Dennis Hillier

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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 have this book as well, obviously I commend anyone that provides nutritional foods for the community but I think the hype is aimed at selling books.
If I recall correctly they have a lot of free help and spend roughly half of the gross revenue on hired staff, plus other expenses incurred during the course of the growing season so what’s left over split between them isn’t nowhere near the $100,000 plus figure that gets people to buy this book in hopes of making it big. The information on how they operate the farm is interesting and definitely has useful insights into market gardening for the beginner.

We appreciate you two reaching out, it seems that making a connection with a likeminded woman that would enjoy the permaculture lifestyle and living on a small homestead is a bit tougher to find than we expected. Best of luck with your journey as well.

Fertilizer isn’t really required for mushroom growing, we inoculated the totems last summer early so they will be ready to fruit this spring. This is definitely a topic we haven’t heard being discussed, ideas always welcome.

Unfortunately our only shady spot on our property is not near a convenient water supply. With the traditional mushroom logs we stack in the wheelbarrow and bring them up to soak in our rain barrels. I was thinking about possibly sitting a five gallon bucket in top of the totems with a drip system to keep a constant moisture level but definitely interested in how others might have tackled this issue.