Family farm finds permanent home after moving 4 times in 10 years!

and a half acre market garden. We're located in the northern Shenandoah Valley of Virginia about an hour and a half west of Washington DC and today I'm going to give you a tour of our farm. The farm right now is in a really great place because we just purchased this land less than a year ago. We have actually moved our farm to four different locations and we have been leasing land and we're really excited to put down roots in this place. So all the tunnels that you're about to see we have moved multiple times and we're really happy to be in a permanent location. We operate year-round. We have 14 caterpillar tunnels that we grow in year-round roots and greens. We go to farmers markets and as you'll see we're growing a lot of summer produce right now. It's late June here in Virginia. So we're here now in our nursery. What we've done in the transition of moving our farm is created this tunnel to be half wash pack station and half nursery while we are in the process of building a large nursery. We use the Japanese paper pot system which has eliminated a lot of bending over and transplanting and has just been a really great system for us. We'll show you how that works a little bit. So right now we have some summer crops in here. We really try to push the season on greens and radishes. So we have some little heat tolerant lettuces here and we do a weekly seeding that's really important to keep up with our successions out in the field. So now we're walking out of our nursery through our pack station and I'm going to show you the rest of our tunnels and the fields. So right now there are five of us that work on the farm full-time and we have a couple part-time folks but for many years it was just Dan and I. Being a husband and wife team works really well for some people not so well for others but for us we've really found that we work great together and now we're really excited to introduce a third edition of our daughter Lena who's two years old and she helps us pick radishes sometimes. So welcome to our tunnel complex. We have 13 tunnels up right now. One is being built and right now we are in transition from summer crops to, sorry, from spring crops to summer crops. So as you can see in this tunnel we use a trellising system for our tomatoes. It's worked really well for us. We find that it keeps the tomatoes from getting too bushy and keeps things really clean and promotes really great growth of the fruits. We're doing a lot of interplanting this season. It's working pretty well in some places and others not so much. And I'll bring you over here to another tomato tunnel. We're getting our first harvest of our cherry tomatoes. Very exciting. And then we've interplanted beets and then we just here under our insect netting have some turnips to keep the season going on those. It's getting a little hot but we really try to push the season on those. So some more tomatoes here and we're also excited to trellis cucumbers in this tunnel. That also works really well. We do a lot of successions of cucumbers but they're easy to harvest when they're trellised. So we really love using tunnels. They allow us to grow crops such as in this one baby ginger and turmeric. We don't have a long enough warm season to grow it to storage stage but it creates some really nice sweet tender ginger. And also having so many tunnels allows us to to grow some specialty crops like that. We have plenty of space. So we have some heirloom tomatoes growing here. Okay so I'm going to put on some irrigation because we just planted here. We irrigate from our well right now. We're very fortunate that right before we moved they put in a new well. So we do have a pond on this property which gives us some backup emergency options for irrigation. But we have back in January when we moved to this property we had a nice window to put in. We put in irrigation lines all the way down through the middle of the farm. Because we moved so many times we really had a clear vision of how we wanted to lay out our farm. What the best method was for that and I'm not going to say it was great practice because it was a lot of work to move so many times. But we did learn a lot and to start on fresh ground it really made it easier. So we're using sprinklers inside these tunnels and out in the field as well. One of the biggest things is weed control that being starting fresh. I mean it's not totally evident that we I mean we're not weed free but we certainly have much better weed management than we did before. And what we had to do because we could not have a lag in production is we had to break ground and plant right away. It's not the ideal way to do it but it's what we had to do because this farm is our livelihood. We don't have outside jobs and we are also supporting a staff so keeping that production going was really important. So come on out I'm going to show you the rest of the field. This is a pretty nice looking tunnel right now we have some scallions and greenhouse peppers some frisee tomatoes. It's looking pretty pretty clean in there show that one off. So here's a tunnel that we need to put the plastic on we're keeping it tarped right now to keep the weed pressure down. Looking forward to putting that one in production and then we have a spot here for our 14th tunnel. We ended up doing the tunnel complex it helps with we have some pretty high winds so these tunnels give these tunnels a bit of a wind barrier. So you can see the scope of our field crops now we have a deer fence up which is really exciting for us we didn't have one for many years. It takes a lot of time to get the infrastructure that you need it's costly and also we were on year-to-year leases and had to make sure that everything was mobile. So putting up a deer fence was a bit out of the question for us for those reasons. Okay as we go a little bit further we again are in some transition here where we've mowed under some of our spring crops and we've put in our summer beets and as we go further we will see some more of our summer crops but we'll be turning these beds and preparing them for late summer and fall storage crops. That's something we're really concentrating on for this season to have storage carrots and beets because we are going to farmer's market all year round. This is the home of our future nursery it's I think that it can be difficult for beginning farmers or folks who are want to start farming to see a lot of beautiful perfect farms on Instagram or social media but I mean look it's not it's just not always like that there are weeds and you're always working on projects and especially this time of year everything is just so busy so you know you really have to give yourself a break. We really wanted to get this nursery up and going months ago. This will be the third time that we have built this tunnel. We originally got it as an NRCS grant and then there was a big blizzard and we didn't live on the farm that this tunnel was up so we couldn't scrape the snow off and it bent inwards like this so we kind of did a little reconstruction and built it again and now we brought it over to this third farm so it's going to stay here now but we look forward to having a really big nursery and definitely getting that up this season. So we have some of our cabbage crop here leftover from the spring we found a really nice variety of red cabbage so if anyone is wants to know what that is send me a message and I'll tell you it's really great it's hard to find a great red cabbage. We've decided to leave a nice area here we have big dreams of a gazebo and a hangout spot just to admire the view and to enjoy our hard work at the end of the day. Some other projects going on here we are going to put in some perennial herbs. I'm really excited about that because when you lease a farm and you don't know how long you're going to be there you certainly don't put crops in the ground that you're not that are perennial so the first day we actually closed on this property September 21st last year which happens to be our daughter's birthday so on her first birthday this place was ours and we immediately planted blueberries and a couple fruit trees to say hey we did it after nine years so the perennial herb bed is also part of that we're excited about that. We're still having some really nice kale harvests it's been a pretty mild June here we harvested today it's Friday a big harvest day and so that'll be going out to market here's our crops getting some nice irrigation we have some parsley three types of celery carrots spinach and purple mizuna right now. We grow pretty intensively we've taken the same spacing that we use in the caterpillar tunnels and brought it out to the field we really bootstrapped our operation so big equipment tractors are there are not something that we were able to afford so we use a small BCS two-wheel tractor and we use we do a lot of things by hand cultivation and it works well for us on this scale I think that I mean you can really grow a lot of food on small acreage those of you who have even grown a small garden you know that you're probably giving away tomatoes and squash. Speaking of squash this is our second planting of zucchini and squash unfortunately our first one didn't work out I'm not really sure what happened to my zucchini plants but we didn't we did we don't have it so we just have a couple squash right now and then further on this field we have our peppers and I'd like to show you another instance where we're doing some interplanting really trying to make the most out of the space that we have. We have worked hard to find some heat tolerant lettuces and we've done that so we're able to bring lettuce to market all season. The heat tolerant varieties we use are Muir lettuce M-U-I-R and P-A-N-I-S-S-E. We also grow some of the Salanova varieties that we found don't go to bolt as fast they stay they stay pretty tender and not bitter. We're doing a little bit of trellising here of some pole beans and we have one round of tomatoes outside these are Matt's wild cherries they get super big and bushy so I didn't want to put them in a tunnel or trellis them but I did want to grow them for especially for chefs and some tomatillos. We've totally stopped putting tomatoes out in the field here in Virginia they're really susceptible to blight and you end up having harvest for tops four to six weeks if you're and the plants just really don't look great so putting them in tunnels is a total game changer you can control the moisture and tomatoes love heat so it's really great. So I have some Asian greens under here but like we didn't let's see what they look like Dan and I actually went on vacation which never happens and we didn't we didn't put the row cover on in time so they have some flea beetle damage but we love Asian greens luckily so do our customers so we try to push the season on these and find some heat tolerant varieties they're actually extremely tender right now being under the row cover and yeah we love growing greens year round. Okay so we're here at towards the end of the farm this is some pretty rocky soil that we're dealing with right now but to be honest we don't mind picking out the rocks because this is our land now and we're just excited to make the soil better and to keep growing here for years to come. We have another we're going to put some winter squash here and then we have another patch that will become our next round of squash and cucumbers. We have our little patch of eggplant here and some cucumbers and we're really trying to grow a lot of flowers not for bouquets but for pollination and also for our daughter Lena she loves to pick flowers so I grow all edible flowers and she likes to eat them. Across the way we have a pond and a little bit of land about a half an acre that we can expand not this season probably we have our hands full but eventually maybe we'll grow some berries over there and that's the pond that we can use for emergency irrigation as well. I think just a final thing I'll show you here is under our row covers this is some lettuce mix that was just harvested with our greens harvester some arugula as well this is part of the patch that we didn't cover in time so there's some flea beetle damage but again it's it's just great to have greens and radishes as often as we can. We keep them covered for protection against pests. We grow organically here so that's a really important part of our business plan. So that concludes our tour thanks for joining me you're welcome to follow us on Instagram and yeah stay in touch with what we're doing. My baby daughter just arrived so I'm gonna go say hi to her and thanks everyone happy growing!