Jamie drove his final delivery of 2022 to Asheville on the Thursday before New Year’s Eve, hauling a melange of mache, mustard greens, carrots, and spinach. He began delivering to Asheville chefs this last quarter of the year, an opportunity born out of his relationships with a few of them. The Asheville drop is a bright spot in his weeks, where he gets to walk into restaurant kitchens and chat with the chefs who will turn his produce into the plated dish. He comes back revived from his sixty-mile drive up the mountain. Often he returns with small gifts—a bottle of fermented hot sauce made from his Aleppo peppers—and commentary, “Eric says that when you grill the broccolo, it tastes like buttered popcorn.”
Before we ever owned a farm, the delivery hustle was a regular part of Jamie’s routine. He would spend an entire day driving around Charlotte, carrying bins and bags of freshly washed vegetables through the back door. It was inspiring to him, a former chef, chatting about food with other chefs. He loved how ideas differed from person to person and loved sharing his knowledge, too. During those solo farming days, these conversations kept his hands in the soil and the work worthwhile.
Since those early days, much has changed. Freshlist, a local food aggregator, created a service in Charlotte that allowed farmers to sell their produce to a large network of chefs and retail customers while they handled distribution. Now that we live and work on the farm, Freshlist is a necessary time-saver and meaningful partner to our operation. Jamie no longer has the time to drive the hour to Charlotte, duck in and out of twenty different restaurants around the city, and then drive the hour back to the farm. It would eat an entire day.
These days, our hands are full.
2022 marked the first full season in operation here on Old North Farm. We unofficially started in 2021, after an abrupt ending to another farm gig. This was the first full season of growing on our own piece of land, the first year we delved into the intricacies of living and working on our farm with others, and collaborating on our businesses full-time. There is much to be proud of, and much to learn from.
First years are the entrypoint to information gathering: What do we want? How do we want it to feel? What can we improve? Add? Subtract? Refine? Where do we want this to go?
This year, we expanded the garden space from 52 beds to 76 and we added a culinary herb garden. We launched the inaugural season of the Old North Farm share, our CSA program, which stretched across three seasons for a total of thirty weeks. For our maiden voyage, we served 25 customers and learned the delicate balance of growing for farm share customers, the farmers market, and restaurants via Freshlist and Asheville delivery. This year, Old North Farm had its employees on payroll.
We hosted on-farm events this year to much success, a space we entered with the mentality of, “If we build it, will they come?” And people came! Our very first event was the Old North Farm Fish Pickin’, a fish fry on steroids, where we welcomed 100 people to the farm. We brought in some of our favorite chefs from Asheville and Charlotte and fed customers who came from as far the Eastern Shore of Maryland to dine. In total, we hosted three events on Old North Farm including an intimate two-night gathering with our friends from Lost Creek Farm, and an authentic barbacoa feast with Oaxacan chef Luis Martinez.
Old North Farm engaged in meaningful seed work with Two Seeds in a Pod and the Utopian Seed Project. We grew Turkish varieties for seedkeeper Mehmet Oztan of Two Seeds in a Pod, a mix of watermelon, small-eyed peas, and summer savory for his seed catalog. We taught our staff how to care for and process seeds. For the Utopian Seed Project, we participated in taro root crop trials and Jamie continued to serve as an active board member.
In July, a microburst hit the farm, destroying all of our caterpillar tunnels and the entirety of the tomato crop. We gained a lesson in resilience. The tunnels were rebuilt by the end of a brutal August thanks to the helping hands of our farm crew and community members.
The farm added a part-time person to our main season team. We lost a crew member too, and weathered the first blow to our small ecosystem. The farm-bakery also lost a staff member, but gained a part-time person who worked the Uptown Farmers Market and helped create efficiencies in the kitchen. Every Friday, and sometimes on Wednesdays, Jamie cooked farm lunch for the crew. This was a time for gathering, talking about current events, and celebrating birthdays with our trademark haiku circle. We even had a few guest chefs prepare farm lunch including our friend Sheri Castle of the Key Ingredient. Though too small to add big incentives to our team, we guided our employees toward health insurance navigators and everyone got covered.
We connected with Black farmers in neighboring Kingstown and hosted an afternoon of educational outreach where we planted garlic together. We also provided produce for their community market. Most importantly, we’ve entered into relationship with our closest farming neighbors, one we hope will continue to flourish in the coming years.
The onset of fall and winter shifts the energy of our ecosystem toward the bakery space. From October through December, the holiday season pushes bakery production to capacity while the pace of the farm slows from its frenzied summer pace to something more manageable as cooler temperatures set in. The bakery intentionally stacked the holiday season with a rapid succession of holiday markets, pop-ups, and big bakes. Our hope, and eventual reality, was that we would be able to take an extended break in January.
The final pie delivery of the year happened on December 23, our stated “last day of work” for the year, which didn’t come easy. A month of back-to-back-to-back events drained the last of our mojo and the push to complete the last order of the year was none too kind, riddled with long hours and late nights. The Arctic Blast that blew through the US knocked our power out at the most inopportune time on the last day. We pulled out a campfire stove and a generator to make the meringue needed to finish the last Eggnog Custard pies. At that point, all we could do was laugh.
While we could’ve called it a good year on December 23 and closed up shop, we baked one last time the afternoon of New Year’s Eve and invited folks to the farm. The bake sale was equal parts love offering and a use-the-last-of-the-ingredients kind of affair. And though the weather left much to be desired with its sullen mist and gray overtones, people showed up. I had my doubts about the viability of the day, but by 12:30 folks were lined up beneath our outdoor pavilion.
For a farm seeded with the idea of community as its foundation, this felt like the most fitting end to our first year, gathered with folks from nearby and those who drove an hour or more to see us. The farm, we said, would be the heart center of all we do, and it is our hope that we’ll continue to live ever closer to the land we call home. I think we’re off to a good start.
Love so many things about this. Thanks for sharing. So happy I can follow along and learn from you!