We don’t grow anything we wouldn’t want our own kids to eat because our family eats from the garden, too! We don’t use chemical fertilizers or pesticides. We do use a lot of organic compost and vermicompost to keep our soil, and ultimately our plants, healthy.
We also grow cover crops to reduce erosion and to feed the soil. To reduce insect and disease problems, we rotate our crops through the field. Weeds are managed without chemicals by hand-pulling and cultivating with a hoe.
We use our limited space intensively, which requires that we employ that oldest, and most versatile, of tools: our hands. With the exception of a few tasks for which we use machines, most of the work is done with either hand tools or with bare hands.
We are not a USDA certified organic farm because we consider the costs to be too high for our small scale. But being able to assure our customers that our farm is safe and sustainable is important to us. So we’ve chosen an alternative certification: Certified Naturally Grown. While requiring the same basic standards as the USDA organic program, the Naturally Grown program is tailored to small-scale, direct market farms. We feel that one of its greatest strengths is that it’s based on the internationally-recognized participatory guarantee model of certification. Put simply, it’s a system based on transparency and information sharing.
Overall, everything we do supports one goal: to grow high quality veggies that taste great and keep us and our planet healthy.