Weekly Update: April 17th, 2017

Farmer Jason’s been organizing his thinking and planning for post-harvest processing. Luckily we have the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association’s (CFSA) publication, Good Agricultural Practices for Small Diversified Farms, which we were given at their GAP workshop. We may be ready for the mock audit sooner than we originally expected! To-do: Set up our hand washing sink and plumbing; Move in to and set up our new post-harvest processing space; Design a food safety manual with procedures and training; Test our walk-in coolers; and much more! We think we can achieve most of this while the plants do their growing. Our aim is to be GAP certified by Fall 2017.

Mr. Eric Cheek and the students from GoodWill YouthBuild have nearly completed work on the walk-in coolers. On Tuesday, they put up boards to help finish off the AC walls. Next week we’ll schedule the vinyl work to make our coolers up to par for GAP certification. After that we’ll be ready to test the units!

Mr. Barry Bowen of Legacy Charter School showed us around our future post-harvest processing home. We need to do some plumbing, planning, and arranging, but we anticipate having full access to the building by the first of May. We may hire Ratenski Services, LLC to move our small sheds to their new home. They’ve helped us before and were well-equipped, quick, honest & reasonable.

Jason and two of his sons installed some simple plumbing on Tuesday to help get water flowing to the beds (surely that’s how the boys wanted to spend their Spring Break, right?). On Wednesday, Shelby & Kirsten from the Greenville County Soil & Water Conservation District, along with two of Jason’s old students, Anthony & Sean,  helped install the majority of the irrigation system. On Thursday morning, we completed the irrigation installation. Everything has been tested and is running on a new timer!

On Wednesday, the team also put together a fencing package after shopping around a bit. We started to set it up on Thursday with Anthony’s help. The fence we chose is designed to deter rabbits and groundhogs. It goes a little deeper than a normal fence, and remains floppy on the top so that ground hogs tip over and get discouraged. We need more fence posts than originally expected, so we have a bit more work to do next week.

The seedlings are ready for pick-up at Banner Greenhouses facility in Nebo, NC. It’s going to be a lot to plant, but it’s what we’ve been waiting for! We can count on a few neighbors, Jason’s old students, and a few friends from the Soil and Water Conservation District to transplant seedlings.

After consulting with a number of experts, we’re focused on getting the fields planted and setting up our post-harvest processing before we speak seriously with potential buyers.

Transplant Week 1’s seedlings; complete fencing; Seeding summer cover crops; Set up home base; Organize post-harvest logistics