Plant City Goes Local!

We are finally getting some coverage. Bay News 9 did a news story on The Corner Store about how they do a great job of buying local items for the community. And I got about 2 seconds of fame deducted from my alloted 5 minutes. You can click here and get the story.



http://www.baynews9.com/VideoPlayer/?The_Corner_Store_830



Step by step our farm is changing lives!

Check out the Movie Food, Inc.

I haven't had much to say in the last few month during our off season. Things got too hot, wet and bug infested to grow anything worthwhile. So I am adapting to the off season and getting ready to push up our sickly orange trees and diversify some. We will be adding some goats and pines to the land to secure our greenbelt tax status. It will also give us some room to expand the organic growing area. I've already started putting up fence for the goats and we should be pushing the trees in the next month.

The Dixie chicks are doing great. They like their mobile home and strut around their pen all day looking for food. They are getting big and should be laying in the next few months.

We have our cover crop of sudan x sorhgum grass in. We have been harvesting sweet corn and it is delicious. I planted the "Silver Queen" variety and it did pretty well. A few caterpillars here and there but we tolerate a few of them. I planted okra this year and if fared well. We will be planting it again this year for the CSA members.

We saw the movie "Food, Inc." last night at the old Tampa Theatre. It was a treat to see the movie in a historical landmark theater. It was my first time there. The movie was very good and give me inspiration to keep doing what we are doing and keep our philosophy of bringing organically produced food to our community. I highly recommend watching it. It is about how our food is industrially produced and the rationale behind it. It is fairly emotionally charged but has a good message.

Our Organic CSA Changes Lives!

I've been wanting to post this for a couple of weeks now but haven't had the chance. One of our CSA members (identity intentionally left out) has told me that she has changed her path in life partly because of our farm's produce. I thought she was joking but she was serious. I was told that due to her finding our CSA and enjoying our organic produce, having better neighbors living next door, and finding The Corner Store, she has decided not to move from our small city towards the more urban Tampa. Our tiny farm has made a genuine difference in some one's life. That is amazing! I never thought much beyond the farm in terms of just producing vegetables to sell. I mean there is the part about helping to change the world towards a better place to live by adopting sustainable practices. There is the cleaner environment by not using more chemicals and fossil fuels in delivering our produce. There could be the better health enjoyed by those who eat natural foods. There is the idea that by selecting some of our own crops we are working with natural selection to use less inputs. But I never thought that our CSA and small farm would have such a profound and concrete effect on some one's life other than our own. That is a wonderful motivator for producing great organic vegetables on our farm. It also shows that a CSA is really a Community that supports agriculture. At first it is customers that show up for produce and then, with time, it is friends that are showing up on the weekends, as we share information and stories. And then it really is a community that unites us around the theme of our daily sustenance. I hope we can continue to grow and change lives for the better with our CSA and small farm.