With the pending apocalypse following covid-19, murder hornets and everything else 2020 has thrown our way, there couldn't be a better time to start being more sustainable!? Could there be??!!
There are going to be many hurdles to overcome but I am ready to take the ram by the horns!!
My most recent addition to the farm is my absolutely adorable southdown babydoll ram, Jose. He is scheduled to meet up with his ladies, Gin and Tonic, in late August. This will be the start of my breeding flock of Babydoll Southdown Sheep. We are all very excited to welcome Jose Cuervo to the "lush" family farm. 😉
The biggest hurdle of the year will be obtaining farm status. While I have been doing small scale farmgate sales since 2017 I have not successfully consistently sold the required $2500 worth until this year so I have not made the jump into BC Assessment until now. So this post is going to be discussing my personal learning curve and journey of what I am doing to generate crops for farm status in BC.
THE PLAN:
This is the part that has taken the greatest amount of mental anguish. Plan, plan, plan and re-plan. I cannot stress enough the need to mathematically plan the costs vs profits. I struggle with planning for profit vs planning for passion. I have come to accept that while I may prefer my beautifully landscaped yard full of many variety's of flowers and scents, these do not bring in the types of profits you need to farm. So I have decided on a permaculture approach to intermixing my passions with my ability to generate profits! This years garden plot has been designed to address my desire for beauty while still fulfilling my need for profit.
One example of this attempt is my intermixing of herbal flowers in and amongst my vegetable crops. One such planting is my Citizen Seed Trial Tomatoes (Midget X Variety) surrounded in Chamomile and Calendula. I have had a great crop of the medicinal flowers so far and cannot wait to see if the tomatoes have also benefited from this planting. I absolutely love wandering around in a garden that is designed just as much for beauty as it is for function.
I have been amazed so far with this group of companion plants. I will be utilizing the entire plant of all the varieties. The calendula and chamomile flowers will be dried and sold, the last group of flowers of the season will be allowed to go to seed to harvest for next years crops and also to sell seed packages. The entire plant will be harvested at the end of season and composted for soil improvements and I also intend to sell any excess compost from both plant and animal excess. My plan for small scale farming is to pack as many plants as the area will be capable of nourishing. I cannot express how much planning will go into your goals for a small scale farm. I have done research for the area that I live in and have found that the hottest selling items for my farmgate sales so far have been:
Eggs, Hatching Eggs, Plant Starters, Garlic and Herbs. These items are also low investment and easy to sell.
(I am venturing into more livestock in the spring with the sheep but haven't had any experience in sales of them yet so I will pass on them in this particular post)
My other planned crop for sales this year is pumpkins and gourds. I planted hundreds of seedlings in early March and did well in seedling sales. This is a very high profit margin product. Considering that seeds are quite cheap 'if you buy them' but they are even cheaper when you harvest them all from last years crops!! I cannot express how important it is for me to harvest seed! This is by far my highest profit margin products. PLUS you can also sell off your excess seed! So after seedling sales I had planted over 60 squash plants in many different areas of my yard but as we all understand how gardening works...due to the prolific slugs this year (I had sold all my ducks...slug control...big mistake we will be getting more) I am down to about 40 successful pumpkin, gourd and squash plants. Although disappointing still not unprofitable. Even if you base your pricing on corporate store pricing, squash range from 1-2 dollars per pound. If each plant only produces 2-3 squash at a couple pounds each (using very small squash estimates) that was still a few hundred dollars in profit, without adding what excess seeds and seedlings that were sold, for a crop I paid nothing to produce! I love seed saving!
Going along with my permaculture approach to planting I have created areas in all my yards that incorporate tree guilds and intermingling crops.
A big success this year was spacing out my garlic plantings throughout my entire property.
I was able to harvest loads of garlic while also utilizing the plants bug repelling effects to assist my other crops in their success! The image to the right is just the very first armload of harvested garlic! The image doesn't do them justice, they are the music variety and they are almost as big as a fist! I was very pleased with the amount of garlic this year! While some may say the harvest takes longer if not planted in rows I say it is worth it to utilize companion planting for the health and benefits of the other crops you are attempting to grow!
Right now garlic is selling for $1.69 each in store, so again if you are utilizing last years bulbs that you grew to produce this years crop this is another very low investment item that will produce a decent profit.
So this years newly attempted items will include composted manure, dried herbs and pumpkins and squash. Since all of these items are very low cost input I am hoping that sales will go as well as planned and we will see decent profits from these new ventures.
To be continued as these plans play out!!
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