Been pretty much 6 months since my last update and a lot has happened in that time. The reason it’s taken so long for me to write is two fold…1) I was worried that writing about the saga with the city might somehow jeopardize our ability to continue operation. 2) I’ve been lazy. Can’t do anything about the laziness now except change and start writing. As far as the ongoing saga with the city; it’s such a joke that I’m not actually worried about them catching up with us. I now figure I’m simply going to write what the situation is and deal with it from there and they can do what they’re going to do.
We’re now caught in a static situation with the city. At our last meeting they told us that two officials would decide if we could be classified as a “truck farm.” If you google truck farm you’ll notice that it is exactly what we are. Truck farms are allowed in residential areas (R-1), while urban farms are not. Interestingly, though the term truck farm is used in the city ordinance it’s never actually defined. The two officials have to decide if we are a truck farm but they are not required to actually define the term, they can simply say whether we are one or not. Our last meeting was about 4-5 months ago and we submitted a revised letter of intent and were supposed to wait to hear from the city in regards to our classification. Still no word. It’s a good thing we decided to just go ahead and continue with operations instead of waiting for the city to 100% back us because timeliness doesn’t seem to be their strong point. For some perspective, the city just mailed Kat a notice saying they didn’t receive her tax return…from 2011. Took them over 3 years to get that done which is rare seeing as they were asking for money, in general they’ve been more on top of anything that requires people writing a check.
Anyway, we decided to just go ahead and continue operations. My guess is just that the city doesn’t want to officially allow us to do what we’re doing just in case there’s some big fuss from someone down the road. If they keep it in limbo and something goes wrong they can say they never actually approved anything.
Because we kept going with our business it’s broken down into two halves over the summer. One half is us building/maintaining vegetable gardens for a couple of clients. The other half is a community share agriculture (CSA) program that we started on our own land. The basic idea is that people pay for a “share” of the farm and we deliver a box of fresh veggies to their home every week. We started early in the summer and we had a successful first season; I think one key was not overextending ourselves. We only had 4 shares so we were able to provide a fair amount of produce to every family in the program. We are starting our fall CSA in a few weeks and I’m excited about that. We’re expanding to 6 full shares. The growing and distributing is closer to the aspects of this business that I’m personally interested in so this is a fun time for the business.
I’m getting a little fatigued of writing so I’m gonna call it on this post. However, I’m going to put more of an effort into keeping this updated. Not caring what the city does has opened up my mentality a bit and I’m not as worried about putting out information. More info and pics to come later.
