Annie Jesperson and Nathaniel Talbot of of Deep Harvest Farm grow vegetables and seeds on Whidbey Island in Washington.
In this episode, Annie and Nathaniel talk about how they run a CSA basket program in addition to a seed company – and how they love having both businesses to balance out the seasonal workload and cashflow.
They discuss how they managed to access land and built up their client base.
How seed crops and vegetable crops share time and space in their fields.
How they started selling seeds by setting up seed racks in local nurseries. And only once they had established themselves in this way did they launch an online seed store.
How they grow most of the seeds they sell, but they also work with some other regional seed companies to supply varieties that they have trouble with or can’t grow in enough volume. Annie and Nathaniel also grow a few seed crops in larger quantities for these same regional seed companies.
For this episode’s technical deep dive into a seed crop, Annie and Nathaniel talk about growing beets for seed. How beets take two years to get to seed and that means storing the roots through the winter. The spacing they use when they replant beets in the second year. Knowing when beet seed is ready to harvest. Postripening in a caterpillar tunnel and how to clean beet seed.
Oh yeah, we also talk about how to keep finches out seed crops using bird netting!
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You can listen on
- Apple Podcasts
- Spotify
- Or use this RSS feed to subscribe in your podcast player of choice: https://feeds.libsyn.com/412058/rss
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Thank you to Annie and Nathaniel for being on the podcast and for their patience while we figured out how to get the call to work!
Thank you to Farmer Jesse and Jackson Rolett of No-Till Growers, and the podcast’s sponsors The Bauta Family Initiative on Canadian Seed Security and The Organic Seed Alliance – Their support is what has made this podcast happen.
And thank you for listening!!!
