Pluk! was conceived one summer evening in 2017 by a couple of wannabe farmers. They were fresh out of agriculture school in the polder (low lying land reclaimed from the sea) and living in the heart of Amsterdam. That night, over a bottle of organic wine, we considered what Amsterdam had to offer — a progressive and diverse population with a growing appreciation for local food — as well as the city’s challenges, a lack of agricultural land around the city the most daunting.

Last month I wrote about how we sell flowers at farmers markets and through a CSA. This next article focuses on selling to florists, brides and weddings. The market streams covered in this article require, to me, a more seasoned skill set to do well. This does not mean you cannot start by selling to florists, but farmers markets are more forgiving than florists, or brides, or mothers of brides.

Back in the mid-1990s, I was at a SSAWG (Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group) conference in Austin, Texas. I’d been hired by Potomac Vegetable Farms (PVF) in Virginia to develop a satellite property with organic sweet corn as the main crop. That goal daunted me: 15 acres of organic sweet corn on ground that had not been improved. 

Point-of-Sale (POS) software is readily available for use on smart phones and tablets. The technology allows farms to easily check-out customers while gathering important data for production and marketing decisions. POS applications, such as Square, allow the farm to quickly and easily capture data about each customer transaction including item name, weight and/or quantity, price of each item, and date, time, and location. Together, this can reveal trends in customer buying, opportunities to change product pricing and format, and quantify hunches about consumer behavior or item popularity. 

This is the fourth of four quarterly articles on the many types of alliums that can provide some onion-family flavor all year-round. Alliums are a staple ingredient in so many cuisines that farmers who can grow or store them all year long will always have a market for them. The spring season can include alliums in all stages of development: some to sow, some to transplant, some to harvest, some to use from storage, and many to weed.

Our farm is a mystery — one farm, but also three farms — like a holy farming trinity. I jest, but what I mean is this: on the land we lease, three different farming operations have shared the land and infrastructure to suit their needs. Together we are able to afford the significant rent while saving money by sharing materials, equipment, marketing networks, and our farming knowledge. Here’s how that happened, and how it’s going.

Kristen Efurd Osgood and her partner Joe Balooshi established Beyond Description Farm last year on 30 acres in Arkansas’ Ouachita Mountains region.  With extensive backgrounds in sustainability, farming and permaculture, they are trialing crops to see what will thrive in their temperate climate, now hit with hotter summers, extreme temperature swings, and excessive rains. When Kristen and I exchanged emails in July, they were prepping for a 107°F degree day by making ice in rubber feed pans to give to their chickens, guineas, ducks and geese during the hottest part of the day. 

From the time you get seed catalogs, order seeds, plant out plugs and seeds, water, weed, fertilize and finally harvest your flowers, you need to know where they are going to be sold. For most people it is growing of flowers that draws us in, not selling flowers. Rarely does someone say I love selling flowers so maybe I should grow them, too. 

Managing weeds so they don’t interfere too much with crop growth or harvest can suck a lot of time from market growers. I’m grateful the weed-choked plots I had when I was growing full-time are now a distant memory. I recall afternoons as a new grower furiously pushing the wheel hoe between rows of veggies choked with foxtail grass or hand weeding so much that my hands cramped and when I closed my eyes to sleep I saw the outlines of weeds against the blackness of my eyelids.

Many of us only know safflower as an oil we might use in bulk to fry some potatoes, and while it is very tasty that way (ask me about my French fry addiction), it is also an exceptional cut green for growers with hot dry summers. I first learned about safflower from my mentors Calvin and Julie Cook at Arrowhead Dahlias, who are among the best flower farmers around. My first seed came from Wild Garden Seeds, and was their ‘Superior Orange’ variety. Seed is easy to save, and if you like the wild, be-mohawked look of the orange or yellow flowers, or if your florists do, that’s another great way to use them. There is a creamy white cultivar that may be better for those outlets. 

At the end of February Little Wings Farm in Eugene, Oregon, posted a couple of photos of “the field boxes” they stash in various locations around their farm. The boxes hold items that at one point or another they’ve found themselves in the field without, and the idea was to save themselves trips back to the barn for small items that are easily duplicated and stashed in a box. The boxes aren’t for everyday use, just for little emergencies. 

My daughter came home from preschool one day years ago with a message: “Be a bucket filler.” I had never heard this before, and it is based on a simple, human concept. Be kind to others. The entire idea behind bucket filling is to make someone feel special by doing or saying something nice. By doing so, you are filling up their emotional bucket and making them feel good. At the same time, you are filling up your own bucket. We all know how it feels to do something nice for someone else. It not only makes them feel good… it makes us feel good, too.  In the world today I think we can all afford to feel a little better. Our kids are no exception and perhaps the most deserving right now.