Meet this week’s vegetables:
- Salad mix — Well, after a few awesome days, we’re back to winter again. At least it feels that way today — build a fire and cozy up out of the rain! But, in spite of the weather, our lettuce is chugging along in our greenhouse (thank goodness for the greenhouse this year!). So, this week we get to enjoy a delicious salad mix that is half fresh lettuce and half other over-wintered greens (kale, arugula, rapinis). The result is a delicious blend of flavors and textures!
- Broccoli OR Brussels sprout rapini — Your choice between bunched broccoli and Brussels sprout rapini!
- Cabbage rapini — Sometimes cabbage plants amaze us. This year, thanks to a relatively mild winter (no low lows), we were able to over-winter cabbage plants, harvest the cabbage, and then harvest rapini that sprouted from the remaining base! It’s like the plant that keeps on giving!
- Green savoy cabbage
- Parsnips
- German butterball potatoes
- Leeks
- Garlic
This week, McMinnville gains a new addition to the local restaurant scene — Community Plate, a sibling restaurant to Thistle, serving “Americana” food from 7 am to 4 pm at 315 NE 3rd Street.
Casey and I are excited to try the food, but we are also excited to be providing vegetables to Community Plate as well, making it our fourth local restaurant client. We also already sell to Nick’s Italian Café, Thistle, and the Blue Goat (in Amity).
Yes, folks, I guess we sell vegetables to restaurants now.
This might not surprise those of you who have been seeing our name on local menus for years now. Restaurant sales have always been a part of our income since we first started farming in 2006, but it may surprise you to know that it is just in the last year that we have fully embraced this part of our operation.
Our first year, we tried selling our vegetables every way possible: through the CSA of course (always the core of our farm’s identity), at the farmers’ market, wholesale, and to a few restaurants that seemed interested. We were experimenting to see which markets would work best for us as farmers and business people.
Honestly, the restaurant thing was frustrating at first. Our first major restaurant customers started up and went under all within our first season. We were dropped as vendors before the restaurant went under, but we didn’t hear about it right away because the chef was gone. Eventually the manager contacted us and apologized, but we definitely felt burned.
That first experience was eye opening to us and made us wary of investing significantly in business relationships that could end overnight (the restaurant business being by its nature finicky!).
Obviously, we regularly have CSA members who quit mid-season, for whatever reason … but if one CSA member quits, we might lose a few hundred dollars from our projected budget; but if a restaurant quits working with us or goes under, it could represent a few thousand dollars off our budget! Those facts alone were enough to make us cautious and conservative — we didn’t want to put too many “eggs” in one basket!
But soon after our first experience, more restaurants came on board. Even though we continued feeling reluctant about investing too much time and energy into the experience, we also started having a lot of fun — especially when we took the time to eat meals prepared with our own vegetables.
There is something so fulfilling about seeing skilled creative hands turn our humble vegetables into absolutely delicious works of art! We like to cook and eat at home, but we never take the time (or have the skills) to make the kinds of dishes that these brilliant chefs do! What joy!
As with the CSA, we’ve had to work through a lot of details over the years in making these restaurant relationships work for all parties involved, which added more challenges to the earliest years. Simple things such as how and when we would deliver can make or break a relationship (and did so in one case many years back).
Eventually, we realized that selling to restaurants would work best if we were absolutely honest up front about our limitations as a very small farm. We cannot deliver every day of the week or to every location. In fact, at this point, we’ve limited our deliveries to downtown McMinnville, but we will expand our route to Newberg once the CSA begins there.
The other big hurdles for us to overcome before feeling fully committed to restaurant sales were communication (finally we realized that email works best since our work hours are very different from a chef’s!) and quality control.
Because they are preparing fine restaurant fare with our vegetables, we realized that we have to make sure everything we harvest is pretty darn close to perfect (by our standards). Sometimes that means leaving a vegetable off the availability list, because it’s not worth a chef’s time to deal with blemishes that might just add a few minutes to a home cook’s prep process. At the very least, with less than perfect product (especially in winter), we need to be completely upfront about any flaws so there are no surprises.
Working through all of these details helped make working with restaurants easier, but Casey and I still wondered whether it was a good direction for our farm to pursue.
We still worried about the reliability of the sales, but eventually over this last year we started realizing we were having a lot of fun and that the sales were more consistent than ever. We also received more inquiries from more restaurants, and the ball just kept rolling.
So, we have finally (after all these years) put our whole heart into selling to restaurants, and it feels really good. We’re excited about the prospect of expanding to Newberg (and possibly Dundee) as well, but we still want to take it slow and build each relationship slowly and properly.
The CSA is still the heart of who we are, but we’ve started thinking of our restaurant customers as happy and natural extensions of that concept — it’s another way that local eaters can enjoy our vegetables.
Ironically, given that we’re parents to a very young child, we’re personally eating out less frequently than ever before. But that will change with time, and for now we enjoy working with the chefs and knowing that skilled hands are preparing delicious dishes with our cabbage!
Enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
