How we do things

We are committed to being responsible land stewards and community members. For us this means:

never using chemicals
minimizing tillage to protect soil health
choosing inputs and farming methods holistically, taking into account how each piece effects the whole
sourcing supplies as locally as possible
striving to reduce plastic waste in all forms
transitioning off fossil fuels
buying seeds from small farms and small companies

Farm Layout

One of the questions we get asked a lot, especially by our closest neighbors, is do we grow everything we sell? Quickly followed by, do we do it all on the land in Apex? The answer to both is YES! The land we lease isn't very big, roughly 3.75 acres, and the land in production is even smaller. This year we're growing on just under an acre.

This is the layout of our land about the time we signed the lease. The red line is where we built our fields, 10 of them in all. And the red square is an area where we're cover cropping just over half an acre to prepare it for use in a few years.

This is what we started with in May of 2021. There were old, tall rows that ran the length of the field, and just wouldn't work. Plus, it was overgrown with grasses, weeds, sweetgum and blackberry.

So we smoothed out the rows, shaped our 10 smaller fields and started cover cropping. Over the next year we added aged mulch and compost to most of the fields, and continued cover cropping.

This was what it looked like in early 2022. It's mostly cover crops of cereal rye and Austrian winter pea and a few baby greens under the row covers.