We sold every single bag of dried peppers from our first year of offering them. Getting on eBay was huge for us and we have shipped all over the country now, sending off to our 24th different state last week. It's so crazy to think that people in California, Washington, New Jersey and Michigan want some peppers from a little farm in Tennessee. We recently opened an Etsy Store to offer customers another purchasing option and reach a new audience.
Bowl of dried Trinidad Scorpion peppers.
The growing season was super busy, partly due to the increase in the number of plants and programs we had, but also partly due to us installing new things on the farm to help us do things faster and easier. We added metal fencing to trellis tomatoes, cucumbers, sunflowers and luffas, and transitioned most of our wooden posts to metal posts. We made tunnels for our beans, cabbage, potatoes and kohlrabi to keep both the deer away with netting and the insects at bay with row covers. All these things took time, effort and money, but they will pay off greatly in the long run. We also managed to purchase some new tools during the season and a full-size tiller at the end of the year. We are so pumped to have a big tiller as it will greatly cut down on bed preparation time next season.
Some of our Sunflowers from the summer.
Our harvest was really good this year. We had a really wet Spring followed by a hot, sunny Summer. While temps never got extremely high, the constant sun did take its toll on the plants. We were really happy with how everything produced. We lost the majority of our hot pepper plants right after planting when heavy rains flooded our area about three times in a one-week period, but those that did survive made us plenty of peppers. We also had good production out of our sweet potatoes, black beans, cucumbers and peanuts.
Peppers continue to be our most requested item and bring in the vast majority of the income that keeps the farm going and growing so we are going to shift more focus onto the peppers for next year. We will attempt to plant that same number of hot peppers again, just hopefully without flooding this time! We plan to add a few new varieties in 2019. On the sweet side of things, we will add another Italian fryer in Mama Mia Giallo to go with our staples, Carmen and Escamillo. Biscayne will be joined by Nassau, another sweet Cubanelle variety. And we will have a variety of massive Bell peppers. For hot peppers, look for Red Devil's Tongue, Scotch Bonnet, new Cayenne and Habanero varieties, and the Naga Viper to be on the farm. We will also try White and Yellow Ghost peppers again, and work on more production of the Moruga variety of the Trinidad Scorpion. We will also add the third hottest pepper in the world to our arsenal with the 7 Pot Douglah.
We trialed out the Community Sponsored Agriculture (CSA) Program this year. While it was a success, we will not continue it in 2019. It is a lot of work to keep up with and most of the poeple interested in our program live a long way from us. With us juggling real jobs and running the farm, meeting up with everyone involved in the program was quite difficult. We will still prepare custom orders for anyone that wants them, but the prepaid CSA program will not continue. Thanks to everyone who helped us with the trail this year and we hope you enjoyed the selection of veggies and products we provided.
We will also be ending the Roadside Stand. We had to stop it early this year due to lack of produce available, but overall we had less people stopping and it just isn't worth the time to pack things up, drive over, set up, sit there, then move it all back to the farm. We do plan to still have occasional Veggie Sales at the farm and set up at local events like yard sales and sporting events when we have enough produce and time to justify it.
A table at the Roadside Stand
Shannon produced her Pickles again this year and they continue to be very popular here locally. We haven't sold any online as shipping is a bit high to ship fragile, quart-sized glass jars. With USPS shipping prices set to increase again in January 2019, things may get even worse. As always, you can purchase them from the farm for $5 a jar. We still have quite a few jars left as we canned plenty this year while our cucumbers were producing in full force.
Pickle making
Canned pickles ready to eat!
Shannon also added Jellies in the early Spring, followed a few weeks later by fruity Jams. It was a good choice! Not only did we get to eat plenty of tasty spreads here on the farm, but we sold quite a few as well. That helped with costs of the expansion and also got our name out to new parts of the country. We have had numerous people asking for more varieties and coming back to purchase more, so we plan to keep the canned items going into 2019. We have added Christmas Jam, Pineapple-Mango Habanero Jam and Cranberry-Banana Jam over the past few weeks. We are getting the violets and dandelions ready for more jelly to be made in March and April. Those two unique jellies were a huge hit this year.
Pineapple-Mango Habanero Jam, made with our own premium Habaneros.
The last thing we want to mention is our progress on eliminating pesticides on the farm. It has been our goal since the very beginning. We hope to be able to produce all of our veggies without any pesticide, even all-natural ones. We want to provide the cleanest produce we can because that's how it should be. Moving to insect barriers and netting has helped on a lot of our plants. We are also more diligent about manually removing bugs from crops before they become an infestation. We used about 75% less pesticides in 2018 as compared to 2017. About 75% of our crops are completely pesticide-free and grown completely organic. Of the other 25%, about 50% were treated with natural pesticides. The non-natural pesticides were applied to some of our peppers and tomatoes this year out of necessity as we were losing to the worms, but we were able to keep it at just one application compared to 6-10 applications in previous years. We think we can completely cut out pesticide use in the near future. We are almost there!
Thanks again for visiting the page, keeping up with our updates and supporting the farm! We love doing it and hope that at some point we have provided you with something that put a smile on your face. Look for some changes to the website coming soon as we find our focus on where the farm is going. More updates to follow as the winter progresses and we watch our winter garlic grow!
