Looking towards 2017

I've spent the last year or so investigating land options-- buying, renting, or backyard expansions. At a farming workshop I attended last weekend, New Farmer U, I met many new farmers who are shopping for or have recently purchased land. They dream of acres of vegetables or crops, quiet days and dark nights, lots of room for livestock (I loved learning about goat farming!), and raising children in the country. And then there was me...

I finally learned from all of my soul searching that although I really love visiting the country, I am a city farmer at heart.

Kids raised in the city can still grow food! My daughter grew these gorgeous 40 pound heirloom pie pumpkins this summer at the urban farm.

Bikes

It all goes back to bikes. Not that agriculture hasn't been my passion since I started working as an hourly for the cotton breeding program in college, but biking is such a large part of my life-- both for recreation and transportation, as well as biking instead of driving for health and environmental reasons-- I need to live somewhere I can bike as much as possible. The country would allow me road rides for exercise, but it wouldn't be reasonable to run errands by bike.

Adding beds to the urban farm. Having my plots in town allow me to work all day on the urban farm and then bike into town for happy hour (Capital Brewery anyone?).

Neighbors

My friends who grew up in the country will tell me that they had neighbors. But as a city kid at heart, I like have people close to me. Really close. I enjoy chats over the fence and waving at the lady across the street. I also like sharing my life with neighbors, showing them that you can grow food in the city. I've had several visitors just this summer who came over because they were curious about the urban farm. I love that! My hope is to get more people over next summer to tour the farm and share my excitement about local food.

Food vs. Lawns

I need to start off by saying I don't hate grass. My black lab, Olive, loves to chase her tennis ball and she needs a lawn to do that. But grass can be expensive (both monetarily and environmentally) because it can take so many chemicals and so much water to keep it looking perfect. This is especially bothersome to me if no one is out enjoying it. These are the yards that are underutlized and could grow vegetables.

Food or grass? We have chosen food. And hopefully we'll be feeding more people than just our family next summer!

Two Wheels Urban Farm's Future

Because of these reasons, the urban farm is staying within the beltline! We are expanding our home growing plots and moving into at least two additional yards this year (thank you awsome Land Owners!). The program works when a land owner trades yard space for a weekly share of vegetables harvested from all of the urban farm's plots. With the cost of CSA being several hundred dollars a summer, I am trying to provide a good value for my land owner partners. (This will also give me the opportunity to practice growing a weekly CSA). The rest of the vegetables I plan to sell at a local farmer's market. (Two Wheels Urban Farm now even has a tax ID, so we are official!)

My dad working on a new addition to a land owner's existing plot. Looking forward to the urban farm's expansion!

WWOOFing with the best of them

I spent the past week working on an honest to goodness CSA (community supported agriculture) and market-selling organic vegetable farm. I volunteered through a program called WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms). WWOOFing works like this: you volunteer on a farm for anything from a week or two up to a whole season in exchange for a bed and some simple food. For some the adventure is in the travel or being free to move around the world cheaply. For me, this program provided the easiest way for me to get onto a farm and see how things work (and perhaps other farms in the future!). It also allowed me to put into focus what I want out of Two Wheels Urban Farm.

My week looked like this: 8-9 hours of work every day, and this included planting hundreds of garlic bulbs, building temporary tunnels to protect the veggies from the first frost of the year, harvesting, and filling CSA boxes. The farm provided me a comfortable bed and dry bulk items (rice, beans, lentils, quinoa, etc.) and all the veggies I could eat from the farmer box (veggies that didn't make the cut for the CSA box or the market stand, but are still super delicious!). It was tiring work, but the farm crew was awesome and I had a ton of fun and learned a whole lot of valuable information that will make the urban farm even more productive.

All the veggies I could eat! And I ate well for sure!

I took notes all week on the technical stuff, including some terrific varieties I'm going to plant next year. But these are some of the additional take-aways:

1) Farming is a labor of love. You don't farm to get rich, and most families have at least one person who works off-farm. This is something that I had thought about in other ways, but hearing the farmers talk about it in these terms made total sense. Like teaching, growing food is something that you love not for the money, but for the hard work and the non-monetary rewards. It feels great to grow food and feed people.

Packing up the CSA boxes was a lot of fun. I thought of all the people involved in the CSA boxes I've received over the years and all the people who would be eating the food grown at this farm.

2) Starting small is ok. I feel like my ideas are creeping along, but that is a good way to grow-- slow and steady. The CSA farm I worked on last week started out 30 years ago with only 10 shares and an acre of gardens. Today they often have seasons where over 100 CSA shares are sold, they run a weekly stand at the farmers market, and they farm over 7 acres.

The veggie plots at this farm were very large and needed a crew to keep them up. If my urban farm grows slowly and I farm only what I am able to handle, my business and my sanity will survive to farm another year!

3) I learned this week that urban farming, especially going the route of farming small plots in city backyards, is really cool (perhaps I have underestimated myself?). And by living and working in town, I can live my values and use my bicycle as significant mode of transportation, something that I wouldn't be able to do if I lived out of town.

There are a lot additional advantages to urban farming: the very local community of both my neighbors and those with whom I farm and sell to, utilizing lawns to produce healthy, chemical-free food instead of input-heavy grass, and producing food without the land debt (often in the hundreds of thousands of dollars) that many farmers face. Also, I will be able to have "high touch" with my high density plots, keeping them weed free and healthy to get the most produce out of small amount of land.

Unlike row crops, veggie farming is very hands on, and plants need babied throughout the season. I built these tunnels to protect sensitive lettuces from the first killing frost.

Have a great week everyone! Next week I hope to have some updates on the urban farm expansion project!