We have a market garden we started here on our farm. One of the early goals was to start to build a presence in the community and get folks excited about what we are doing at the farm. What better way than to grow vegetables and participate at the local farmers markets right?!
When I tell you we have never worked so hard for so very little… just take my word for it. We knew it was going to take some hard work to build a presence and knew that the farm would need more than just vegetables to get by.. we just needed to perfect our garden and then continue to add additional opportunities for income.
We started to be very strategic about what and when we grow our produce. Last year we spent a ton of time calculating out our projected sales.. this is so embarrassing to admit but we didn’t even hit 20% of our goal.. I mean we had a plan people… here is where we really messed up.
We pre-ordered our seeds. We selected crop that was new to us. One of these crops that we projected a decent sales from was Purple Globe Turnips. We had a 50’ bed of these vegetables… yes you heard me 50’. We would harvest to take to market and then end up bringing a majority of the turnip harvest back home. We couldn’t even give them away. I tried to figure out where we went wrong. At the end of the season as I am trying to figure out what to do with them… we put all of our trust in turnips.
We were faced with many people who had never tried turnips, myself included, I could not give our customers a great answer of how they tasted because I hadn’t ever had any myself. I remember coming home after a market and started to research what turnips are good for and did a few taste tests. After that day I could tell customers that they taste like a mix between a radish and potato. I could also provide our customers with the ability this root crop has to be substituted with a potato without the cholesterol or the fat along with if stored correctly it could hold for months.. by the time I figured all of this out our season was over and I was left with almost an entire 50’ bed of turnips that I committed to preserve so the food we worked so hard for doesn’t go to waste.
I have learned to make vegetable soup and add some turnip for flavor. We received a fantastic recipe from one of our customers using radish. I substituted it with turnip. We are also fortunate enough to have saved for and purchased a small freeze dryer that helped me preserve the harvest.
Moral of the story…. Creating a plan is great. But having a plan that supports the vision and goal of the true outcome is the key to success. We set a financial plan and forgot about the people.
-Jamie
Moral Of The Story 