Practices

Growing Practices

Everything we pack in the Harvest Crates is started from seed on our farm or harvested from perennial plants - things that produce every year and don’t need to be replanted. Some seeds begin indoors on a heating pad while others are sown directly where they will mature. We focus on heirloom varieties which means flavor along with texture and color are prioritized over production and shelf-life. We use nothing for fertilizer except compost, manure, and minerals. We use nothing for pest control except natural pest predators, essential oils, and diatomaceous earth. We make our own compost from garden trimmings and vegetable waste as well as bedding from our rabbits and poultry. We strive to be as wholly natural as can be, even to companion planting for bio-diversity among the garden beds. We go beyond “certified organic”

Waste Practices

We do our best to minimize waste at every step. Our Crates themselves are sanitized and reused for each delivery. Our packaging within the Crates is either sanitized and reused or made from 100% compostable material. You can even send packaging back in your empty Crates to be added to our compost. At the end of each season, when plants are cut down, all the trimmings are chopped into mulch and composted as well, building the nutrition and organic matter in our gardens every year.

Harvesting Practices

We strive to harvest everything at its peak for the absolute best flavor and nutrition content. We know that nutrition starts to decline within hours of harvest with flavor not far behind. That’s why we harvest, wash, and deliver everything within 2 - 24 hours with the average being under 12. We pick exactly what we need, when we need it. We may not have precisely the right number of, say, bell peppers for each Crate to get 3 each week, but we do keep track of what goes into each Crate so that we know what you got last time and we can rotate things to maintain variety in your deliveries.