Monday, August 4, 2008 – The Official Drink of Makaria Farm
I realized the other day that our strawberry farm might not be a coincidence, given that Brock’s favourite alcoholic beverage is a strawberry daiquiri. I confronted/reminded Brock, and we immediately drove to the liquor store to buy some rum.
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Sunday, August 10, 2008 – Farm Fest 2008
Hugs and strawberries to all the wonderful people who visited us this weekend for our first ever farm party! The weather was shitty, which meant I couldn’t roast marshmallows like I’d planned, but we managed to fit everyone into our tiny home and ate a LOT of good, fresh farm food. My favourite part was the guitar & harmonica singalong. Thank you so much for coming and filling our house with happy times! Brock and I have been working our asses off this year, and it was a pleasure to be able to share our farm with the people we love.
Some highlights:
– collecting eggs with Kyle, Adrian and Shoshanah
– herding runaway hens with Sho
– strawberries with chocolate and kahlua whipped cream for dessert
– the roasted veggies, with Russian Blue potatoes from our farm neighbours
– Brock and the Cutler boys singing Rap Trax II songs in the dark, once we were tucked in and going to sleep
– yummy WINE, contributed by the Chalifour clan, Adrian, and Dan & Steve Cutler
– breakfast the next morning: fresh eggs, Cowichan Valley bacon, spelt flour bread (made while drunk, post-party), taters from the fields, and Sho’s french toast with fresh strawberries and leftover kahlua whipped cream
– the odour of our neighbour’s fields, freshly sprayed with manure tea
– Janene’s Martha-Stewart-quality cupcakes
– many, many farm tours as guests arrived
– Sho and Steve eating raw kohlrabi in the fields
– the Xtreme radishes (such a small veggie, such a lot of kick)
– the tomato, basil and mozzarella plate
Sunday, August 24, 2008 – To market, to market
We’ve been selling all our veggies, eggs and strawberries through our farm gate, our Harvest Box Program (CSA) and our mailing list orders, so when yesterday came and we were supposed to be at the Duncan Farmers Market, we had nothing ready to pick and sell. I’ve been half-wanting to stop going to the market, since we sell out by 11am and then I just stand around for 3 hours — time that I could be working on the farm. So we decided to set up our booth, with a table and a sign apologizing to our regulars, and then just sell from the farm Saturday. It worked REALLY well. Hopefully we haven’t alienated anyone who came just to purchase from us!
We’ve found that, if we have or expect a large harvest, we can just put out highways signs and we’ll have a steady stream of customers until we take the signs down. Doing this, we sold out between 2pm-6pm. Since we didn’t start selling until after noon, we were able to have a nice breakfast together, putter around in the veggie patch, pet the rabbits, and generally enjoy our Saturday morning. Then we put the signs out and picked berries and visited with our customers for the afternoon.
Aside from developing our sales techniques, we’re also busy these days figuring out our expansion plans for 2009. We’ve found that there is an almost ceaseless demand for high-quality, local, organic produce. We believe we’ll be able to sell as much as we can grow, since we can always expand to restaurants, B&Bs, retail outlets, and numerous other local farmer’s markets in the area (or just start attending the one we originally signed up for . . .). The problem is what we can physically do, since preparing the soil, planting, weeding and harvesting all take so much time. We have lots of options here too: hire WWOOFers (Willing Workers on Organic Farms), hire part-time labour, develop some sort of “u-pick” option, etc. Another crucial component: cost. Sure, we know we can sell tonnes of blueberries, but at $5-8/plant that adds up quickly. We’d love to offer meat birds, beef cows and turkeys, but that means investing in housing, feed and the stock animals. Ha ha — I just had a whole new understanding of “what comes first – the chicken (which you have to buy, feed and house) or the egg (which you can sell)?”
All in all, it takes a lot of thinking and figuring out what we want our farm to become. Luckily, it’s raining today, so we can’t pick strawberries (they’d rot): instead, we can sit inside and drink tea and make big, exciting plans for the future . . .
