and in November a workshop on sustainable berry production. I will say the farm tour attendees did not seem to care what kind of shape the berries were in. Next season we should have a new crop of berries in a new and better spot and hopefully we will be swimming strawberries all spring summer and fall next year.
The greens have been around all season. In spring we had lots of lettuce, spring mix, arugula, kale and various Asian greens. Summer we lost the lettuce-we did try to grow some several times because it was cool most of the summer but every time we started lettuce we would get 5 to 8 days of heat and humidity, always a week or two after germination and that would cause the baby lettuce to get bitter and bolt to seed. now that it is autumn we have several beds of nice lettuce growing as well as volunteers coming up around the market garden. the same thing happened with spring mix. After late June it got impossible to grow it though we did try. We did get several harvests of arugula for our efforts through the summer but nothing else from the spring mix beds. Kale and chard were the summer mainstay greens, they always are.
Broccoli did badly for us but we did get some decent cabbages. I dunno why we have such problems with broccoli, perhaps we should quit growing it. Spring radishes were hit and miss and the early red meat radishes were a complete failure. But we do have a 1/2 bed of them now that are very nice. We got really nice early rutabagas as well as red turnips. the fall red turnips are ready to harvest and store for winter, though it will be early next week before that will happen.
Finally, the Farm Share Initiative has been a great thing for us. It allowed us drop a farmers market and make more money while being allowed to stay home and get more work done. Definitely a win, win for us and the fact very few people seemed to notice there is no longer a Tuesday evening market in Oxford (maybe 10 people have asked about this this summer) tells me that we would have made less money this year than last at that market. So it is good that we are doing the FSI.
I think I will change a few things on how the FSI is run next season. This season I allowed members to sign up for the entire season but pay monthly. That will stop as it is not fair to the members that ponied up the cash for the entire season upfront. And the members who did this have all dropped out for the last month, not good. They also got a few extra weeks as I was treating them like the paid in full members as I expected them to go through the entire season. I think the monthly farm tour/pot luck will go as well since we only were able to hold two this year mostly because of a lack of interest on the part of most of the members. I think a once a year farm tour/pot luck will suffice. I am having a hard time getting it through to the members that farm visits are a very important aspect of the farm share/CSA experience. This is how one connects to their farm and without farm visits one might as well buy their food from the farmers market. I also think it is time to drop the month to month deal. This has the potential of getting very confusing which will lead to mistakes -especially when the FSI grows to more than 30 members. It will be replaced by what I used call "Share Cycles" where I break the season down into 2 or 3 month increments for those who cannot do an entire season for whatever reason.
Well, that's the summery of our summer
We grew the best melons ever (and Eugene is an excellent melon grower). Maybe 2% of them were not absolutely excellent. we had several customers (and these are people who's opinions about such things I respect) tell us that our water melons were the best they have ever eaten.
The alliums out did themselves again this year, meaning they are better this year than last and last year they were incredible. Sublime garlic, gigantic leeks (and so far, all we have harvested are the small fall leeks, the winter leeks which should be 2x to 3x larger won't be ready for another month or so), beautiful onions and wonderful scallions.
The tomatoes, despite the plants succumbing to some sort of local blight (not late blight but rather something we contend with every year) fairly early, still produced a lot of huge fruits. Or at least most of them did. We did have some failures such as Black Krim which gave us few very cat faced fruits. I believe we got about 4 usable maters from 15 plants. I do not believe we will grow these again. The Paul Robeson did not do well for us but when the plants did produce typical fruit it produced some gorgeous tomatoes. I saved seed early on and this will get a second chance. The Green Zebra was something else-I believe a small red saladette type mater, something we have far too many of already. Baker Creek messed up on that and as this was about the 7th time they have messed up with us, we will not be ordering from them in 2010. I do like their philosophy but they will have to do far better with selling us correct seed, good seed and getting orders to us in a timely fashion. There are several other seed houses that do heirlooms that give us better service such as Seed Savers Exchange.
Ah enough ranting, back to maters. The great White tomato, while a bad seller, was a great producer of beautiful ivory white fruits with a good acid bite. they came on early and produced longer than just about anything else except early girls which, while early and prolific were a bit of a disappointment this year. The early girls were not as big as last year and found the flavor lacking. fortunately we had GL-18 (AKA Glick's Pride) as our mainstay red mater and they far exceeded our expectations. they were far bigger than they have been before. The shape was about perfect and they rarely cracked and had zero cat facing. It would have been nice if they could have held on a week or two longer but they got us through most of September and we had big red maters when no one else did at the farmers market, cha-ching!. The other reds we grew-the canners did really well for us but I don't think as well as last year (or was it two years ago?). We grew Amish paste and Opalka again. The Amish paste out produced the Opalka about 4:1. We grew enough of these to make and can ourselves plenty of tomato sauce, ratatouille and salsa plus we sold about 300 pounds to others so they could put up tomatoes.
The cherry tomatoes were only so so (which is actually a good thing since when they do really well that means someone has to spend several hours daily picking them and than we have to figure out what to do with the excess). We have decided never to grow green grape again since it does not sell. This means it will produce hundreds of volunteers all over the farm in the future. It is hard to get people to try the green maters. Though it seems when I can get someone to try a green grape they get hooked quickly. they are a very nice mater but for most it is hard to get past the color. The yellow pear barely produced and a lot of them were green again this year. I think it is time to get new seed. the Sun sugar did well for about 3 weeks than quit producing much and the plants now look like hell. This is good as everyone at the farmers market(s) grew this kind this year so the market was flooded and sales were way down. I think next year we will cut back a lot on the cherry tomatoes. We do not need all that many for the farm share-maybe 20 to 30 plants and it seems they have become passe at market. that will free up beds for something else next year.
Unlike last year, we have a lot of ripe peppers. Last year the peppers were very late and we got a killing frost before they got ripe. It did not help that on Sept 14th 2008 we had hurricane force winds for about 6 hours that knocked down all the pepper plants. This year things are completely different. We have a lot of huge bell peppers and they are getting ripe well before it gets cold. I have also learned to take them off the plants when they show color and they ripen up just fine indoors away from pests and diseases that tend to ruin about 50% of the ripe peppers (which is why red, yellow and orange (ripe) peppers cost twice as much as green peppers).
the raspberries out did themselves again this season. The Lathams, our early summer raspberry, was spectacular again. Heavy production and excellent quality. My only complaint was we did a piss poor job of pruning in the early spring which made parts of the raspberry patch almost impossible to harvest. Next year I am cutting back a lot more than Eugene will deem necessary (he has a problem with thinning out plants and wants to leave a lot more than should be left). The Heritage raspberries, which we mow down in early spring, had quite good production and the flavor has been sublime, far better than the Lathams (which, as I said were excellent). Eugene has this crazy notion that we should let the heritage grow and produce in spring. I have this crazy idea that he can do all the harvesting as well as tilling, seeding, transplanting and other spring chores if this happens. You see we do not need a second kind of spring raspberry when the Lathams are pumping out over 30 gallons of fruit. As it is we do not sell all the Lathams produce (we come close but in order to get rid of them we have to sell in bulk and drop the price 33%). We do sell pretty much 100% of the Late summer berries and if we allow the Heritage to have 2 crops we will lessen the fall yield by about 60% and not have enough for the FSI, store and farmers market in August and September. In other words, Eugene's idea of more spring/summer berries is a bad one on many levels.
The strawberries have not been the best. I don't think we have them in the best place and they need to be replaced this fall with new day neutral berries. the yields have been down and disease problems up. We did get a very nice crop of April may berries because we put a hoop house over them. Granted, the hoop house got nailed twice in the winter-once by heavy wet snow and than a month later by high winds. But neither incident seemed to have any effect on the berry production. it is ironic that the first year the berries have been less than great we do a farm tour and in November a workshop on sustainable berry production. I will say the farm tour attendees did not seem to care what kind of shape the berries were in. Next season we should have a new crop of berries in a new and better spot and hopefully we will be swimming strawberries all spring summer and fall next year.
The greens have been around all season. In spring we had lots of lettuce, spring mix, arugula, kale and various Asian greens. Summer we lost the lettuce-we did try to grow some several times because it was cool most of the summer but every time we started lettuce we would get 5 to 8 days of heat and humidity, always a week or two after germination and that would cause the baby lettuce to get bitter and bolt to seed. now that it is autumn we have several beds of nice lettuce growing as well as volunteers coming up around the market garden. the same thing happened with spring mix. After late June it got impossible to grow it though we did try. We did get several harvests of arugula for our efforts through the summer but nothing else from the spring mix beds. Kale and chard were the summer mainstay greens, they always are.
Broccoli did badly for us but we did get some decent cabbages. I dunno why we have such problems with broccoli, perhaps we should quit growing it. Spring radishes were hit and miss and the early red meat radishes were a complete failure. But we do have a 1/2 bed of them now that are very nice. We got really nice early rutabagas as well as red turnips. the fall red turnips are ready to harvest and store for winter, though it will be early next week before that will happen.
Finally, the Farm Share Initiative has been a great thing for us. It allowed us drop a farmers market and make more money while being allowed to stay home and get more work done. Definitely a win, win for us and the fact very few people seemed to notice there is no longer a Tuesday evening market in Oxford (maybe 10 people have asked about this this summer) tells me that we would have made less money this year than last at that market. So it is good that we are doing the FSI.
I think I will change a few things on how the FSI is run next season. This season I allowed members to sign up for the entire season but pay monthly. That will stop as it is not fair to the members that ponied up the cash for the entire season upfront. And the members who did this have all dropped out for the last month, not good. They also got a few extra weeks as I was treating them like the paid in full members as I expected them to go through the entire season. I think the monthly farm tour/pot luck will go as well since we only were able to hold two this year mostly because of a lack of interest on the part of most of the members. I think a once a year farm tour/pot luck will suffice. I am having a hard time getting it through to the members that farm visits are a very important aspect of the farm share/CSA experience. This is how one connects to their farm and without farm visits one might as well buy their food from the farmers market. I also think it is time to drop the month to month deal. This has the potential of getting very confusing which will lead to mistakes -especially when the FSI grows to more than 30 members. It will be replaced by what I used call "Share Cycles" where I break the season down into 2 or 3 month increments for those who cannot do an entire season for whatever reason.
Well, that's the summery of our summer
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Sunflowers
Pictures of the sunflowers we grew this year. the seed is a mix of at least 10 different kinds. We got the seed from the Seed savers Exchange. I am saving the seed of most of the different kinds and will plant them next year and see what we get.
Sunflowers sure do make a farm happy.
Sunflowers sure do make a farm happy.
Monday, September 07, 2009
Early September
Some farm photos for your enjoyment. These were taken throughout the day Friday Sept 4th
Tomato plants
Some of the winter squash harvest. Cushaws, delicata, butternut, acorn and sunshine.
Ugly radishes. sweet and hot.
Rainbow carrots
Sunflower
Sunflower being pollinated by a native bee
More sunflowers
Beetles on a sunflower
Purple peppers
Tomato plants
Some of the winter squash harvest. Cushaws, delicata, butternut, acorn and sunshine.
Ugly radishes. sweet and hot.
Rainbow carrots
Sunflower
Sunflower being pollinated by a native bee
More sunflowers
Beetles on a sunflower
Purple peppers
Sunday, August 30, 2009
The IFO Farm Tour
Tour goers gathering in front of the store before the tour commenced
We hosted a farm tour today in association with Innovative Farmers of Ohio. We talked about sustainable strawberry and raspberry production. Around 20 people came out for the event and a good time seemed to be had by all.
We got started at 3pm with Sharon Sachs introducing us to the tourees. We spoke about what we would be discussing on the tour than everyone was invited to introduce themselves and tell us what they wanted to do with berries (market farm or backyard gardener) Many were backyard gardeners though there were several farmers there as well
After the introductions we got started with the tour and took everyone behind the store and out to the market garden.
This is me explaining how to get bigger berries by pulling certain flowers off a fall
talking irrigation and ground covers
Now we are all done talking about strawberries and we are starting towards the raspberries and pointing out things as we go.
part of the tour group by the raspberries
talking about pruning raspberries
Look! Over there!
Enjoying the farm
Tour is almost over at this point and Eugene is showing off a cold frame
part of the tour group by the raspberries
talking about pruning raspberries
Look! Over there!
Enjoying the farm
Tour is almost over at this point and Eugene is showing off a cold frameFriday, August 28, 2009
Tomatoes
I haven't posted in a while. Between long days working the farm, marketing food and Facebook I haven't made time to post here in weeks.
Like all summers it's been busy at Boulder Belt Eco-Farm. We have had a great summer-the weather, for the most part has been cool and dry and the crops have loved it. we have huge tomatoes this year, despite the evil specter of late blight which has been stalking the tomato patches of the eastern US this summer. We don't seem to have that problem. Our tomato plants look pretty bad as they have once again been struck with whatever crud we have in our soils but it is not late blight as our crud rarely effects the fruit. It just kills the vines which can lead to sun scald problems but not fruit with disgusting lesions and rot. At any rate, the fruits are huge.
I did not know that Glick's pride was a beef steak tomato as it never has gotten all that big for us in the past 12 years we have grown it. But this year we have a lot of 1 pound+ fruits.
I notice the paste tomatoes, Amish paste and Opalka are also both huge this year. Usually the Opalka come in at about 1/2 pound or less. This year they are at least twice that big. Same with the Amish paste.
The early girl are not all that big this year but quite prolific
The Paul Robeson are all over the place on size-some are teensy and catfaced, others are big and beautifully round. the taste is good but not quite as good as I expected. still seeds have been saved for next year
Great White tomatoes like others are huge and for the most part perfectly round. And they taste really good for any tomato, but especially for a white tomato which generally are pretty insipid. unfortunately because they are strange they do not sell well (I guess I will have to get aggressive about them and convince people to try them)
The Nyagous are perfect cue ball sized black tomatoes again this year and they taste fabulous. these have become one of my favorites.
The Black Krim are just wrong. 95% of them have catfaced horribly making them pretty unusable for anything other that displaying as a freak of nature or sauce/juice. I dunno what happened there, but it ain't good.
I don't know what happened to the Green Zebra, but with pretty much all the different types of tomatoes we grow ripening to at least the point of identification, we don't seem to have any. But we do seem to have a lot more red saladette types than I remember starting. It's been years since we have grown Green Zebra but I remember them being pretty early so if we have them we should be harvesting them by now. We got the seed from Baker Creek. I do like the philosophy at BC but this is not the first time we have gotten wrong seed from them. I doubt we will order from them again as we cannot afford to spend money with such a lax seed house.
The Costoluto plants died early but they did produce a crop of beautiful fluted medium red tomatoes before they succumbed
The cherry tomatoes are doing well this year. We have way to many sunsugar about the right amount of Cherrywine (which is nearly stable this year-I believe there was only one sport-a pink saladette). The yellow pear plants are not dead and generally they are the first to die of our home grown tomato ick. The green pear seem to be stabilized their first year of selection-100% of the plants are producing green pear maters. As a mater of fact, I found a couple of green pear plants in with the yellow pear plants. The red grape are going gang busters and the green grape are nice and healthy and just beginning to ripen.
It looks like we got 2 crinckovich plants this year and they are noting special. I do like the fruit so I think it will be worth seeking out a good seed source as I do not have enough to keep seed from (you really need a minimum of 8 plants and I have 2).
The Sunray tomatoes are just now ripening up and they are about perfect in every way. huge round deep yellow fruits with great flavor and very prolific. I am surprised the plants have not broken under the weight of all the fruit.
The Dr Wyche's Yellow is almost over for the year and they were, like so many other tomatoes pretty spectacular. Very few deformed, catfaced fruits. Good flavor and good yields.
The Boulder Belt Striped was very good this year. As far as I can tell, we had zero off types so I will declare this a stabilized breed. the flavor is good to boot.
The Matina has been great. Wonderful small tasty fruits and very very prolific
So That's the August rundown of our maters
Like all summers it's been busy at Boulder Belt Eco-Farm. We have had a great summer-the weather, for the most part has been cool and dry and the crops have loved it. we have huge tomatoes this year, despite the evil specter of late blight which has been stalking the tomato patches of the eastern US this summer. We don't seem to have that problem. Our tomato plants look pretty bad as they have once again been struck with whatever crud we have in our soils but it is not late blight as our crud rarely effects the fruit. It just kills the vines which can lead to sun scald problems but not fruit with disgusting lesions and rot. At any rate, the fruits are huge.
I did not know that Glick's pride was a beef steak tomato as it never has gotten all that big for us in the past 12 years we have grown it. But this year we have a lot of 1 pound+ fruits.
I notice the paste tomatoes, Amish paste and Opalka are also both huge this year. Usually the Opalka come in at about 1/2 pound or less. This year they are at least twice that big. Same with the Amish paste.
The early girl are not all that big this year but quite prolific
The Paul Robeson are all over the place on size-some are teensy and catfaced, others are big and beautifully round. the taste is good but not quite as good as I expected. still seeds have been saved for next year
Great White tomatoes like others are huge and for the most part perfectly round. And they taste really good for any tomato, but especially for a white tomato which generally are pretty insipid. unfortunately because they are strange they do not sell well (I guess I will have to get aggressive about them and convince people to try them)
The Nyagous are perfect cue ball sized black tomatoes again this year and they taste fabulous. these have become one of my favorites.
The Black Krim are just wrong. 95% of them have catfaced horribly making them pretty unusable for anything other that displaying as a freak of nature or sauce/juice. I dunno what happened there, but it ain't good.
I don't know what happened to the Green Zebra, but with pretty much all the different types of tomatoes we grow ripening to at least the point of identification, we don't seem to have any. But we do seem to have a lot more red saladette types than I remember starting. It's been years since we have grown Green Zebra but I remember them being pretty early so if we have them we should be harvesting them by now. We got the seed from Baker Creek. I do like the philosophy at BC but this is not the first time we have gotten wrong seed from them. I doubt we will order from them again as we cannot afford to spend money with such a lax seed house.
The Costoluto plants died early but they did produce a crop of beautiful fluted medium red tomatoes before they succumbed
The cherry tomatoes are doing well this year. We have way to many sunsugar about the right amount of Cherrywine (which is nearly stable this year-I believe there was only one sport-a pink saladette). The yellow pear plants are not dead and generally they are the first to die of our home grown tomato ick. The green pear seem to be stabilized their first year of selection-100% of the plants are producing green pear maters. As a mater of fact, I found a couple of green pear plants in with the yellow pear plants. The red grape are going gang busters and the green grape are nice and healthy and just beginning to ripen.
It looks like we got 2 crinckovich plants this year and they are noting special. I do like the fruit so I think it will be worth seeking out a good seed source as I do not have enough to keep seed from (you really need a minimum of 8 plants and I have 2).
The Sunray tomatoes are just now ripening up and they are about perfect in every way. huge round deep yellow fruits with great flavor and very prolific. I am surprised the plants have not broken under the weight of all the fruit.
The Dr Wyche's Yellow is almost over for the year and they were, like so many other tomatoes pretty spectacular. Very few deformed, catfaced fruits. Good flavor and good yields.
The Boulder Belt Striped was very good this year. As far as I can tell, we had zero off types so I will declare this a stabilized breed. the flavor is good to boot.
The Matina has been great. Wonderful small tasty fruits and very very prolific
So That's the August rundown of our maters
Sunday, August 16, 2009
CSA short Film
Check out this beautiful film from a member's perspective about their CSA in PA
Fridays at the Farm
Fridays at the Farm
127 Yard Sale, Day 4
Okay a week late but here it is. this year's finish of the yard sale far exceeded past years. We had probably 1000 people com through between 9am and 4pm. I attribute this to the fact that for the first time the other YS venues in Ohio did not shut down on Sunday as they have in the past. So shoppers had reason to keep on shopping throughout Ohio.
Last year I believe we had around 200 people stop. It was so slow that we had earlier made the decision not to open Sunday and I gave all the vendors their space for free on Sunday this year if they wanted to stick around. I am glad we decided to stay open Sunday as that was by far our best produce sales day of the weekend. next year we will plan on doing Sunday and we will not give away the spaces that day
I was struck by how many Maryland license plates we in our lot Sunday morning. They outnumbered the Ohio (and other state plates) 2 or 3 to one for a couple of hours. I guess these were people about ready to hop on I-70 and head back home and we were about their last stop on their Yard Sale adventure. though I do not know that for sure as I did not talk to any one about why they were here Sunday morning.
All in all this year's yard sale was the best ever. But next year will be better. We plan on having T-shirts for sale (we still need to design them) We will do the map again as that was simply fascinating and from the comments we have received we are the only people doing such a thing on the 127 YS Trail. There will be a new food vendor-We have asked several chefs we know if they want to set up and all are interested. But we will see what happens over the next 11 months.
Last year I believe we had around 200 people stop. It was so slow that we had earlier made the decision not to open Sunday and I gave all the vendors their space for free on Sunday this year if they wanted to stick around. I am glad we decided to stay open Sunday as that was by far our best produce sales day of the weekend. next year we will plan on doing Sunday and we will not give away the spaces that day
I was struck by how many Maryland license plates we in our lot Sunday morning. They outnumbered the Ohio (and other state plates) 2 or 3 to one for a couple of hours. I guess these were people about ready to hop on I-70 and head back home and we were about their last stop on their Yard Sale adventure. though I do not know that for sure as I did not talk to any one about why they were here Sunday morning.
All in all this year's yard sale was the best ever. But next year will be better. We plan on having T-shirts for sale (we still need to design them) We will do the map again as that was simply fascinating and from the comments we have received we are the only people doing such a thing on the 127 YS Trail. There will be a new food vendor-We have asked several chefs we know if they want to set up and all are interested. But we will see what happens over the next 11 months.
Monday, August 10, 2009
127 yard sale 2009 Day 3
Day 3 was almost as busy as day 1 but I do not think anyone sold as much-lots of lookers but probably only 1/3 actually bought anything. Still, the vendors all seemed happy with the day. We had around 2000 people come through our sale. Looks like we will have had at least 6000 people stop here by the end of Sunday. That is about twice as many as in any previous year. Part of this is the fact I did a good job of advertising on the web and part of it is because Ohio has finally come alive for this event. Unlike previous years, there were at least 500 sales, big and small, in Preble County. I heard this was also true in Darke County. I have not heard about Butler, Hamilton Counties but people said it was active from West Unity southward-Way to go Ohio!
We picked up a new seller, Vince, who had a wide array of music -CD's, Records, Tapes- and some other things to sell. He at one time had a large record/music store. He showed up around 10 am asked about a spot and set up. He said he would be back for the entire 4 days next year.
Looks like we have 8 of our 20 spots reserved for 2010 already. Everyone agrees we have one of the best places to set up in Ohio-right one the road and 3 miles south of where about 85% of the yard salers start their shopping trek. Those folks that called and said they would set up here and flaked out missed a great opportunity and it is likely they will not be able to get a spot here next year. I now can be picky as to what sells and who gets to sell it. the fees will likely be raised for 2010 as this farm is a hot commodity and why sell ourselves short. setting up and managing this event is a lot of work and we need to start being decently compensated for it. As it stands right now we can make about the same money doing one 6 hour farmers market so we need to start charging more per spot. $10 bucks ain't much
We have one guy who leaves as soon as he makes $300. He was gone at 3pm. Everyone else stuck around until 6pm. By 6pm few cars were pulling and we were all exhausted.
We had no food as Adams Rib pulled out yesterday. Next year we will get someone who can do the full 4 days. It probably won't be Adam's Rib BBQ but it will be food and likely far greater variety (The BBQ folk brought only 2 selections when they could have brought much more. They did not supply an eating area as they had last year. They did not seem to have their heart in this event which is a shame. It is time for us to move on to bigger and better things with our food vendor). I believe if we had food Saturday we would have even more people stop. I noticed we were dead at lunch time and again at dinner time (though we were all ready to close up by 6pm so not an issue)
All in all Saturday was another great day for us.
Saturday, August 08, 2009
127 yard sale 2009 Day 2
It was slow on day two of the 127 yard sale. Real slow. I would say we got, maybe, 1000 people coming through, maybe less. The car count average was down by 2/3rds perhaps more (probably more).
I spoke to may of the other sellers about this and we all decided there were a couple of factors involved.
1) The first day of the sale should have the best items so that is the day to hit the sales.
I don't think this is necessarily true. It was observed yesterday that between Eaton and St Rt 73 there were about 50 small sales that had cropped up in the yards, barns and parking lots that were not there Thursday (and boy did they miss the boat!). So in that case the good stuff would still be there on Friday as it could not have been sold on Thursday
Add to that the fact that our sale is still picking up new vendors. I got a call from a guy in Michigan who said he would be coming in sometime Saturday morning. that means we will have a whole lot of items that have not been gone though.
Plus I know we continue to go through our house and barn and keep finding additional items to put in the sale as do a couple of our other vendors who live close by. I am positive we are not the only people doing this so this also keeps the sale selection some what fresh for buyers
2)Thursday has the truly serious buyers. the folks who are attempting to do the entire distance. In order to have a chance at going the whole way or at least more than one state you must start on Thursday. So that would go far in explaining the extremely heavy traffic on that day.
I did notice we were getting heavy traffic Friday from 7am til about 10am and that most of these people were from out of state and doing a lot of the sale. After 10 am the traffic dropped a lot and we were getting more locals than out of staters. Several people told me that they had taken a half day off from work to do the sales. And I did note that after 2pm that we were getting an increase of people, though now where near Thursday's volume. I expect traffic to be up today as it is Saturday and people have the day off
I spoke to may of the other sellers about this and we all decided there were a couple of factors involved.
1) The first day of the sale should have the best items so that is the day to hit the sales.
I don't think this is necessarily true. It was observed yesterday that between Eaton and St Rt 73 there were about 50 small sales that had cropped up in the yards, barns and parking lots that were not there Thursday (and boy did they miss the boat!). So in that case the good stuff would still be there on Friday as it could not have been sold on Thursday
Add to that the fact that our sale is still picking up new vendors. I got a call from a guy in Michigan who said he would be coming in sometime Saturday morning. that means we will have a whole lot of items that have not been gone though.
Plus I know we continue to go through our house and barn and keep finding additional items to put in the sale as do a couple of our other vendors who live close by. I am positive we are not the only people doing this so this also keeps the sale selection some what fresh for buyers
2)Thursday has the truly serious buyers. the folks who are attempting to do the entire distance. In order to have a chance at going the whole way or at least more than one state you must start on Thursday. So that would go far in explaining the extremely heavy traffic on that day.
I did notice we were getting heavy traffic Friday from 7am til about 10am and that most of these people were from out of state and doing a lot of the sale. After 10 am the traffic dropped a lot and we were getting more locals than out of staters. Several people told me that they had taken a half day off from work to do the sales. And I did note that after 2pm that we were getting an increase of people, though now where near Thursday's volume. I expect traffic to be up today as it is Saturday and people have the day off
Friday, August 07, 2009
127 yard sale 2009 Day 1
Alyssa and Sohpie are prettying up the Open sign for us. They spent the day with Alyssa's Grandmother, Rose McCoy, of our first time vendorsDay one of the yard Sale dawned clear and cool. By 7am we had 5 of the 6 vendors in place and setting up. The 7th vendor was a no-show.
By 8am the parking lot was packed with cars and this did not stop until around 6pm. It was the busiest Thursday we have ever seen-Yard Sale Madness!
A walk through of the sale around 8:30 am
It was also a bittersweet day. The night before we lost our dog, Arlo-he had a stroke we believe at 6pm and was dead by 10pm. So Eugene dealt with digging a very large hole behind our store and buried him while the sale went on its' merry way. Than one of our New vendor's got word that his mother had died around 10am. He had asked if he could give our number to his brother as his mother was gravely ill and he might need to be contacted. Well, he was contacted from around 9am on several times with worse and worse news. Finally I was in the store talking to his wife and the phone rang again and I said I will bet that is for you. It was and it was the news of death. They hung in there the rest of the day but around 5pm packed up and left. They will be back next year which is great because we really like these guys and they had a lot of interesting items for sale and really enhanced the sale.
happy shoppers around 10amWe put up a map this year and are asking people to put a thumb tack to show us where they are from. We had people coming from as far away as Los Angeles California and Seattle Washington. We heard that there was a person from Germany doing the sale that someone had met at the West Manchester sale. We came up with the map idea a couple of years ago and kept forgetting about it until mid Afternoon Saturday of those sales. But this year I remembered in June and reminded Jules and Rosie and they got the grand kids to put something together-A US Map on cork board. This is becoming a bit of an attraction for the yard salers which is way cool. I love looking at how far people come for this event. And it gets conversation started too. I would say about 10% of the people put their location on the map, maybe 20%.
We had Adam's Rib back again and they will be here today as well but not Saturday or Sunday. But who knows perhaps another food vendor will show up. We had several people ask about renting spots. One guy was nasty about it. He though $10 for a 10' x 20' spot was way too much and that he could set up for free somewhere on US 40. That's nice and I wish him the best. Than another guy asked Eugene about setting up and was back within an hour with his stuff. He will be here through at least Saturday and has a variety of tools and other items.
The day ended around 7pm and I was dead tired-selling to thousands of people for 10 hours is amazing tiring. That much people contact really drains the energy out of you. We were all dragging buy the end of the day.
Today is shaping up to be another spectacular and busy day. It is 7:15am and we already have our first buyers on site. An SUV pulling a trailer. Eugene went out to talk to them and found out this is trailer number 2 for them-these are serious buyers.
Monday, August 03, 2009
127 yard sale Update
today we got two additional dealers making our current total at 6. We will have knives, walking sticks, antiques, military items, food, produce, tools and lots more. I fully expect a few more to rent spaces by Thursday.
Also I was interviewed by the Dayton Daily news about thios sale so this should draw in even more people than the several thousand expected over the course of the weekend.
This is not your average yard sale and this year is shaping up to be far better than the previous 4 years (all of which were fantastic!)
Also I was interviewed by the Dayton Daily news about thios sale so this should draw in even more people than the several thousand expected over the course of the weekend.
This is not your average yard sale and this year is shaping up to be far better than the previous 4 years (all of which were fantastic!)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)