( - promoted by Jill Richardson)
Well, I've made my first two deliveries so far, from the farm. I've sold kale, herbs, flowering plants, peas, greens, lettuces, and some vegetable plants. In an effort to keep customers happy by making it as convenient as possible to order their produce, I set up an online store where people can order what they'd like delivered the following weekend. If they like, they can come and pick up instead on Sundays. I deliver to my customers who live in the Mulino hamlet, the Molalla CPO or the city of Molalla. These areas are not more than 10 miles away from the farm, and it's pretty cool to deliver stuff to people.
I originally started out sending my order lists in an email to my customers. That just confused everyone, and one of my customers suggested the shopping cart. I looked into it, and my web host has several to choose from. I settled on a script called OS Cart. It's an open source php script that's pretty easy to work with, especially if you're like me, and have just enough knowledge about programing and scripts to be dangerous. My watch words when screwing around with code, is always save a copy of pristine code in case you do something to completely bollocks up everything, which I've been known to do now and then... |
| A lot of people probably don't think about what all's involved in running a business, or a farm, much less a business that is a farm. Unless you're going to grow just a few things, you really have to be a multitasker. In addition to the goats, emus horses and chickens, I've decided to grow a pretty wide variety of plant crops here, which meant setting up a greenhouse. There's now way I could have afforded to buy all those starts, and for a lot of crops you really need to be putting actual plants in the ground, as opposed to seed, although for some things you need to go from seed instead of plants - beans and corn are good examples of this. On the other hand, I've planted in excess of 130 tomato plants, in over 12 varieties, some of which you can't even find as plants around here.
Growing in the greenhouse involves a lot of trial and error, having had no formal training. What I do have however, is the internet. My favorite tool for anything in the world is the WWW. There's so much info on the net, that you can learn to do almost anything short of brain surgery. Well, maybe that's going a bit far, but you get the idea. Then there is learning about caring for all the plants, what's an annual and what's going to be around for a while, and for those, where to put them so that they get the light and have the drainage they will need to make it to next year, and won't interfere with next year's or this fall/winter's crops. The nice thing about trial and error with edible plants is that you can still eat most of your mistakes, even if no one else wants to. ;-)
Then there are the harvest issues, cleaning and storage. When to harvest, what can be picked a bit early (I usually like to pick/package the morning of delivery day), because even if I decided to make my deliveries on Saturdays, that doesn't mean that the crops will wait till then. Some, like corn or green beans, soup beans, etc. can wait, but Snow Peas wait for no farmer. They're kind of like oat hay. Ya gotta cut when it says, not when you say. Otherwise the grain will ripen and you've lost the thing that causes oat hay to bring a premium - those green oats that, along with the stem and leaves of the stalk, were harvested at their peak. That's peas for ya. A bit mature and they're still good, but the little tender pods that are full of sugars are what really get peoples' mouths watering. Speaking of which, the kale's getting a bit long in the tooth as well. Time to look up some of those kale recipes I ran across while I was researching something else a few weeks ago.
All of this is a lot of work, but not really anything that I'm not already fairly familiar with. The thing I've been having the most fun with is the marketing. Learning what my customers like, what they don't, how to let other people know about the farm. Right now I'm only delivering to 3 people each weekend. That's all the produce I have right at the moment. But here in a month or so, it's going to hit the fan and I'll have loads of stuff.
I've done some web design for myself in the past, but setting up an ecommerce script is completely different, and editing things like the header, and body have to be done by editing the pages directly. Fortunately, the parts I can edit, such as the body of the main page, where I have info about the types of things produced on the farm, have lines of text saying things like 'put your store's information here' and have places for pictures, etc. so it's pretty easy to figure out.
I started out working on computers with the intent of expanding my artistic and photography skills to digital media. So I have all sorts of graphics programs, 3D modeling programs, filters, etc. and with my trusty digital camera, no plant or animal is safe.... By all that I mean, that I did all the photography that shows up in the store for plants/produce, eggs, etc., the header, and the photography in the background of the Mulino CSA Network Virtual Farmers Market is by me and shot on property, then edited on my laptop before being uploaded to the host.
It's good to be able to finally justify having the computer, all this software, the internet connection and web service I've been paying for over the last few years. Speaking of which, I'm also building a virtual farmers market so that members of the Mulino CSA Network can have an online store (their booth at the market), so that people can order from them from home or the office and then pick up their order at what ever real farmers market the farm has a booth at, or the farm or a pickup point.
You can see what I've been up to here -
The Little Homestead Farm store
Mulino CSA Network Virtual Farmers Market
One of the things I like about the online store is that I have it set up so that my customers can elect to pay on delivery, and that way I don't have to deal with credit cards or Pay Pal taking a percentage of my sales. It also makes it possible for my customers to pay when the produce arrives and they have a chance to check it out. I can also make adjustments to a customer's bill incase they order something that I've run out of. That happened with one customer who had ordered 4 lbs of snow peas. When their order came in, I only had 3 lbs left. I offered to give them change or credit the ammount to their next order. They decided to take the credit.
I'm learning a lot, and having an adventure. I've been very busy planting and cleaning the greenhouse out and getting all those plants in the ground so I can start the summer/fall plants. The little chickens are doing well, and they're all out with the big hens and the roosters. We now have close to 70 chickens tooling around the barn, and the land sharks have found the sweet corn that's coming up. Oy..... |
