08/23/2024
It's with great sadness we announce that the stand will close permanently after August 30th this year. I'm unsure at this point if I'll still hold the seed giveaway in February, but I AM still planning to do the spring plant sale. I'm sure quite a few of you are going to be pretty upset and sad about it, so I want to explain why this change is happening.
When I first started the stand and all that we do here, I had high hopes that (though I'd do all the work the first year), I'd find regular volunteers to help at least 3 times a year once we got word out and gained some followers wanting to help in the community. To get the ground prepared, to plant the seedlings, and to clean the ground and prep for next season. That help never materialized, and though there were two people that did come by and volunteer a few hours, each coming by one time during those three years, I was left doing everything by myself. Without that help on the farm, doing this has caused some pretty serious medical issues and I've reached a point that I can no longer continue on.
Now I'm sure at this point most of you are wondering why we didn't hire help. It's pretty simple, we can't afford to. This was a hobby of mine turned into a charitable mission, and we can't afford hundreds every month to pay someone to help us. We provide food for free after all, and the donations we get are minimal. We do what we do out of kindness and a sense of community, not an expectation of profit. Our goal was to help curb food insecurity locally, while showing people how fun home gardening can be.
The second reason was that the further I got into the food stands and sales, and adding things on one by one, I gave away a piece of myself in return. I'm at a point that I have not a single moment of free time to myself to do what I want, take a vacation, or just sit down and relax for an evening. I work a full time job, come home to a special needs son and tons of therapy appointments, and then spend the hour before dusk rushing to try to do every farm chore on my list. I have no time to catch up with friends and family, explore my other hobbies such as canning, or to even care for our own basic landscaping needs here without sacrificing the needed maintenance on the plants and stands. If things do fall behind, it's almost impossible to catch up. It's all become too much and has taken a serious toll on my well being.
Thirdly, when we started this, there weren't hardly any roadside farm stands or places to get produce besides the grocery store. As it is now, prices were insane then and we wanted to provide an alternative source for local fresh produce. Since then, covid hit and everyone was home and bored. A lot of people without a job took up gardening (YAY!), and that led to many more people starting their own farm stands. There's so many now, that we are no longer really needed. Produce at almost every other stand I've seen is priced very low compared to grocery stores, and there seems to be an endless amount of produce to go around.
Lastly, we thought adding in a dry goods section this year to the stand would help even more people than before, but it actually had the opposite effect. Once people came in and saw the dry goods section, they immediately felt that the food here wasn't for everyone, just those in need. That wasn't what I wanted, and people stopped coming by, feeling it was no longer a farm stand for the general public. No matter how many times I posted trying to tell people that there's still plenty of produce and that the stand was in fact, for everyone, people still felt weird coming to a stand and taking anything if it felt like a food pantry. While that's understandable in hindsight, I definitely didn't see it coming, and it made me realize at that point that all the hard work I did and time I gave up to grow the food, was literally to feed my chickens treats of food that's starting to turn. That's not at all what I wanted or envisioned for the stand.
It's important in life to know when to tap out and call it quits. With all of that happening and my health failing from the stress it's put on me, it's my time to tap out and pass the torch onto all these lovely backyard gardeners and farmers I've seen popping up all over the county. I'm glad we could be here when we were, in a time of need and to fill a niche that was empty when we entered it. My son needs more and more therapies as he is getting older, and I need time for myself for my own wellbeing, and that of my marriage. Maybe in a couple years things will settle down and we may reopen. Until then, I hope to see you all around HarCo, and keep on gardening and sharing with your community! 💙🌱
