Hello, friends! We are so excited to announce that after five long years of work and successes and challenges and, oh yeah, a pandemic, our first trip to DC is underway. Why do we care? Because the very purpose of AIF is to help fund that trip for our 8th grade team members. (Among other very important purposes, of course.) We thought it would fun to take a quick look back at our roots to help celebrate this big occasion.
You can hop through our site and see a bit about our origins. Long story short, we began as a ragtag band of 6th graders in 2017 with a dream to transform our messy garden of weeds into a place of bounty- both in beauty and profit. We spent a year just figuring out how to even begin farming and growing in a way that would meet our goals of worthwhile engagement and income. We met each week to learn about the basics of building a business, including logo and mission statements, web design, revenue streams and more. At the same time, we cleaned up the space and began exploring how to grow our products in an efficient, economical and, most importantly, ecologically sustainable fashion.
In fall of 2018, we tested the waters with our first CSA- community supported agriculture- bouquet subscription service. It was a huge success! We sold out of all our shares and routinely sold all the extra bouquets each week. We were blown away by the demand for flowers and the support of campus community. Emboldened by our success, we went straight into the holiday season with Paperwhite (narcissus) bulb vases and, again, sold out of all our product.
In 2019, we added the Farmers’ Market to our revenue stream and enjoyed a wonderful season of experiencing all the ins and outs of selling to a broader audience. There were many challenges with this venue and we ultimately chose to not participate again, but we learned so many valuable lessons that we incorporate in our planning today.
Enter 2020. This was the year scheduled to be our first trip to Washington, D.C. funded by our business. Well, we all know how that worked out…
The beautiful thing about nature is that it will continue to grow and flourish regardless of the swirl of the manmade world around it (obviously not a carte blanche statement and not encompassing the major impact humanity has on the land…) and the flowers bloomed despite the sickness and the sadness. While we did not get to take our trip, 2020 brought us our magical hoop house!
The hoop house (an unheated greenhouse) was built with donations and grant funds. We opted for raised beds and permanent floors. As soon as we had it filled with soil, we started planting. The hoop was such a space of respite and relief from the classroom. We could spread out, pull our masks down and reconnect, with the earth and each other. Our first year of growing in this space was incredible. We had bountiful harvests of veggies and flowers that carried our business and our souls through a tough year.
We returned to school and the farm in the fall of 2021 and picked right back up where we left off- with a sold out CSA bouquet service. We hosted the ASCFG (Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers) farm tour and loved sharing our special little farm with so many like minded flower farmers. We experimented with succulent pumpkins for harvest table decorations and had another sell out season of Paperwhite bulb gardens.
That brings us to today…we have plenty of pretties about to bloom in our hoop and fields. We are growing over 400 marigolds that were special ordered by our campus men’s civic group and… Our very first trip to DC is underway right now!
We have exciting things coming down the pike, but right now we are going to celebrate the culmination of five long years of work! Thank you for taking this trip down memory lane with us.