09/28/2026
Another big step forward on the farm: all of the wall panels for our walk-in cooler are officially standing! After all the scrubbing, rust removal, painting, rearranging the wash-pack building, and figuring out how this giant stainless-steel puzzle goes back together, it is finally starting to look like an actual walk-in again.
Of course, nothing involving used farm equipment ever goes completely according to plan. 😂 The cooler arrived missing one of the door hinges, so the door is temporarily sitting on the sidelines. We found a replacement and ordered it, and hopefully it will be here by this weekend so we can get the door hung properly.
Our next challenge might be the most interesting one yet: the ceiling. Those insulated ceiling panels are big, awkward, and HEAVY, and somehow we have to lift them above our heads, maneuver them into position, and get them locked onto the tops of the walls. We’re currently accepting clever ideas from anyone who has assembled one of these before!
Once the ceiling is in place, the structure itself should finally be complete. Then we can go around the entire cooler and seal all of the seams with silicone so we aren’t losing cold air through tiny gaps between the panels.
After that comes the part where we stop pretending to be HVAC technicians. We still need to install a new breaker, complete the electrical work for the cooler, and get everything ready for the refrigeration system.
Then we’ll bring in an HVAC/refrigeration company to inspect the cooling equipment, figure out exactly what needs to be repaired or replaced, get everything operating correctly, and charge the system. We knew when we bought this cooler that it was going to need some work, but bringing an older piece of equipment back to life made a lot more sense for our farm than buying a brand-new walk-in.
When everything is finished, the inside will be lined with four 4-foot-wide, 24-inch-deep, 6-foot-tall wire racks plus two 3-foot-wide racks of the same depth and height. That is going to give us a tremendous amount of organized refrigerated storage compared with what we have now.
And we’re going to need every bit of it.
The walk-in is one piece of a much larger project we’ve been working toward. Next up is construction of our new high tunnel, which will be dedicated heavily toward producing lettuce and other greens throughout the year. The goal is to dramatically increase the amount of salad we can grow while keeping the quality and growing practices our customers already expect from us.
Our lettuce is grown using the same regenerative, no-till approach we use throughout the farm. We focus on building healthy soil instead of constantly disturbing it, and we grow multiple lettuce varieties so our salad mix has different colors, textures, and flavors instead of being a bag of one generic green.
Depending on the season, that means tender green and red lettuces along with other fresh greens and seasonal additions coming out of the tunnel. Everything can be harvested, washed, cooled quickly in this walk-in, packaged, and kept at the proper temperature until it heads home with you. That cold-storage step is a huge part of producing consistently crisp, high-quality salad.
This is also what will make our Spring 2027 Salad CSA possible. We’ve already had people sign up, and there are three membership levels available depending on how much salad your household goes through.
We’re intentionally keeping the first round fairly limited while we dial in production in the new tunnel. We’ll absolutely grow as much as we reasonably can for the farm store and farmers market too, but CSA membership will be the way to guarantee a steady supply of our salad mix throughout the season rather than hoping we haven’t sold out that week.
We’ll also have our Pork CSA returning for Spring 2027, so whether your idea of dinner starts with a giant bowl of fresh salad or a package of pasture-raised pork—or preferably both—you can find the details about the upcoming shares at www.rigginfarm.com/csa.
For now, though, we have some very heavy ceiling panels staring at us. If you’ve ever assembled a walk-in like this, how would YOU get those panels safely eight feet in the air and into position? And if you know a good commercial refrigeration/HVAC company that works on walk-in coolers in our area, tag them below. We have a feeling the next few weeks are going to be busy.
