When I was in ST. Louis I worked in a research lab. Every week in the summer we had a farmers market downstairs. I LOVED doing my grocery shopping downstairs. I had a CSA I was a member of. There was a guy who sold the best Yogurt. FYI the best yogurt is windcrest dairy out of Trenton Illinois. Yea I am biased because it is soooooo good. Great people as well. Anyway. I would get enough yogurt for a week and my csa and had no need to really go to the grocery store. I would go to Soulard or my own small garden on occasion if I needed something more but most of my needs were covered.

Then we moved to Iowa. The land of farms with no food to eat. It was amazing how spoiled I had become. You never even think about it. Just go to the grocery store and pick up something which is trucked in from elsewhere. We did not have space to start with but the town we lived in had Community Garden space. You could really rent a plot for the season and it was cheap like $35 for a 20×50 plot. Now think about how much you could grow on something that size? You do not have that space or a community plot near? While we never used this service I did come close two seasons but one we were traveling a lot that summer and the second I was just to “busy”. In reality I did not want to bother with it cause I was still pouting about not having my CSA and Soulard and home garden.

Aerogardens are a good alternative. We bought one for our apt. We could produce about 2 salads a week using all the pods. That was not so bad and to have super fresh salads was awesome. I am not a huge iceburg lettuce fan so the aerogarden was a pretty good option. The down side was the lights were on for 17 hrs and while LED so little energy used it was bit of a light pollution issue in our kitchen at 3 am and bright as day in there.

So we bought our 5 acres. You can see the plot on a previous post. So we started a small 50×100 garden our first year. The sweet corn was pancaked by winds. We did get some but it was all laying down. Our squash did awesome. We had butternut, spaghetti, pie pumpkins, zucchini, summer squash. Our tomatoes did well enough to enjoy and even can some sauce.

The second season our squash did well again but trying a new technique we had significantly reduced yields. Our tomato produced okay but the green house gravel issue reduced those yields and pests got all of our corn. We did get black beans, garlic, potato, and wheat. We have expanded each year with the hopes to eventually provide our own food and sell at market the overage.  We have also begun looking at the legal aspect of farm production for sale. Including training on FSMA (Food Saftey Modernization Act).  Slowly we are meeting fellow producers and learning the market streams and how it all works. We have attended several conferences that I will post about in the future.

In a nut shell that is how we got here.