High Dry Farm, Sultan, Washington….Certified Organic
We just finished transplanting the last row of our high tunnel with cucumbers. We have 270 tomato plants and 450 cucumber plants, and all them are growing by leaps and bounds now that the weather has finally warmed, after one of the coolest springs in recent history. It will be another couple weeks before we start harvesting these warm weather veg, but in the meantime our self-serve farmstand has bagged salad mix, cabbage, kale, green onions and an assortment of bunched herbs.
High & Dry Farm will be vending today at the first meeting of the season of the Snohomish Farmers Market. Join us on Cedar Avenue in Snohomish, 3 pm-7 pm.
Large healthy certified organic tomato plants in “trade” gallon pots, are now available for purchase at High and Dry Farm. These are $9 each, including tax. This is slightly cheaper than the big box stores charge for plants that are not certified organic.
Plants can be picked up at our self-serve farmstand at 32814 120th St. SE.
Order and prepay on-line before pick-up.
We have the following varieties: Abe Lincoln, Amish Paste, Arkansas Marvel, Aunt Ginny’s Purple, Aunt Ruby’s Green, Aussie, Austin Red pear, Beam’s Yellow Pear, Benviento, Big beef, Bison, Black Beauty, Black Cherry, Black Krim, Bloody Butcher, Brandywine, Camp Joy, Carbon, Cherokee Purple, Dingwall Scotty, Earl of Edgemont, Estiva, Flamme, Frachetta di manduria. German Johnson, Goose Creek, Grandpa’s Minnesota, Ibsen’s Gold, Ilses Yellow, Impulse, Jasper, Kellogg’s Breakfast, Kimberly, Lucky Bee, Manitoba, Neve’s Azorean Red, New Hampshire Surecrop, Olga’s Round Yellow Egg, Peace Vine, Prescott, Pruden’ Purple, Sakura, Salvaterres, San Marzano, Sebastopol, Ste Lucie, Stupice, Sungold, Sunpeach, Tommy toe
Maintaining organic certification requires keeping complete, extensive and detailed records about all aspects of farm work, and requires keeping copies of receipts for all purchases of seeds, fertilizers, etc. Even market gardeners that do not seek organic certification must maintain extensive records to be compliant with food safety laws as codified in the FSMA. As I am an intrinsically disorganized person, I have created a relational database to facilitate keeping and maintaining the required records. The database is now on its third iteration of improvement. The beauty of the database is that it runs in the cloud on Airtable, which allows access by smartphone from the field, as well as via web browser from a laptop or desktop computer.
Annual recertification of an organic farm requires an inspection that typically takes two to three hours, with most of this time devoted to auditing farm records. During High & Dry Farm’s most recent certification inspection, Airtable allowed me to power through the audit, which was completed within one hour, with no significant issues reported.
We am now making this database system, Organic Farmer 4.0, available to farmers completely without charge. Sign up for a free Airtable account here. Once you have signed up, download a copy of the Organic Farmer 4.0 database to your Airtable account here. Detailed instructions for use of Organic Farmer 4.0 can be found here.
Fans of Greek mythology know Persephone as the Queen of the underworld, the dead, and of Spring. Farmers understand the Persephone period to be the days when the period from sunrise to sunset is less than ten hours, causing vegetables to struggle to grow. (And farmers to struggle with seasonal depressive disorder).
Sadly, at our latitude, the Persephone period has begun. We will count the days until Februrary 8, when we emerge from Persephone and our veg commence to thrive.
Construction of our new 30′ x 96′ high tunnel is now essentially complete, and USDA NRCS just inspected it, and certified that it meets their specs, so they will be wiring funds into our account from the grant they awarded us.
After some thought we decided to build our new high tunnel with 4′ hoop spacing, instead of 5′, for added strength, so the planned dimensions are now 30′ x 96′. A big unexpected roadblock is that we cannot perform site leveling or post installation until an archaeologist assesses the site, and NRCS has no idea when the archaeologist can visit, as they employ only one to cover the whole state. WTF?
The hoophouse kit arrived on June 5. 7000 lbs of steel. Today we are in the middle of assembling 25 hoops with trusses. The hoops weigh about 200 lbs each, so muscling them around in 85 degree heat ain’t a lot of fun. We are a little more than half done.
Yesterday High & Dry Farm was honored by the visit of our congressional representative Kim Schrier.
Representative Schrier was the first customer at High & Dry Farm’s new farmstand. Talk about a grand opening!
Our USDA EQIP high tunnel grant application didn’t get funded initially, but then USDA found some loose change behind their sofa cushions and belatedly awarded the grant to us. Follow us as we race to get our 30’x95′ veg cathedral completed soon enuf for a Fall crop.
Here is a list of some project milestones:
Our new walk-in cooler and wash/pack buildings are now nearly complete. They are fully functional and just need a little trim work.
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