2023 At Kodachrome Gardens

Slow growth in the right direction

I wrote a novella length recap of 2023 at the garden for Kodachrome’s email subscribers. We typically only use the list to let people know about our Buyers Club, Farmstand, workshop opportunities, etc., but it felt important to give folks a snapshot of where the garden is at as one year becomes another. And, right or wrong, I like to think anyone engaging with an agricultural enterprise on the Internet may enjoy long-form reading, slower social media, and a general ignoring of life in the algorithm, even if just for a moment. So now I’ll share it here, too, complete with snappy newsletter punctuation and Florence locals’ shoutouts that can hopefully be appreciated for their village charm wherever you might be reading. Join our newsletter here, if you’d like. And happy holidays.

Christmas is done and 2024 awaits. This week is one of my favorites. It’s a liminal spot on the calendar; the holiday rush is receding, and the days can feel free of the usual expectations. Are you even sure what day of the week it is? It feels good to just exist. For us, it’s a time to reflect on the year that was, and get a leg up on what we want the coming twelve months of farming to be. We thought we'd share some of our thoughts with you here in long-form. 

2023 was a year of dramatic physical growth at Kodachrome. We’ve gone from fifteen beds to forty-five, or 1,150 square feet of active growing space to 3,800. We’re hauling a lot of compost at the moment, so those numbers will climb again by January 1. At some point, we switched from thinking of it as a large garden to considering it an intensely productive micro farm. Reading about the ways small scale agriculture and cities have intertwined in our past gave even more clarity to our purpose and continued effort to scale up. 

An army of volunteers helped us take our biggest step forward way back in February. The twelve beds we built that cold, sunny Saturday gave us hundreds of pounds of purple hull peas over the summer, and currently house carrots, purple mustard greens, kale, and collards. Thank you so much to everyone who came out!

We also have to thank everyone who attended our fundraiser at Odette in early March. These new beds were great, but nearly every morning I would find deer and other tracks meandering through them. The eight foot fence we were able to purchase and install because of y'all's generosity has made all of this expansion a reality. With the whole property protected, we have been able to look at every corner with new eyes and really pack in the growing potential. We cannot thank y'all enough!

As part of that expansion, we put up our first hoop house in early December. It’s a 25 x 16 foot caterpillar tunnel that has already been a game changer for winter growing. It will stay up year round for climate controlled cultivation. It’s currently growing the finest kale and spinach on the property, and will house early season tomatoes before we know it. The little seedlings got their first true leaves over Christmas.

Looking back at our beginnings, the goal in 2022 was simply to learn the land and make sure we could grow things on it. Each micro climate is different; now we know how the shadows move and change on every day of the year, where the wind tends to blow the hardest, and which spots gather the cold or heat. This year, we wanted to take that emerging confidence and scale it up. That came in the form of restaurant sales, the launch of the Buyers Club, and our weekly Farmstand. We’re still climbing the steep learning curve, but it has been a very gratifying to watch our produce go out into the community and thrive. We love chatting it up with Josh and Kyle at Odette, or having John snag a bag of veggies for Rivertown when he makes his compost run. When any of them post a special on Instagram, the garden group text lights up; we’re very proud to be on those plates, and to be in discussions with other great restaurants in town about providing produce in 2024. The same is true of the Buyers Club. It is an honor to have a part in family dinners, and to help folks realize their goal of eating intentionally and seasonally. A huge thanks to Kristy and her crew at All The Best for becoming the pick up spot. The Tepaches kept us going through the dog days of summer. And the Farmstand brings y’all to us, which we love. Food production can seem very far away, even if it’s grown regionally. Most farms are, by necessity, out in the country; we’re right down the street, right at a mile from the restaurants we work with and a lot of the people we feed. It’s great to have folks walk the garden and see the plants their veggies come from. It’s Florence food, grown in compost made in Florence, experiencing the same weather we all do day to day. That’s invaluable, and weaves us back into a communal connection with the natural world, a bond that can often be lost in our era of modern conveniences. We love the community that happens every Saturday morning. Come join us any time! It's a simple suggested price system, from 9-11 AM at 526 Campbell Street. 

We also made new friends at the Dream Center. The logistics of getting newly harvested veggies into the hands of folks who need them can be a challenge: from the time something is picked, the clock is ticking on freshness. Teresia and her team in the Food Assistance Program made the process seamless, and thanks to their hard work, over 350 lbs of our produce went to our neighbors. We are so thankful for what they do and look forward to furthering our relationship with them in 2024.

I mentioned John Cartwright making his compost run: he brought over 6,000 lbs of kitchen scraps from Rivertown this year, two 5 gallon buckets at a time. We are so thankful he’s bought into our efforts to close the local food loop. The scraps go in the compost heaps, and a few months later go back on the beds as nutrient-rich soil to feed the veggies that, oftentimes, go right back to Rivertown. That’s the goal! And the beauty of doing this in a small, tight knit community like Florence. We’ve also been lucky to have Zach, head brewer at Singin’ River, send us all of the spent grain and yeast we could handle. Over 10,000 lbs of it! This also goes right on the compost pile, or even occasionally acts as the base of a new bed if we’re in build mode. The plants love it, and we have absolutely no complaints about the smell of IPAcalypse wafting around the compost bays while it’s mixed in. Companion Coffee opened this year and immediately reached out about working together. We’re thankful they did, as we’ve taken in over 1,500 lbs of their grounds. Each bucket can do everything from soil building to pest control; it is an embarrassment of wealth to organic minded gardeners. These three businesses keep us moving forward. They go out of their way to work with us, and as a result, nearly 18,000 lbs of waste has been diverted from the landfill and put back to work feeding the soil that feeds us.

As we’ve grown, it’s also opened up more opportunities to have folks of all ages tour the garden and talk about growing, the importance of nutrient-dense food, and the possibilities for its place in their own lives. This is the heart of why we exist. We hosted a handful of free workshops on bed building, with participants getting a hands-on experience with how we convert an empty lawn to a bed through no-till practices, along with a good discussion while we worked on how this builds soil and leads to healthier plants and zero need for lab-manufactured chemicals. Multiple UNA First Year Experience classes visited for a tour and rundown of what we do and why, and what makes Florence such a special place to do it. UNA’s Culinary Arts program also stopped in. Aspiring chefs make for a fun taste test tour group, and we’re excited to keep working with them so the students get a complete view of what happens from soil to seed to plant to plates. 

Most memorably, Sky Stewart brought his Common Ground summer campers for a visit. After eating Sungolds off the vine and taste testing a few other veggies, we got to the purple hulls. We showed them how to look at the pods and spot the ones that were ready (so, which ones were purple), and then peeled our harvest. We watched along with Sky and his staff as the lightbulbs went off, and kids who had never stopped to wonder where their beans and peas come from now had an answer - one that’s just blocks away from home. These are the moments we remember. 

We hope all of these visits, or Buyers Club deliveries or Farmstand purchases or meals prepared by our brilliant chef friends, are sparks of inspiration. Not everyone will start planting veggies, but we can all engage our local community and larger world with deeper intent and purpose. It’s a way of living that provides far more back to us than we could ever give. Thank you all so much for your support these first twenty months. 2024 will be a great year.