From Hobby to Profit

Hi Ya'll, happy Fall! I haven't posted in a long time, mainly because I keep myself so darn busy with too much to do! Apparently though, that is the way I like it, or I wouldn't keep doing this to myself! I am almost finished with my MBA and have been thinking about ways to turn my passions for gardening organically and living off the land from a hobby to a profit.

We had a great season this year, lots of daily rain in the beginning of the year helped get the vegetable crops going strong. I used black plastic on the ground and that really made a big difference in the diseases that would normally show up with the amount of rain we had. I also used drip line to water. We grew tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, kale, bok choi, Chinese cabbage, regular cabbage, potatoes, eggplant, green beans, onions, carrots, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, lettuce, Swiss chard, yellow squash, zucchini, acorn squash, spaghetti squash, pumpkins, cushaw, watermelon, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, grapes and a large variety of herbs. I put 1/2 cup of Epsom's salt in each transplant hole for the tomatoes and peppers. I think it really made a big difference in the health of the plants. I had so many big tomatoes that several of the plants fell over. I was using tobacco sticks for support but the weight of the plants pushed the tobacco sticks over too. Next year, I will have to try a different method to support them. Let me know if you have an idea that works for a large amount of tomatoes. I grow about 100 tomato plants a year, so cages for all of those is just not cost effective.

I grew a couple acres of sweet corn and popcorn, but I didn't get to eat one ear of corn! It was an ultimate fail. I think I should have thinned it out better and side dressed when it was a foot or two tall. I had no help from nature either, other than rain. The deer, raccoon, squirrels and who knows what else ate it all before it was even ready to pick. They even the popcorn. My vegetable growing areas are fenced except for the areas I grew the corn, melons and squash, The animals seem to not care to much about the melons or squash but they love corn! They mostly feasted on the corn but also some bush beans and all the leaves off my newest apple tree that we just planted this year. I guess I need to get some electric fencing for next year. A friend said he was using fishing line to keep the deer out, but I am not sure how well that worked for him.

Of course, I have been busy the last couple of months canning and preserving some of that for our winter stash. We also sold some to some local restaurants and the public. I did not get to sell at the farmer's market this year as I had hoped too. My two boys are both playing soccer and we spent most weekends going to soccer games and other events. Next summer, my oldest will have his license, so hopefully I won't have to spend so much time shuffling them back and forth to practice and games, and I will have time to do the farmers market then.

I have come to realize that vegetables are great to grow, fun to share and sell, but do not generate much profit after all is said and done. Unless you have a very large operation and customer base, you barely make enough to cover your costs and pay for what you consume. We have been borrowing a friends tractor to do all the tilling and grading here, and it is getting old. In order to be an organic grower, you have to have cover crops and till those in a couple times a year while you rotate plots. We also have a long gravel drive that has to be graded several times a year. We need a tractor with a scoop to turn the compost piles and clean out the chicken coop area. We also need one to get downed trees out for firewood and to make lumber for our home addition we are planning. So borrowing a tractor once or twice a year is just not practical for us anymore. Therefore, we are going to pick up our new (to us) tractor tomorrow. We are really excited to finally be getting this equipment! We have wanted our own for a long time and it is finally going to happen tomorrow! YeeeHawww!

Since veggies do not generate much of a profit, I am looking into raising some livestock. I am going back and forth between sheep, goats or alpacas. I don't have time to commit to milking anything, so they will have to be raised for meat or fiber. As much as I love goat cheese, I would rather buy it from the store than go to all that trouble. Ain't nobody in my house, got time for that! I have also been debating getting a pig. Organic bacon really doesn't exist around here in our grocery stores and I am sure if it did, it would be 3 times higher than regular bacon. I have heard some disgusting tales about how pigs are kept on factory farms, so knowing what my pig ate, and how healthy it was before I make it into bacon & pork chops, seems like a good idea to me! I have never killed anything, except bugs! I am trying to wrap my head around raising an animal to kill for food. I am not sure how I will handle it emotionally. I love animals, they are creatures who have feelings, capable of love, attachment and fear. I am afraid I will get very attached to them. It is easy not to think about where our meat comes from when all you see is the package at the store. I think providing a good quality life to animals is important. They should be healthy and happy, free to roam a little and enjoy nature, and treated with kindness and compassion. I have a feeling that my husband will be the one taking them to market or the local chop shop, its just not something I see myself doing. He will have to bring home the bacon in a package or the money.

In addition, I want to grow a crop of hemp for animal bedding. The University farm has been doing some studies and found that hemp fiber bedding for animals is a superior product to any other bedding that is currently being used. It has much greater absorption properties, its chemical free, has minimal dust, helps trap bad odors better than other products, the list goes on about how great it is! You can read more about it here: http://www.americanhempllc.com/#!horse-bedding/c1iam

It is just an awesome agricultural product to grow. There are so many wonderful uses from building material to oil to semiconductors for batteries. It is a wonderful renewable resource that saves forests, stops erosion control, mitigates pollutants, and its sustainable! I hope they finally legalize hemp growing in Kentucky around throughout the US! It is so ridiculous that they still treat it like its a drug. You would have to smoke a joint of hemp the size of a telephone poll to get high! I mean, come on now, who cares anyway. Alcohol kills more people and ruins more lives & families than marijuana ever has anyway. People need to do their research and find out all the benefits of both hemp and marijuana before they form an opinion. I am convinced that those who are still against it just don't know or understand the facts because if they did, they would change their mind!

I am going to apply for a permit to grow hemp next year. I have also started a new LLC company called the  Kentucky Hemp Company, and would like to grow hemp to use in my products, so check it out and like my page if you are interested in knowing more about the benefits of hemp and my products!

I have made several handmade soaps, lotions and other textile and rope products that I plan to list on ETSY soon and start selling. I want to use all hemp products that come from Kentucky, but so far, there is not much available here. I use hemp paper in my packaging and tags too. I have applied to have the Appalachian proud and Kentucky proud logo for all my products even though the hemp oil and fiber I am using now is not from Kentucky. You can still use the logo as long as it is handmade in Kentucky. I can also sell these products at the local farmers market, fairs and shops. So, I am pretty excited to see how that takes off once I get it going and have enough products produced. I am still working on getting some better pictures of my products before I list them on ETSY. I am also carefully debating what I am going to charge for them to make sure I am making a profit for my time and energy, plus leaving an opening for wholesale pricing. When I used to sell soap and body care products under my Starlight Creations, LLC, I made the mistake of pricing around what others were charging, rather than what it truly cost me to make the products. I lost money on some items by doing that and I also limited what I could sell for at wholesale price, so I am not doing that this time around!

The new tractor will help us create a fenced in area to keep some livestock with a post hole digger attachment. It will also help us to compost the manure properly by turning it often. IT will come in great as a manure spreader for use in our organic production of veggies. We will be able to use it to plant and harvest the hemp, tilling the veggie beds, getting firewood and lumber, etc. I am really excited about this new adventure in farming and homesteading! Adding a tractor and some animals will complete the list of what we need to have a proper organic operation!

Here is a picture of the new tractor, a hemp product preview, and some of the veggie garden & harvest.

Spending a chilly birthday at the Last Resort

Tomorrow is my birthday and last night it dipped down to 20 degrees with wind chills in the teens. In all my years, it has never been this cold on my birthday. Usually, this time of year I have already started planting some cold tolerant plants. I am glad I decided to wait this year and keep it all in the greenhouse because none of it would have survived the night. We are just about out of firewood too. We didn't anticipate having to restock the woodstove this much in March. We did get a little break from it last week, when the temperatures got up to almost 70 degrees and we had several days in the 50-60's. Now we are back to a full load of wood daily. I am using this time to catch up on the farmers market rules, order some greasy bean heirloom seeds (if you've never heard of those, then you don't know beans!) and do a little sewing on the sewing machine I gave myself for my birthday. I haven't tried to sew anything in years because I haven't been able to find the old sewing machine I had. It is packed away, somewhere in the container full of things that I didn't consider necessities when we downsized from 3000 sq.ft. to this 1000 sq.ft. cabin. My husband jokingly calls this place "The Last Resort" but when thinking of a farm name, it just didn't sound right to buy products from the "Last Resort," so I went with a name that signifies this area and native plants. We have Mountain Laurel growing all along this ridge, especially back along the cliff line at the rear of our property. It gets such pretty flowers in the late spring/early summer and the leaves stay green through the winter. It is a wild rhododendron and gets about 15 feet tall here. Little Laurel is also the name of the holler at the base of the cliff line here, identified on the USGS map. It is a tributary to the Licking River. So Laurel Ridge Farm seems like an appropriate name for this place. Getting back to the subject of sewing, I don't really miss that old sewing machine that I can't find in the hundreds of boxes stacked in the container. The machine was heavy and smelled like a burning belt and oil. It also had very few features and often made me really frustrated. The foot pedal was either really slow or pedal to the metal. I am hoping this new machine with 130 built in sewing stitches, 170 stitch functions, build in LED light, LCD display, start & stop button, extension table for quilting and large pieces, free arm option and it threads itself! That is important because my eyes are not as good as they used to be, thanks to all these birthdays that keep creeping up so quickly. Time really does speed up as you get older. I always thought older people were silly for saying that, so I guess I am the silly one now! Here are some recent pictures including one of the finished greenhouse/workshop/outdoor kitchen/bar. It really is a multipurpose structure! We absolutely love it. There is nothing else designed like it that I have ever seen. I put some black plastic down on part of the garden, hoping to warm the ground up and keep the weeds down. My dad gave me a rolling A/V cart he got at a school board auction and it works great for rolling the plants in and out of the greenhouse. Inside the greenhouse, I have some supplemental lighting for cloudy days and I have wrapped the windows with white frost cover to keep the sun from burning and drying out the plants on warm days. The chicken cages I had to build to keep the cats off the seedlings. The cats live in the greenhouse over the winter. It is heated by the outdoor woodstove boiler along with the house, hot water heater and our hot tub. It keeps the greenhouse at least 55 degrees. I start the seedlings on a thermostat controlled heat mat at 70 degrees. We have started terracing some of the garden because we are on a hill and not only does that cause soil loss but you get tired of standing kneeling on a hill trying to garden. It wears out the knees, ankles and hips quick! Tomorrow, I will borrow a friends tractor and start on making some newly tilled areas for my popcorn, squash and melons.

 
e

KY PROUD

I have progressed in my knowledge and farming skills over the past few years although anyone who farms as a hobby or a business can tell you, there is always more to learn and no two years will be alike. The winter wasn't too bad until the very end. All of a sudden, we had two significant snow events that turned into record breakers, followed by flooding, then some 70 degree weather, and now, possible snow again tomorrow. Bulbs are breaking ground and coming up to bloom, while insects are gearing up for the season. Weeds are already awake and the grass is getting greener. I started seeds in the greenhouse in January. I have lettuce, broccoli, cabbage, kale and other cold loving crops ready to go in the ground but I am afraid to stick them out there. It seems about every two weeks, the temperature drops and we get a frost or snow event. It's just not worth losing them so I am keeping them in the greenhouse until I feel more confident. I will probably stick them out sometime in April with a low tunnel frost protection.

This year I have signed up to sell at the local farmer's market. I always have more than I can eat or preserve, so I usually give away the extra and also feed some to the chickens. I decided to grow more than last year. Each year I make the garden areas bigger and the soil better. Hopefully that means I will have even more extra food to sell this year. I have two boys that need to get a sense of what work is and how hard it is to make some money. This seems like the perfect opportunity for that. I told them they could keep most of the money we make if they would help me. So far, they do not seem too excited but I am hoping that will change once they get some dollars in their pockets. I try to explain to them the importance of buying local and growing organic. I am not sure if they get it but I guess if I say it often enough, it will eventually sink in. It will be a challenge since they are dedicated to soccer and it will be going on most of the summer. We will do the best we can though. Soccer comes first for them and I am okay with that. I only have a small amount of time before they are grown and making a life on their own, so I have to put them first for now.

Since I used to sell my soaps & candles at craft fairs, I understand what it will be like to sell at the farmer's market. I am excited to be able to label my products Kentucky Proud and Appalachian Proud. Tonight I went to the local farmers market meeting and filled out the paper work to use the special labels. I also bought a big Appalachian Proud banner to hang up in my booth and some stickers for my products. I am so excited to share what I love to do with the community and make some money for it too. To me, farming is not a job but a healthy lifestyle choice. I can't stand to jog or exercise in a group class. I like to work outside all day and not even realize I am sore and tired until it is dark. I also love the reward of having fresh organic food to feed my family.

I ordered seeds from Johnny's seeds again but I also ordered seeds from Sustainable Seed Co. this year. I am excited to start growing popcorn this year too. I have expanded the variety of fruits of veggies that I grow to include some bok choy, Chinese cabbage, swiss chard, red celery and some herbs and heirlooms I have never tried. I am also going to try selling cut flowers. I am not sure how great the market for that is here, but it will help make my booth look nice, even if they don't sell!

I will post some pictures of the greenhouse plants this weekend, I have to finish watching these KY Wildcats beat the West Virginia Mountaineers. I love my Old Kentucky Home! KY PROUD! GO CATS!