We finally have our overhead irrigation installed. This system simulates gentle rain and means we no longer have to hand water 40 market beds.
We are starting an fortnightly market stall in the local city next weekend.
As a small scale producer of vegetables I am regularly asked why our vegetables are priced the way they are. What makes them so special and why, given that we sell direct don’t they cost less? If there is no distribution chain taking their cut, shouldn’t our vegetables be cheaper? The short answer is a solid NO, the long answer lies in the concept of being Frugal vs being Cheap.
A Frugal mindset analyses spending via the lens of quality, longevity, benefit to the purchaser’s life and value for money. A Cheap mindset simply evaluates the price and will tend to settle on the lowest cost, regardless of any other factor. While it is understandable, especially in the post-Covid economy to be careful with your spending, being Cheap always puts you further behind in the long run. Frugality takes a long term view of wealth, health and quality of life and balances them against the cost of an item.
Our farm is managed with hand tools not machinery. Our plants are tended to with love, high level knowledge of plant and soil health, wisdom and a passion to serve our local region with food that nourishes and heals the body. For example our soil is aerated with a broadfork rather than tillage and our Spinach is harvested with scissors and washed by hand.
Commodity vegetables are produced with tractors, a workforce that is indifferent to the end product and consumer, packed onto trucks and driven all over the country to wait in warehouses before going back onto a truck and driven to a supermarket or green grocer. A bag Spinach or a head of Lettuce could be 4 weeks old before you even see it on the shelf. Have you ever bought a bag of Spinach then taken it home only to have it go off in a few days before you even get through the meagre amount contained within?
Our Spinach is $10 for 250g minimum, has excellent flavour and a crunch when you bite into it, lasts weeks and weeks after harvesting and the quality far exceeds everything else available.
Coles Organic Spinach is $4.80 for 100g (more expensive than us) and in the same time span as consuming one of our bags, you could buy 4 or more bags of flimsy Spinach with no mouth feel, limited nutritional value, end up discarding up to half of it and have a miserable experience consuming it as it rapidly goes off in front of you. No wonder people “don’t like salad” they are consuming garbage.
Our produce is for people looking to improve their culinary experiences, health and quality of life all the while supporting a local, family run business that is improving their local environment.
Always be Frugal, Never be Cheap. 
Update on our second attempt at running a locally based market garden. Our landlord is an aircraft mechanic and pilot. He recently flew over the farm and took this photo.
This was a weed filled goat paddock when we started 9 months ago, we now have 34 of our 40 initial market bads shaped and planted. Some beds are onto their second rotation.
We are selling organic vegetables to the local pub, a health food shop in the nearby city and have launched our home delivery service.
Still a lot of work to go but we are making great progress.
#grownostr
Thank you, we live in a beautiful place and put a lot of work into the layout of this garden. Our business is called Nelson OMG, the OMG stands for Organic Market Garden but we also want to people to say Oh My God when they see it
There are nowhere near as many pest bugs in Australia as in the USA for whatever reason. I have found that keeping a very clean garden and mulching with compost keeps most bugs away. We have a species called Cabbage Moth which like to eat all brassica's so we use insect netting over all of those crops. It equates to a 20% shade cloth.
We kangaroos and rabbits everywhere here which require the equivalent of deer fencing with smaller gauge fencing at the bottom for the rabbits. Koalas can climb over and come through but they don't eat vegetables.
Thank you, I have to take one day at a time at the moment its all I can do
A carpenter is also called a "Chippy" probably gives just as many red flags
He deserves the gallows
A Sparky (that's what we call Electricians in Australia)
Thank you. I have been playing around with Twitter but really don't get any positive interactions on there. I was having a good time on Flote before that imploded, Nostr is far better than both Twitter and Flote.
Thanks Matthew, I am hoping this garden is very photogenic and that we can eventually do a lot of farm tours. We are in southern Australia so are currently in Autumn/Fall. As we are in Australia and on the coast we get almost zero frost and have a moderate climate so can grow all year.
Thank you. The soil here is mostly sand and organic matter. Its full of worms already and yes things are growing really well. We ate our first baby spinach last night, beetroots will be next
So much better, we now live on the edge of a small fishing village surrounded by a Tea Tree forest, 1 km from a river, 3 km from the ocean. People here are friendly and supportive of what we are trying to do. Essentially the exact opposite of the last 6 years of our lives