McMullin Harvests Broccoli!
Providing fresh produce is no easy task, but Firmly Rooted Farms always makes sure to provide the freshest organic produce possible.
Tamara McMullen has loved plants her whole life, and her husband Brian had a career in landscaping, so farming seemed like a natural fit for the two.
They had always heard you can’t make money farming, so it was just going to be a hobby. They spent 9 months visiting other small scale organic farms to learn all about the practice from seasoned veterans in the business.
At Firmly Rooted Farms they are a small scale intensive organic vegetable farm with 40 veg crops, and some fruits. They grow produce all year long in hoop houses.
They grow summer crops such as carrots, beets, radishes, turnips in the hoop houses in the summer, and once the seasons turn they flip to baby salad greens which is what they are best known for.
Work on the farm varies day to day, however most tasks including seeding, transplanting, weeding, pest control – whether that’s insect netting, picking beetles off or more- harvesting, washing packaging, and delivering.
Their fields and greenhouses keep them busy all year around.
Everything that Firmly Rooted Farms grows is eaten within a 1 hour drive of the farm. A lot of the produce goes to Goderich, Bayfield, Clinton, Exeter, and Blyth.
McMullen says working on a farm doesn’t come without its challenges.
Selling the food they grow has been the easy part according to McMullen, its the growing part that is hard. Bad weather, long droughts, and crazy floods are just some of the things that could effect the produce they grow.
Another setback for the farm was years ago, McMullen says the farm was contaminated by a neighbouring farm that was doing aerial spraying, and they are almost through the 3 year period of waiting to grow new crops where the land was contaminated, to once again be organic growers.
In the early days of the farm, her partner Brian broke his leg while they had a very young child at home, they put it up on Facebook, and people came out to the farm every week and weeded, harvested and helped out.
There are people that started with them back them, that continued to work with them for years afterward.
One of the things that they have really benefited from is the legacy that other small scale organic growers have left in the area.
You can listen to the full interview with Tamara McMullen of Firmly Rooted Farms here:
Written by: K. Milhomens