The busy busy-ness continues to snowball….my life is starting to be like that TV commercial in which the three people excitedly watch as their internet business goes online for the first time. They cheer and high-five each other as the first orders roll through the server….then they sit there slack-jawed as thousands and thousands of orders pour in, knowing full well that they have just about no way to cope with their success!
While our farm success isn’t quite of that magnitude, it is becoming a lot to keep up with. Just this week I decided to formally advertise our CSA basket subscriptions to coworkers at the laboratories where Ken and I work our "day jobs"; a little mid-week program whereby for a flat weekly fee, subscribers get a generously filled basket of assorted produce in season. So Wednesday night has hereby been proclaimed "Basket Night". This means, getting home from work and any really necessary errands between 6-7pm, flying out to the garden to madly begin harvesting. Peppers, squash, cucumber, melon, pounds and pounds of everything……usually harvesting stops when it is no longer possible to see what I’m doing. All then has to go to the central processing location; Drew’s kitchen. Next, everything has to be washed and set aside to dry. Then baskets have to be selected and labelled for their recipients. Then item by item, the baskets are filled with as attractive an arrangement of said produce as possible. Last night I finished 6 baskets at 11:30pm, which included some time to stop and eat dinner. The baskets stay lined up overnight, and the following morning are loaded into the car and delivered. Since the appearance of the baskets amounts to self-advertising, today we have yet more people who want baskets. Great! Except, when will they get done and how will they fit in the car??
When the decision is made to expand a business offering, it is very important to be able to deliver; unhappy customers go elsewhere. So it’s all part of the process of expanding the farm into the self-sustaining entity that I hope it will one day become. Now if we could just clone ourselves so that more people were available to do the work…..still, I wouldn’t trade this even if it is a lot of hard work for relatively little money. Seeing the delight on people’s faces when they admire the produce and can’t wait to look through their basket has its own rewards.