Xochi Star Market Farm

07/22/2022

Due to illness, we will once again be unable to make it to the farmers market today. Harvesting bins and bins of vegetables and buckets of flowers is serious physical labor that we just could not do while recovering this week. We will be back next week!

07/15/2022

I have beautiful buckets and buckets of blooms for the market today and lots and lots of produce. Alas, we will NOT be in attendance due to a family illness that developed overnight. With the nature of small scale farming, I have touched everything we have to sell. We don't want to share our germs with all of you in that way. On the bright side, our sick home will have vases and vases of flower in every room. I was so excited for everything I was bringing to the market today. Fingers crossed, our family will be recovered by next weekend for the Downtown Elgin Farmers Market.

05/27/2022

Wow I've been quiet on here! Only because I have been working so so so so much! One week until I'll be at our first farmer's market at the Downtown Elgin Farmers Market on 6/3 from 3-7pm. We should have mesculun lettuce mix, some head lettuce, multiple kinds of radish bunches, spinach and arugula. Lots more to come in the following weeks! Flower bouquets? Maaaaaaybeeee.... The anemones (picture #3) are so pretty but they're still little shorties. I'm hoping they'll throw out long enough stems for a few bouquets. 🤞

It's been a tough week for us all, hasn't it? Sigh. Alongside that heaviness, we've said goodbye to two of our well loved chickens. And this mama is just relieved we made it through the end of our school year today. My big parenting win for the week was planting a flower maze (picture #2) with my girls. It was so much fun and I feel proud of myself for making the time for it. Happy long weekend everyone. Thanks for following along. I hope that once the crazy hours of spring planting (alongside full time work and parenting!) is past, I can post and blog more regularly. 🤞

03/20/2022

Anyone else have a crazy week? Planting out these presoaked and sprouted anemone and ranunculus corms (kinda like bulbs) was a high point. As well as getting a MASSIVE delivery of local compost. Things are getting real, busy and exciting over here!

02/15/2022

Hi Farm Friends! Thank you so much for following my weird little journey to becoming a market farmer. If this popped up in your feed, I appreciate you!

I said I would be posting a blog post every Tuesday and then promptly didn't post anything last Tuesday. It was written, but I totally got a vulnerability hangover after writing about my life. I'm a publicly private person. Although if we are friends, I doubt you will find me to be private. . So here is that blog post. I wrote about why we left Chicago for a more rural setting. If you love Chicago, you will be fine. I hate when people s**t on the city and I would never do that. We loved our public school, we loved our neighborhood, we loved our city life. And we still moved. I really enjoyed writing this and was sad to edit down all the super funny bits (because it got freaking long!). And I am 100% aware that I have a weird sense of humor. You are probably welcome for the edits. Although if you were obsessed with The Office the first time around and HATE HATE HATE How I met your Mother, we probably have the same sense of humor. So then, sorry you missed out on me being weird and funny.

Clearly, I have little to no idea how to run a business page with my long posts. Oh well.

why we love chicAGO. WHY WE STILL LEFT. (AND HOW YOU CAN TOO FOR JUST $29.99/A MONTH) ;) Leave a Comment / Uncategorized / By Kelly Garay I have read so many memoirs about people who left the city and began a life in the country and/or started a farm that when we did it too, it felt normal. But gaug...

02/07/2022

Hi Farming Friends! I wanted to share my blog post from last week. It's about my very first garden when I was 26. I was newly married and a Chicago p***c school teacher. Different times, man. Newsflash: I wasn't very good at growing stuff but the short version is I still learned some stuff. I'll have a new post up tomorrow. Every Tuesday from now on.

Growing, growing, growing. growing a farm. Leave a Comment / Uncategorized / By Kelly Garay It’s February 1st of the first growing season of our farm. I am immersed in seed catalogs, hand-written crop plans and dog-eared pages of my many farming/gardening books. One day I feel confident and excite...