2024 Season Review

There is always a long list of things we’d like to improve on at the end of a season but we also take time to name the successes.  This was what hit the top of our list when Paul, Rachelle, Ryan and myself did some season review today.

• Our succession planning for our greens mix and lettuce mix really worked.  That means that we managed to keep getting seeds planted, seedlings in the ground and removing old plants every week so that we could continue to grow these crops throughout out harvest season.  Yay for spreadsheets and then the motivation to keep doing the work throughout the season.
  

• Our flower successions and timings worked really well too making it possible to make full and varied bouquets throughout our market season.
  
• We tried something new at the end of our season (3 shorter markets in October) and it was a success.
  
• We had a good increase in sales this season (yay and thank you!)
  
• We felt we stayed on top of weeding….mostly.
  
• Celery and Chard were fantastic!
  

When thinking about the challenges of a season or places we like to improve one of our questions needs to be, “what was the hardest part on your body?”  It’s no surprise that small-scale veggie/flower market farming is physically demanding and so we are always trying to look at what are the pinch points and maybe there are ways that we can ease the crunch.  I’m not sharing this to complain but it may be interesting to see some of the things were thinking about needing to improve this next season to be more sustainable.  When we were thinking about it yesterday these are the main stressors on our bodies during this past season:

Mondays are super long often working way into the evening to prepare for the very long Tuesday.  Is there anyway we can streamline set up for market to alleviate some of the work on those days?

The fancy new greens harvester that we purchased this past season makes for really efficient greens harvesting but it often left the user with really sore back and elbow.  This needs some upgrades to make it more ergonomic.

Planting seedlings (especially in the spring) but really all season long is sooo hard on our knees.  So we have gone ahead and purchased a paperpot transplanter (we’ll show you that in spring when we start using this very cool tool).

Heavy loads of zucchini and cucumbers in the card. Anyone want to give us an electric cart?

Standing in place tasks like standing at the cash register on Tuesdays or flower harvesting; it’s hard on the feet and low back. 

It's fun to put our minds to these challenges and continue to find ways to do things better.