what quantity are you harvesting? can you describe how you harvest?

It was 6 - twenty foot beds.

The chard was selectively cut and everything else we cut at ground. Tatsoi, bekana, lettuce, chard, spinach.

We were done harvesting at 7.

So, I guess it is more the prep that is taking forever.

I don't know the amount in pounds.

It's a laundry basket full of tatsoi, one of chard, one of lettuce, one of bekana (this will be fast because we bunch it), one of mustard greens and kale mixed, and about half a laundry basket of spinach (that is sooo sweet!). Plus the last of the green onions but we have the prep of those down pat.

This is the first time that we have tried to bag our greens.

i think 5 hours sounds about right for what you are harvesting and preparing for market.
we just harvested and washed, spun, and bagged spinach from about a 35' bed in 2 hours. i clip individual leaves for this.
the other slow one is salad mix.
my stuff is in a hoophouse and is not very dirty and this helps it go faster. the chard, head lettuce, and arugula don't need to be washed at all.
we bag spinach, salad mix, and arugula. chard is bunched. turnips are bunched.
i would find it hard to do this if i was also employed full time.

I do this, but I don't expect to replace the income that I previously had. Lucky I don't need to. I'm doing this to be profitable (covering seeds and amendments) and I ENJOY it. It was a real money making venture, more people would be doing it.

I know each year that I grow the same item, I find faster ways of getting things done. I'm still learning.

Marla

OK, so we are slow. I am thinking it will take at least another 3 hours tonight to finish prepping for sale.

We only got the tatsoi,spinach and lettuce washed.

We have yet to bag anything.

I know we will get faster and we are only bagging stuff because not everything grew enough to sell in bunch size. Usually we just do bunches. I certainly am not going to pursue salada mix sales for mid-season! I can see early season and late season and that's it.

Thanks for the info, Randy.

You too, Marla. I missed your comment. Yeah, I definitely enjoy most of it. Most especially the soil prep and seeding, weeding and selling at market. Harvesting is OK but prep sucks.

Now that I am not alone and have someone to share housing costs with I can possibly work a part-time job and also work for myself as market gardener to make up the difference. I have no delusions of getting rich - I just want to be able to live from something I like doing.

We are going out to a farm this afternoon and may be able to acquire some forest. I would like to grow shiitake, lion's mane, morel, stropharia, and wild leeks to sell at market.

If the site is good we may also consider ginseng for real money. :)

i think its much faster to quality control while picking.

Magz get a bushel sized salad spinner and you will cut your wash time in half if not more and get a drier, less beat up product.

having a system and a well laid out wash/packing area helps a great deal with time.

And it takes a lot of repetitive work to get fast at this job-it is skilled labor. I can do about 5 bushels an hour washing and I can bag around 50 bags of produce and hour and i have a really basic wash area/packing area.

I also I used to be a pantry chef and would do salad washing and building races with a fellow employee and could do 300 salads in 1.5 hours at my best so I learned to be super quick about cutting and washing long before i started farming. But it did take a lot of days doing the salad thing before I got fast.

Keep in mind, ginseng I think takes a long time to grow and establish it. If I can remember my dad harvested alot from my farm back in the 70s and I don't find hardly any even now. I think he may have over-harvested. They were paying BIG BUCKS back then.

I don't know if you're living at the same place as you farm, but if you do, it is easier.

Marla

I'm really interested by this post, because it seems that your volume of greens is about the same as ours and we seem to work at about the same rate. We also have our last market next Wednesday, and both my wife and I have part time jobs (that tend more towards full time). This is our first year doing it. It takes the two of us about 3 hours to pick and wash this volume of greens, and then it takes my wife about 8 hours to sort, re-clean and bag the greens (while I am at work). It is a real PITA but it is reflected in the prices ($10/lb) customers tell us they appreciate the quality. All the same, it is a very select group of customers because not everyone wants to pay that much for greens.

It took us another 4 hours Friday night. But we sold out so that's fine. We put too much in the bags and I will be buying smaller paper bags for next year. We have decided we will bag the seconds - stuff that won't go in bunches because of holes or being too small. It's still good stuff.

Marla, we would be growing wild-simulated and also woods grown and it will be about 7 years before we could market them. The seeds will be viable to sell and use ourselves in about 4. Seeds sell for $100 pound. We can only afford 2 pounds to start off this year - but will ramp it up every year. His woods look like have the right conditions to grow it. We are going to meet with him again next weekend about it. I am 33 now so if I can make some good money between 40 and 45 that'll really help the retirement fund.

Wild ginseng is endangered here in Ontario and it is prohibited to harvest it to sell.

Ah, you're in Ontario! We are in Saskatchewan, the land of eternal frost (almost)!

I can understand why it is endangered, after that ginseng craze down, there wasn't much left. Again, if we had known what we know now or hindsight is 20-20.

Marla

Slimy,

Have you looked into SPIN farming at all? The developer is from Saskatoon.

One idea-- stop washing greens. I gave it up for all but rain-picked greens and as long as you tell your customers that the greens are not washed you're good to go. You can add that that's the way the chefs want them because they keep longer that way.

Boulderbelt says above that he got his experience washing greens in a restaurant kitchen. I say let them wash their own greens.

Yup, we know Wally! He's very knowledgeable and helpful. We feel pretty honoured, because he occasionally buys our stuff, and gave us several tips on how to market our produce.

Geotech, i have to disagree about unwashed greens lasting longer than washed that is not my experience at all. i have done many side by side experiments with unwashed but refrigerated and washed (hydrocooled) and than refrigerated greens and the hydrocooled last 2x to 3x longer for my customers.

Not to mention I don't sell to restaurants. I sell direct to the end user via my CSA and very recently farmers markets

Nor am I a man

Lucy, maybe since we only see your hubby in pictures, people assume that the gentleman in the photo is you. I know, I'm the one taking the pictures, so you don't see me in my pics either.

I believe CSAers are more knowledgeable about how to care for their items than the 'normal' grocery customers.

Marla

I don't wash my greens. I don't have the setup to wash, spin and chill them and I also don't want to guarantee no weeds or bugs in there.

I wish I were faster for market setup and CSA pack up. I have gotten a little better but mostly pretty slow. My market booth looks good though and my prices are very obvious unlike other vendors.

Lucy,

I agree on the washed greens last longer. It is a pain, but it is well worth it. Maybe if I want to increase sales, I should stop doing that??? I have had people say their greens look perfect 1-2 weeks after they purchased them.

I have a hard time selling produce with bugs still on it if I don't make the effort to remove them.

Jay

Mini, washing does make the food ready to eat and unless you have a certified facility you still have to tell your customers they have to wash the produce before eating.

But I do try and get all the bugs and spiders off the produce. Nothing like a spider crawling out a salad to cause the permanent loss of a customer

This is my packing shed, nothing fancy. the water comes from a hose attached to a spigot to the left of the photo. The orange thing in the middle is my salad spinner (which you can get for under $150 and this saves a lot of time and gets the produce a lot drier than using other methods for leafy green drying) The white tub is my wash tub. the gray things are the harvest crate, the white buckets are for collecting compostable items. the SS sink was there just for show (my husband thought it would be useful but I told him I needed a deep sink not that thing so it got sold)

boulder-where did you get the salad spinner? i like your setup.

Boulderbelt ,your setup reminds me of mine, very adequate & efficient and I agree that immediate hydro-cool and a drying process ( I have two huge colanders and use the shake and turn method, myself) and then putting the salad mix,spinach,kale or any other leafy green into 1 gallon clear twist top bags then immediately refridgerate makes for a great 1/2 pound bag of greens ready to sell.
I can do about 20-25 bags an hour if I concentrate and @ 2-4 dollars a bag that is not too bad. Mark

Very helpful Lucy! I would love to wash my greens with a touch of vinegar to help them store better but the spinning part was a no go.
So where did you get the big spinner?

i found the salad spinner. google dynamic salad spinner.
my neighbor at the farmers market described one he built himself. he used a 5 gallon food grade plastic bucket with a lid. put a bolt through the bottom so that when the bucket is sitting on its bottom its actually resting on the bolt head. put another bolt through the lid so that you can chuck a drill onto it from the outside. you will need 2 washers and 2 nuts per bolt. make a square base that has very slightly larger dimensions than the diameter of the bucket. i think 2x8 on edge might work. you want the bucket to spin while its sitting in the base without moving across the floor while you spin. drill holes in the side of the bucket so the water can spin out. wear high boots because you will get wet. assuming you already have a drill this couldn't cost > $15 to build.

Find an older washing machine, tear out the middle agitator, sanitize it and stick it on spin. I put my greens in a mesh bag and then set them in it and a few minutes they are done. No wet floor, no expensive salad spinner to buy. You can pick up an old washer for free most of the time.

Jay

1. Harvest directly into cold water. I use 5 gallon buckets with drain holes in the bottom plugged with a cork. the buckets are lined with mesh bags. Leave the buckets in the row as they get filled. Collect the buckets in a garden cart or wagon when you finish the row. Be selective in the garden, do most of your cleaning there. Bad leaves and weeds should be left in the path to be raked out later.Kill pests as you come across them
2. lift out the leaves in the bags, and dump them in another container of cold water (a deep sink is ideal). Agitate them, scoop out the swimmers and floaters you don't want, then lift out the leaves to the drying area (spinner, flat screens, blower). Dry carefully, you want a clean product with no residual water droplets for maximum shelf life.
3. Use an appropriate sized scoop to fill bags - 1 scoop per bag. Buy whatever scoop is necessary for each size you sell. Or sell as bag-your-own, and buy a scale instead of scoops, and let the labor savings pay for the scale.
4. Cultivate clean beds. Properly grown greens can be harvested more economically. Johnny's Seeds has a great hand-held salad harvester, but it is expensive and almost useless if the greens have to be cleaned of weeds post-harvest.

bi11me, that's a very detailed explanation. you took alot of thought when posting.

Jay, those old washers might cost something, alot people are scrapping these days, but you should still be able to get one for less than $25.

When I sold greens, I told by the pound. I already had the scale. I let the customers fill the bags then weighed it. They were amazed how much a pound of lettuce was. Most people didn't buy a full pound, unless they had a huge salad eating family.

Marla

most people still tell me I'm half-fast farmer... even after 20 years - but nobody asks for a refund. Better to be excellent than fast.

I've heard about the washer before. Not something I can do as it isn't my property (although the farm has appliances fricking everywhere and crap all over like a lot of old farms!).
Dang baby lettuce is sure a time waster- like picking beans! Anyway when the product is prewashed and dried, what should I consider charging? if I got $3 a bag before for unwashed but usually cleanish greens what could I now charge (or value the CSA bags at)?

Oh the salad spinners are over $100

Pricing produce is a complicated equation, and often labor costs are the most important variable. The salad mix that you see in clear clamshell boxes at the grocery store is $8 - $14 a pound, and a pound is a lot of baby lettuce leaves - but it was likely mechanically harvested, cleaned, and blended, from a large farm or group of farms using low-cost migrant labor. To a consumer, your prices may seem high, but if you're the one doing the labor, you know you're barely beating minimum wage.

I bought the salad spinner because, despite the high initial cost, the time savings, and the increased quality of the product, paid for the capital outlay after only a few growth cycles. The same is true of mechanical seeders, automated packaging systems, and greenhouses - the initial cash outlay may be difficult to justify, but the increase in production will repay the investment within two years.

The six-row seeder from Johnny's is almost $600, but with it, I can plant a row 30" wide and 100' long in just over a half hour, walking upright, and precisely spaced. It would take me most of a day to do that by hand, and I'd likely have a hard time working the next day from the strain... I'm 53. That's 18,000 lettuce plants - what's that worth?

An unheated mobile greenhouse 30' x 100' is going to cost about $8,000. Growing tomatoes in summer, salad greens in early winter, and raspberries in February and March, that well-managed house will generate $20,000 (or more) every year for 20 years (or more). Even given a year or two to refine the operation and develop markets, that's a reasonable return on the investment. The challenge is, especially for those just starting out, to raise the necessary capital for that kind of investment.

The pricing, efficiency, and technology won't get you anywhere without the proper market. One of the most difficult hurdles for new growers is figuring out how to sell what they grow at a reasonable return, and that means, typically, having a product that justifies a higher price than what the customer can find at the local supermarket buying commercial produce. It doesn't make sense to try to sell $3/lb green beans if the possibility exists to sell $8/lb yellow haricot verts, which take the same cultural effort, perhaps 5% higher seed cost, and only a little more labor to pick them small, but by the same token it doesn't make sense to grow them if the market - or the economy - doesn't have a demand for baby beans. Many growers base their operations where land is affordable, but if that means the market is 50 miles away, the costs of transportation and time to get to that market make deep inroads in the profitability of the enterprise.

The upshot of all this is that speed is only one part of a complicated calculation. If the market rewards the quality of your work with a fair price, then you can justify the extra care that is permitted by being less speedy. A part of the marketing process is being able to justify the price you charge with an explanation of this fact, but nothing will get a customer to spend $5 if all they have in their pocket is $3.

To justify capital outlay, I am working my way up to what I want and I am learning as I go. I have 6 high tunnels. 5 years ago, I started out with a 12 by 18 put together with $200 and a lot of prayers. I now have 3 steel framed tunnels, and 3 more hybrid PVC/Metal ones. They work really well, grow produce, but I would like to have all steel ones some day.

Along with the Expensive planters, I have an earthway seeder. Yes it wastes seed, and I want a pinpoint seeder, but until my markets start demanding more, I will stick with what works.

One reason I don't grow a lot of beans, is labor. Yes I can gross $100-$150 a market on green beans, that money represents 3-4 hours picking. On the other hand, I can make $75-$150 on cucumbers and Zucchini and only spend one hour picking (or less). Which one makes more sense?

Jay

I see dynamic salad spinners can be had new for $109. This is really cheap considering with a bit of care the salad spinner should last at least 15 years (and probably a lot more)

Here is a link that might be useful: where to get a salad spinner

Great post Billme!