My husband and I started ERB Gardens to do what we can to support the local foods movement. ERB Gardens provides culinary herb and vegetable seedlings to local retailers at wholesale prices.
If we can succeed on a small scale, I believe that we can grow to be able to succeed on a larger scale. We want to become organic farmers and coordinators of a CSA. With winter harvest techniques and enough ground in the right location, we believe we will be able to produce enough fresh herbs and vegetables to supply a CSA year-round. There is a huge learning curve involved in learning to be a farmer, especially if you don’t grow up on a working farm. The most important thing to start trying to understand is the timing. More on this later.
To get to our goal of providing fresh produce year-round & operating a CSA, there are several steps in-between. Currently we are providing local retailers with culinary herb and vegetable transplants for their spring plant sales. We plan to grow a garden with many more varieties this summer and mainly hope to learn from our experience with that - and have a bunch of fresh vegetables & herbs to share with our friends & family. The next step would include growing herbs & vegetables for sale at local farmer’s markets and to local chefs and grocers. To get to that step, we have to occupy the right piece of land so we can live on our farm. Currently the “occupying the right piece of land” part is our biggest obstacle, but we are hoping the more success we are able to demonstrate on the small scale, the more likely we will be able to find helpers on that issue.
So far this week, I have planted over 1000 seeds.
