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SUBSCRIPTION GARDEN
A subscription garden, also known as Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA), is when people sign up in advance to be regularly supplied with what you harvest from your garden. There are many ways to do it. You can have subscribers tell you what they would like you to provide them with. Or, especially to start, you can grow what you think you have the room, the right soil, and the right area for and provide your subscribers with regular deliveries of a specified quantity of whatever is in season.
So in late June, you may show up with a basket full of the fastest-growing early vegetables such as lettuces, radishes, spinach, peas, summer squash, and strawberries. By late July, the basket may contain tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. And in the fall, you will be delivering winter squashes, pumpkins, and other hardy and long-growing produce.
After you have done your subscription garden for a couple years, you can begin to ask customers what they want for produce (if they haven’t told you already) and grow a more custom product, unless your garden isn’t suitable for what they want.
THINGS TO CONSIDER
Don’t promise your subscribers anything. Growing food is fraught with potential problems—insect infestations, a season of weather not conducive to a particular crop—so you don’t want to promise anything you can’t deliver. Tell them what you are growing this season. Make it clear you offer no guarantees about what actually makes it from planting to harvesting. Of course, if very little is harvested or every year you have no corn even though you planted an acre of it, then you need to adjust your gardening practices!
HOW DO YOU WANT TO SPEND YOUR DAY?
Growing a commercial-sized garden is hard physical work. It is also incredibly enjoyable for those who like to till the soil and do garden work.
And you may think gardening is just a one-season business, but in reality, there are only a couple of months, even in the north, when you will be doing no gardening-related work. Perhaps you can take December and January off, but in February and March, you will need to spend time poring over the seed catalogs that will pile into your mailbox. You will also need to use that time to plan your garden: Look through last year’s records (and be sure to keep them!) to decide what parts of the plot to rotate with a different crop, what didn’t do well in a certain area, and so on.
By late March and definitely April, you will be planting seeds in pots for transplanting; those will need to be watered and, unless you have a greenhouse, they will need to be turned depending on your growing lights. In April and May, you will be preparing the garden itself. May is the planting month in most parts of the country. Of course, the summer months will be busy with continuous plantings of different vegetables and keeping the weeds and pests at bay. At least by late June and throughout the rest of the summer, you will be harvesting and delivering produce! By October, when in the north the chance of frost is getting high, your harvesting and deliveries will slow down but you prepare the garden for the winter and plant things such as garlic and any cover crop. Then, whew, it’s December and time for a break!
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
You will need some land to grow your produce. You don’t have to own all the land you need; find a place where you might be able to lease an acre or so, depending on what you want to grow and how many subscribers you want to have.
You will need to have gardening tools. Depending on how big your garden gets, you will want to think about a tractor; but tractors are incredibly expensive and even used ones will exceed your $5,000 startup budget several times over. You can rent a tractor for a weekend, which can work perfectly if you condense your tractor-related work to make the best use of the rental time. You should either plan to purchase a power rototiller or hire someone to do that work for you.
Mostly, though, you will need small hand tools that aren’t very expensive—but you should still plan to buy the highest quality tools you can find. They will last longer, feel better in your hands, and not tire you so fast. Take excellent care of them, washing them off after each use and never leaving them outside, especially in the rain.
The kind of tools you need include a few different kinds of rakes, a couple of hoes, and a few different kinds of shovels. You may want to own some fencing tools, because deer and woodchucks will be interested in checking out your garden.
You will find some tools along the way that you especially like—different things that help plant seeds, for instance. And there are some other garden structures you will need to buy or make to trellis vine plants such as cucumbers and beans and cages to help tomato plants stand upright under the weight of their ripening fruit.
You will also need a fuel-efficient, reliable vehicle to make your deliveries, which is presumably the vehicle you already own. You can also encourage people to pick up their own weekly subscriptions with a discount incentive, which is an especially good idea if you have added a farmstand and there may be additional sales opportunities.
A basic computer system is a good thing to have as well. You can make your own order lists, send an e-mail newsletter, print row markers, order seeds, even map out your garden with a design program.
MARKETING ANGLE
This is another business where the interest in locally grown food and knowing where your food comes from and how it was grown is the key to customers. Promote this aspect in your marketing materials. If you refrain from using pesticides or chemical fertilizers, be sure to tell people that. Those for whom it doesn’t matter will be your customers either way. But for those who do care about pesticide use on their foods, they will not be your customers unless they know this about your produce.
NICE TOUCH
Each year, try a new and unusual vegetable. Provide your subscribers with a recipe or two to help them learn how to cook with these vegetable. Survey them at the end of the season and ask whether they would like to see this vegetable again next year.
Another nice touch is to grow a small plot of flowers and add a small bouquet to each order you deliver.
EXPANSION POSSIBILITIES
Taking on more customers is the obvious way to expand. But in order to do that, you will need more vegetables. In order to grow more vegetables, you will most likely need more space. Ultimately, you will only be able to expand in this business to the extent that you have the time to work your gardens. It would be counterproductive to plant more than you can manage and lose customers because you provide them with lesser quality produce.
You can also expand by having some commercial subscribers, such as restaurants or small markets. Find out what they might specifically like to offer their customers and become their provider of that particular vegetable.
Another great way to expand is to build a simple greenhouse. You can get a jump on the growing season and you might be able to use it for retail space, too, depending on where the greenhouse is located.
Another way to use your greenhouse is to grow seedlings to sell to people to plant in their own gardens. Offer them at a discount to your subscribers—you’d be surprised how many people want to grow a few vegetables of their own but will still subscribe to your garden to get all the things they don’t grow themselves.
WORDS TO KNOW
Organic:To be able to call your produce “organic,” you need to go through a rigorous and expensive certification process. If this is important to you and your potential subscriber base, by all means find out what this process is in your state. You will need to pass those costs along to your customers, so it pays to check with them to see if it is worth it. You may find that you can build a strong enough relationship with your subscribers that they trust that you are using organic processes even if your farm is not officially certified.
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