You pick heirloom vegetables?

Hi, we have a 1 acre permaculture based Homestead here in Vermont and operate a backyard tree and plant nursery. We have been into saving heirloom seeds for quite some time and recently started offering them for sale and had some request to sell some of those plants at our small greenhouse . Long story short we embarked on starting about 100 varieties and probably started around 900 to 1000 plants to test the waters. We have had like seven weekends of rain and being in a very rural area we feel that affected some of our sales so we are shifting gears and trying to plant out some of the unsold vegetable varieties. We have tossed around ideas from doing a mobile farmstand, shipping boxes of hot peppers and one that we really like is advertising for pick your own heirloom vegetables. With a primary focus on tomatoes and pepper varieties we were wondering if anybody else has used this business model with any success  especially in a rural area?

I got a call the other day from a `You Pick`.  The corn is ready to pick for $5.00 for a dozen ears.  It has been raining so you need to wear muck boots as it is muddy.

This was a voice mail and a wrong number.  It is too bad they were about a thousand miles away as that corn sounded inviting.

With the many fruit and vegetable recalls due to deadly bacteria in the news for a number of years we thought the concept of pick your own heirloom fruits and vegetables might appeal to a family with limited time and resources or the health conscious mindset that wants to know where their food comes from with very little carbon footprint.

I think that is a great idea, Dennis! U-pick is a yearly tradition for many people in my area. Everyone knows when their favorite berries are in season and make plans around that. Some of the farms have added vegetables to their u-pick offerings and they seem to be doing well. I think the toughest thing would be getting the word out that you are a new u-pick place. Maybe some local feed and hardware stores would let you put up some posters?

We appreciate the feedback and we also have a pretty good relationship with our local feed store for potential advertising. I think we might give it a whirl since we have hundreds of the heirloom tomato and pepper plants that didn’t sell during the month of May

Dennis, this link is for a farm in a town where I lived when I was in high school- they have been in business for 70 years and are still going strong. I went to school with the kids, they are really smart with their business. They have a farm stand and nursery on a main road, they sell their produce at a stall in a very well-known farmer's market in NYC, but their mainstay is the pick-your-own operation, that's been going for as long as anyone can remember. When I first saw it, they did peppers and tomatoes, and were known mostly to canners and the Italian community. Now, 30 years later, they have apples and berries and pumpkins and all sorts of things, it's become a great day trip for people outside the area, and they still are very focused on good stewardship and being good neighbors.  have a look around their site.

That is a pretty cool link and thank you for sharing that inspiring information. I’m a member of a backyard nursery group and I have posed questions in multiple forums in the past about driving traffic to a rural location and to simplify some have made it sound super easy with social media, marketing and various other digital formats. We have done some email marketing, social media marketing, craigslist and, put flyers up in multiple locations. We have put up signs on major roadways and built relationships with local business owners and tell people about what we do at our small nursery not to the point of being annoying, but just letting people know about us. We have found our excitement when somebody comes all the way from Boston, Massachusetts to buy certain things from us that we are finally making some traction, but honestly, there has never been any consistency with our customers. I’m began selling tree seedlings and mostly catered to permaculture enthusiasts, homesteaders and those wanting to live more self sustainably and provide for themselves and wildlife. I started doing this in 2018 and, the amount of return customers I can count on one hand. We shifted our focus a little bit away from Just tree seedlings as that seem to be more of a one time purchase and got some good advice from others in this business, but even our heirloom tomatoes and peppers in their prime were outstanding looking and really good prices but getting people to drive out to where we are might just be an impossible stumbling block I don’t know.

Dennis, I think that it is worth looking for different marketing angles- i remember when I worked in a library, there was an excursion for the local homeschool/mom-and-baby groups to go pick apples, making contact with cooking schools or some sort of slow food group might be a nice investment, I think it's just a question of figuring out who might benefit most, you're not horribly far from Boston (I used to drive farther than that from Providence to go watch hockey games.... you just need some motivation!!). I would consider maybe hiring a virtual assistant or a young person to spend some time on social media reaching out to the kind of public who would really appreciate some gorgeous heirloom tomatoes.

If you're expecting people to drive a way to you, then adding activities makes it more worth while: play areas for kids, somewhere nice to sit for coffee and cake, nature walks, farm shop and pick your own (you-pick) ....I'm told the US doesn't have garden centres like the UK does? - these can be nice for a quite family outing. This one is a massive one, but you may see something that would work for your area perhaps:

We do have some farm animals here, but we are limited in someways due to the fact that we have less than 1 acre of land, which includes our house to play with. I think possibly a mixture of selling some produce wholesale and some pick your own might possibly be a good combination?

Dennis Hillier wrote: With a primary focus on tomatoes and pepper varieties we were wondering if anybody else has used this business model with any success  especially in a rural area?

I also live in a very rural area and if the goal is to earn some money, the short answer to that is, no. I tried it a long time ago and fortunately it didn't take long to realize the mistake. I've seen several others try it over the years as well and fail. There are a lot of issues with selling fresh produce, the biggest one being the product is only good for a period of two or three days before it spoils. If you have to transport it to a market or rely on advertising in hopes people will come to you during those two or three days, you are at an extreme disadvantage.

You have to convert them to something that doesn't spoil so fast and that is easily transported, stored or shipped, so if it doesn't sell today, it is still good tomorrow.  For example, dried peppers and tomatoes, ground up with a little salt might be delicious and would eliminate the necessity for refrigeration, expensive processing and most of all the rapid spoilage issue. It also skirts most of the regulations related to selling food. Garlic, onions, and a wide variety of herbs work for this as well. Ornamental things like corn and decorative squash can work because they don't spoil in a period of a day or two days and people are happy to pay a lot more for decorations than for food, and again no issues with food regulations.

We sell a lot of trees, perennial flowers, herbs and other things too, but expense has to be kept to a minimum. Seed grown fruit, shade and ornamental trees can be started directly in the ground without expense of greenhouses and the like and sell well at flea markets, farm markets and yard sales. Flowers such as iris, peony, daylily and others can be easily divided and sold, once you establish them in your yard and garden with nearly zero expense in production.  

I think you can figure out a business model for small scale agriculture in a rural area, but fresh produce isn't it. I know of two successful operations in my area and they both have large acreage, they are both on higher traffic highways were all they have to do is put up a sign and they both inherited the land and equipment free and clear. Also, they both have a non-farming primary income.

I agree that making value added products is a must, we are planning on smoking peppers to make a spice mix for sure. We are also dedicating a portion to producing pure seed for sale and had a couple seed packets designed to give us a more professional appearance. We definitely weren’t planning on picking the produce and then trying to sell it, our thoughts were to advertise heavily in advance of certain varieties being 100% ripe and letting people pick their own vegetables straight off the plants. Our gut feeling is we probably won’t get the traffic to make a sustainable income but thought it would be worth a try as we had a couple people ask if we were going to sell any produce.
Another idea was a mobile farmstand possibly advertising to be parked in certain areas on certain days to sell produce directly to customers. I do have some connections with co-ops and selling wholesale is potentially worth it, we are in the process of getting certified naturally grown as well.