Long Weekend on the Farm!

Well we had our overnight stay at the farm over the holiday long weekend and we got busy sorting out some irrigation and doing a HUGE harvest. The biggest harvest WE HAVE EVER DONE. Which I know doesn't sound like a lot considering our past harvests (LOL), but this is big gains for Uprooted. We are making strides here, ladies and gents!

The best part was this harvest wasn't even a quarter of whats left in the ground! We just didn't want to overwhelm ourselves without a plan to sell, and we didn't have much of a plan I'll admit when we starting packing up the truck.

We were digging up some of our gorgeous carrots, and one of our new favourites, Paris Market carrots!

They are these perfect rounded, beet like carrots! So easy to harvest, and cute little things! Not anything like you'd find in stores that's for sure.

We spent most of the day Saturday weeding and avoiding getting rained on, we pulled our garlic harvest, which admittedly was rather small (lessons learned... it involved thistles and an enthusiastic application of straw), and harvested our second round of potatoes, Candy Cane! We then had a wonderful BBQ on the open fire for dinner with some freshly pulled carrots and then was back at it again on Sunday!

We harvest three tubs of carrots and probably close to 100 lbs of beets on Saturday! Seriously. Wow, we had so many beets and there are still so many in the ground! What an amazing harvest we have this year. We can't believe how bountiful it has turned out for our second year of work on the farm. After harvesting all of our beets, we realized we never really grew enough actual purple beets. It became even more relevant when people started asking for normal beets. Normal... pssh... have you actually had a golden beet before?

When we got home, Ben started to immediately work on his contacts to find out where to find the new owners of our delicious veg! It wasn't long before his friend Nick, set up a farmer's market night event at their gym on facebook on Tuesday (Thanks Nick, and owner Andrew!), and we were able to bring veg to the gym to sell! It was fantastic to have the opportunity to set up and provide some fresh produce to friends! We learned we needed good farm stand music like Patsy Cline to really get the mood going! We sold enough to be able to start planning for next season's seed purchases and even extra money to help towards purchases for more implements and tools on the farm for expansion next year.

We hope that our big carrot harvest in the next few weeks will help us with some extra spending money for the farm, to help us towards our goal for expanding the farm next year to potentially a part time gig, as opposed to a weekend warrior side hustle type deal we have going on these past two years. Our hard work is finally jumping off the pages and making eyebrows raise at the produce we are pulling from the ground.

Yes, we are still clueless about a lot of things when it comes to being a market gardener. But its starting that's the biggest hurdle when you are trying to step off the path of least resistance. We all can come up with a million excuses as to why someone shouldn't start ventures like this. But it's these excuses that stop the majority of people from actually just trying it. Half the learning in farming is doing, and so by doing, we are going in the right direction! And it turns out, with the right amount of rain and sunshine, we can make things work out pretty well!

So as our golden chains continue to still hold us back from really leaping in with all our faith, we are chipping away at the learning curve, the financial challenges, environmental challenges and the commute. We keep picking up new ideas from farms around the country, and learning new ways to do business. We are building on customers and individuals who want to see us succeed. We appreciate the support of friends who buy our produce and follow our social media, as it encourages us to keep going on this venture. Know that by buying produce from the farm, we will be putting that money right back into the farm! Also, if you are reading this and haven't had any of our produce as of late, please contact us! We would love to find some more customers in the Calgary area for our fresh produce!

We are looking to expand the plot to more than double of what we planted this year, with tarps down already to extend the rows to over 100 feet in length, and to add an additional 8 rows from the 8 we had planted this year. That means A LOT of beets, and carrots, and potatoes, and garlic! These will be our staple produce, but of course we will be looking into some other options as well as we learn more about what grows and what doesn't. We have no idea if we will even get corn out of those amazing stocks, but if we do, we will plant more! We also don't know if we will be able to get sunflower seeds out of the giant sunflowers we planted, but if we do, and we can roast them up, you know we will be growing more! Trial and error! So far, we have had brilliant successes this year which is just fueling the fire for next year!

The options are endless, and that's part of why we are so enthusiastic about the dream, and why we can't stop thinking about the next move! We actually both have lost sleep one night of this week, our brains just didn't want to turn off.

So I suppose we need to order some garlic for this fall! And hope and pray those ground cherries take off!

Until next time my friends, keep your shovel in the dirt!

Kait