 I'm Sheila Dix and I'm from Joy Haven Farm in shorter Alabama. Our farm is certified naturally grown, so we grow organically, it's 25 acres, but we grow on one acre intensively with two high tunnels that are 30 by 72. We started farming and we have to use that word farming kind of loosely because when we first started it was really just a small garden plot. I've always kind of had a green thumb and I love growing things and when I was a youngster we always had a big garden, so we were like the weeders and the eaters. So when we started our little garden it was basically for our own health. We just were finding that we were having some kind of stomach issues and stuff from things, especially eggs and greens in particular. So we just decided to start growing some stuff and it was a complete flop. I mean we lost almost everything to insects, I had no clue what I was doing, but it was fun and the things that did make it just made me want to grow it more. So it just started evolving and we moved from the little small garden to some raised beds in a growing area and then I started getting better at growing things and starting to actually have lots of, harvesting lots of extra things and so we would give those away to family and to neighbors. I had a daughter who was in college at the time and she was a business major and she would actually come home on the weekends and take orders from her friends and then she would take them back to, so they were kind of like our first people that we ever sold to with some of my daughter's fellow students and she just kept encouraging us, she's like don't give away your organic vegetables, you need to sell those. So then we started going to some local, a very small local farmers market in Tallahassee, then we moved to the curb market in Montgomery, we started a small CSA. That CSA helped us invest in some larger tools and equipment that was going to make our labor a lot less intense and if you can save on labor that's your saving money, that's your putting your money in your pocket. So we sell our vegetables exclusively to our CSA families and these families are from Montgomery, Auburn, Tallahassee and Shorter Area and we have a hundred family CSA. The pros obviously are that we pre-sell our vegetables and we have an estimate of what we need to grow and what we're going to grow. It's also we feel like a really good part of the community by reaching out to these families that are in different areas. The cons are is that it's very stressful to make sure that you have enough varieties for your CSA and then if we have some type of loss, it's very stressful under those conditions because you can't really make up for that. You know it's once the season starts then you're in it. We do reach out to other farmers in our area, local farmers. We offer vegetables that don't make sense for us to grow here like sweet potatoes. So those things we reach out to other farmers and get so by that way we're supporting other farmers in our area. We get our production supplies from several different areas. We get our fertilizers from 7 Springs. We get all of our organic seeds from Johnny's and southern exposure and hymoine. We also get a lot of our bags and stuff we're buying from Glacier or Amazon. We get our compost from when we order seed-starting mix we get it from Vermont Compost and have it shipped here. Unfortunately we don't have a good source for compost in our area. At the time there is a new one that's opened up recently near Auburn that's called Sewel 3 and we got some of their compost this last year. We get our seed-starting mix from Vermont Compost. We get a lot of our like for seed trays and stuff. We get those from Bootstrap or in Eversync. We do the wind strips. We're in high tunnel number two which was our original high tunnel and during the spring and summer you can see we put our tomatoes in. We have intra-planted lettuce. We have spinach this year. What we do with our tomatoes, how we plant them in the spacing, we have to buy nematode resistant varieties because we have nematodes in both of our high tunnels. This is something that we've also used beneficial nematodes. These were all advice that I've been working with Dr. A, but we put all of our tomatoes on typically a 40-inch bed and they are 2 feet apart, 2 on each row. So basically they're 1 foot apart but they're staggered too and then we'll string them all up. These are all determinate tomatoes that we will string up to one lead. The irrigation that we use in this high tunnel and pretty much in all of our areas, it's a 2-inch main line and then we have a shut off on each row of drip tape. We do have overhead irrigation in both of our high tunnels and we use that for cooling down the high tunnels. For instance when it's on a hot day and we have something like spinach in here, we can cool it down by running it about 10 minutes and it'll cool it down for about 10 degrees and then we also will do a little bit of irrigating in order to cool off the soil. This is the original high tunnel that Dr. A put the netting in and the high tunnel was being used. I think I want to say it had one planting on it before we got the netting up. Slowly but surely by the next year we had almost no cutworms. By the following year we had no cutworms and we had no hornworms on any of our tomatoes. It was just a huge benefit and of course caterpillars. Right now we're in what we call high tunnel number one. We have Hakura turnips, Waldrum lettuce, and this is Salanova. We have a row of tomatoes and then we have an Asian green. It's soy Asian green. We plant it intensively because we harvest baby and we bag it. This will be our first lettuce for our first CSA, the Hakura turnips. We'll probably get two weeks out of the Hakura turnips and then of course the Salanova. After this Salanova comes out here because we won't be able to do lettuce in here during the summer then peppers will go in this high tunnel. Here is one of our additional growing areas that is on the side of the high tunnel. You get a lot of water off the high tunnel so we have done a nice long drainage ditch with our BCS. It has an attachment where we can do ditches and also form our beds. So we did raised beds out here. We did landscape fabric because the weeds situation and we've had a lot of heavy rain over the past two storms and heavy rain so some of this stuff is looking a little bit like it's been frazzled but this is some cabbage that we grow for our CSA. I don't have drip irrigation out here yet so we did this micro sprinkling system and it's really nice because it's easy to move. You can put it anywhere you need to. We use them all over the farm. We especially use them like if we direct seed something that needs to have water on it and we have to keep the top wet like carrots or something like that and this row right here is a beneficial insect row that we grow out here in this area to draw in lace wings or ladybugs and this mix is from Johnny's. We're in a new section. We expanded a little bit. We're using landscape fabric in this particular area because it's new and we still have a good bit of heavy weeds in this area. One of the first things we started growing was cilantro and dill. We exclusively do them in our paper pots now and if you notice we had a lot of this really really heavy rain would have really washed out any direct seeding that we would have done on here and you can kind of see that we still have the it has washed it but the paper pots are still in place and the plants are doing well and this is one of the crops that we can start growing them in the paper pots and give ourselves a little bit more time to go ahead and plant them and because we live in Alabama we have to secessionally plant these particular crops because they bolt very fast. They really like the cool weather. What we're in front of right now is our hardening off area. Once everything is got its true leaf on it or has at least germinated in the temperature it needs to germinate in then we move them over here. Many times we'll have them inside of this little hoop we can put stuff in there and protect it like during the storms and stuff we put everything inside and then we gradually move everything out here to start acclimating it to the actual temperature that it's going to and the environment that it's going to be in. This year we've got our paper pot we've done bunching onions up here, fennel, this will be our green beans which we've started doing in landscape fabric. We did it one time and now I'm completely sold on it. We do all of our green beans, less weeding and then also because we grow them so close together we can just it's easier to harvest them and again we've got this overhead micro irrigation because at the time we didn't have this main lineup yet so it was perfect for getting our seeds wet and get them started. We do leeks every spring and we usually don't I swear I wasn't going to do any more onions but we went ahead and did a couple of rows of onions because I love fresh onions and we wanted for our CSA members. The leeks do much better in our area and they're neutral so they do a lot better we don't get any bolting with them and everybody really likes them. We went down this is our direct sowing area this is the area that we've had landscape fabric on before and it's not as we don't have as much weed pressure so we direct seeded lots of brassicas, radishes, we did some paper pot, Asian greens, this is an area where we just got the landscape fabric down on this part and then all the rest of that was either direct seeded or done with paper plot. Our wash and pack area this particular area has evolved over the last eight and a half years. We weigh out all of our fertilizers and stuff so we do all that right here but we have our jank seeder here and then also this is the never sink tilter so this is really great for just incorporating things about two inches and it runs on a drill it's super easy anybody can use it all of our employees use this and the jank seeder game changer. This is our main cooler and it is a seven by seven it accommodates most of our stuff because everything really gets moved out on a weekly basis and then this cooler right here is on a regular air conditioner and we use this as our tomato cooler so as we put our tomatoes they go in there on shelves and it runs at about 60 degrees and inside this is our upgraded wash station we now have all metal walls we have a regular sink which we probably will change this out to one more of these tugs because once we started working in this area we realized that we really could use another tub this hundred gallon tub as opposed to this sink so we'll probably be moving that out and putting one of these in but we have two sinks my husband built me a spinner 100 gallon tubs have bubbler inside of them what it essentially does is when the water that goes in here once it's filled and the vegetables are in there we have these this air that goes through these pipes and pushes the water up and makes bubbles and it actually agitates all the water and cleans the vegetables okay so right now we're standing in front of my little greenhouse is what we call it we started it was my area to start seedlings and we started tomatoes a plants and mostly tomatoes for our for our own use and so we realized it's really a nice little awesome little place but we have outgrown it very quickly we have modified it over the years to make it kind of work better for doing lots of trays of seedlings but this is where all the seedlings start and then we move them over to that hardening off area that we mentioned earlier we put in this tray to load all of our trays with this is we just put it down in it and put the soil inside of them we also use this to sift our soil mix if we're going to do paper plates because their their holes are so small we don't want any big chunks of anything in there so we go ahead and sift it through that right there right now this is pretty empty even in about a couple weeks ago this was completely wall-to-wall with tomatoes and other things so right now we have we just we had some things that are on deck we've got some more cilantro and dill that are in the paper pots we've got basil that's ready for to warm up a little bit outside so we can plant it this basil is actually in the wind strips that you can get from never sink farm and we really like these wind strips they do a really great job know the roots harden off themselves they don't form a ball at the bottom so it's a lot healthier for the plants so i would highly recommend investing in these wind strips we just started getting them i think at 10 at a time and this year we just bought 10 more i had mentioned earlier about the trays that we use these are the bootstrap trays and you'll see that they're just a thicker better quality of um tray that will last you a lot longer we we did buy a lot cheaper ones and we used them over the years but they really would only last two you have two sessions at the most and then they started getting cracked and hard to pick up these are the two hundreds that we now put out do our lettuce in we have on peony pads which we use in the spring to put our trays on to get them a little better germination um and we do use some lights sometimes this tray of squash was zucchini was kind of dragging along and it was really small so we went ahead and put it under the lights but most of the time we don't even have this is um we do have a hot water heater hooked up to this particular building in this faucet so we're able to we want to put warm water on our sea trays as opposed to cold water so we can get them done you know germinate and stay most seeds will germinate about 70 degrees i know a germ chamber would probably be really the best um way to do germination but we haven't done that yet that's on my wish list my advice for a beginning farmer is if you can i would work for another farm for about a year or so because so many things we had a learning curve on and we kind of had to learn also i would invest early on in whether you had to borrow the money or somehow get the money to buy some tools that make your labor so much easy i wanted to add too is that i would definitely reach out to other farmers in your area they're like the best resources for materials for varieties that do well in your area i would also reach out to any of the you know free webinars or whatever's available james book the market gardener was a book that laid on my desk and is open to one particular spot and it's it still sits on my desk i used that book from i mean for all of my spacing i mean i just learned so much from that particular book so james market gardener book is a really good place to get some information but reach out to other farmers they really are helpful most of the time and when they have time they're able to share those things that will help you and also a shoulder to crime because when you lose lose the same vegetables they do from a bug some certain kind of bug it's helpful to share that with someone else okay one of the other resources that i wanted to mention we started using harvey i think we're going into our second year now it's a good platform for our csa and when we do want to sell online we can use that particular platform to do that right now we just use it for our csa but if we wanted to switch to strictly online selling then we could still use that platform the extension resources have been very helpful with us over many years we do i do have the mobile app and i probably what it helps me most with is identifying insects and probably some kinds of disease on our crops it's a quick thing i can look up when i'm out in the field i do occasionally use the calculator for inputs if it's something as simple as nitrogen i can look it up real quick because we have we use feather mail and that's one of the things that's listed on there the resource agents that have helped me and do continue to help us jaymy oats is one that they did probably one of the very first intensive soil testing at our farm which really opened up my mind to our soil health and so from that point on we just started really focusing on our soil health we with cover crops and all that so jaymy is a great resource for that dr a of course is doing this screening and helps us with we when we have any type of insect problems and we're quick to call them i believe i'm not sure we've had a field day out here too for irrigation and i think that was through the extension as well they've been very helpful and continue and i know that if i have a problem i can call them and they'll get back to me and and i get pretty quick answers and if they don't know it then they can send me to someone else