When It All Finally Starts Coming Together...

Two and a half months and several, very, late nights after bringing our storage container farm home, everything is finally coming together and we even managed to start our first 400 seeds!!!! In a little over a week our seeds will be germinated and our little baby plants will soon start to have little leaves with strong roots to soak up all of those delicious nutrients and taking in all those lovely rays from the grow lights in our seedling nursery! We will not be using any chemical pesticides or unnatural grow aids. We are only using natural and organic nutrients and we have chosen all organic seeds as well as these Cocoa and Pete Moss pellets to start our seeds, We want to grow fresh, clean produce so everything we are using, down to our basic cleaning supplies are all green and compliant with food safe regulations, meaning, we will be able to harvest our produce and eat it as soon as we have it in hand! No washing required! Now, we are trying to start a business so please rest assured all of our produce used in salad mixes ect. will be inspected and cleaned prior to sale,

Let's get back to more important things like the first 400!! The goal here is to plant 2 trays of seeds every 2-3 days to continuously be transplanting and harvesting once we have filled all 256 of our towers but while we are still triple checking that all of the sensors that control our water, lights and nutrients are working flawlessly we are going a little slower for our first crop. So on the 9th we planted our first 2 trays of seeds. This batch consists mainly of lettuces as we will be using it to put together various salad mixes and to have sample product to hand out to local establishments that may be interested in working with us for their small batch produce. We have a lot of Romain coming but we wanted to include a variety of textures and flavors so we have some much less traditional lettuces as well as Mustards and less common Radicchio to bring in a little more vibrancy! Our salad mixes will have a variety of colors and flavors which will make for some very tasty salads year round!! Let's face it, having in indoor farm, in Iowa, in the dead of winter, is a pretty amazing perk. When the cold becomes intolerable you can find me hanging out with our plants in the warmth of our farm!

There is so much excitment in the air right now. Seeing our endless hours of work, arguing, laughing and creating memories that we will have for the rest of our lives finally come together, one piece at a time we think its important to remember all of the little details that got us this far. We have camped at our farm site every weekend since we brought Leafy Dreams home and we have had campfires, gone exploring in the dark, watched thousands of fireflies and seen millions of stars. We have watched the most beautiful sunsets and even a few sunrises as we would make our way to sleep after we worked through the night, There were weeks that it was so hot that even the nighttime temperatures were unbearable so we just stayed inside our storage container and ran the AC to stay cool so we could get a little sleep! It is almost dreamlike to start putting all of the pieces of the farm back together and to start putting life back into it again! We are getting to the point where we can slow down a little bit, the long hours and getting shorter and soon it will be a normal schedule! We will have regular hours, and begin marketing and sales (we hope!) before we know it. This time, where we are putting everything back together, trouble shooting any unforeseen issues, and getting ready to make it look a little more professional, is so special. The deep sigh of relief that we are really getting there and the joy that we have to start feeding our people again, and doing it all our way has been nothing short of magical and we feel truly blessed to be able to share all of this with you,

So again, thank you!! To everyone following along with us, and anyone reading along for the first time, we couldn't be more excited to feed you!!!

Until then,

Stay Leafy Friends!