My experience as a Ruby Grow farmer has been exciting and definitely worthwhile. I personally have gained a lot of knowledge and have developed new skills in terms of farming and differentiating plants. For the last month we’ve been discussing the idea of totally upscaling our production to hopefully reach our goal of $10,000 worth of Kale sales. We’ve also concluded that in order to reach our goal, production would have to be 20 cases per week for the 30 weeks and for each individual case it would be $18. Each case holds 12 bunches of kale and each bunch would consist of 6-8 leaves.  

  As of late we’ve shifted our focus from Kale onto another leafy green by the name of lettuce. We have done a mixture of direct planting/sowing and starting them in trays. Let us prepare the transplants! We had taken several plant starter trays and put soil in them and we had read on the seed package that the seed needed to be a 1/8th of an inch under the soil, so in turn we had taken a small stick and made the holes and planted the seeds, of course upon completing that we lightly watered them. Merely three weeks later our first tray is showing promising results. In terms of numbers we discussed that we could plant roughly 100 trays of 72 heads of lettuce and make a marginable profit. Likewise, with the Kale it would be $18 per case of headed lettuce. We’d have to harvest 18-19 cases per week for 30 weeks as well. 

Overall, this experience of seeing plants go from seeds to harvestable crops to table has been absolutely amazing and truly getting the experience of being a young farmer is so fulfilling morally and its something that I’ll more than likely use in future and hopefully pass on the knowledge I’ve gained in the near future. Ruby Grow itself is a wonderful program and I’m beyond thankful and blessed to be a part of it!