Celebrating The New Year With Seeding Tomatoes

Photo By Kelsey Joy

There are lots of ways to ring in the new year and for us the favorite way to do that is planting seeds in the greenhouse including the first tomatoes of 2025.

This is the third year where we have celebrated the start of a new year by seeding tomatoes in the greenhouse.

Tomatoes are our favorite crop to grow and eat so we put in lots of effort to have them early and late in the season since we luckily are in an area where we can have a long season of delicious tomatoes.

Sungolds, early girls and cherokee purple are the varieties of tomatoes we are seeding along with kale, collards, chard, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, parsley and lettuce.

After taking most of last week off from the farm to visit some family it has been so nice to be back on the farm. We are feeling refreshed and ready to continue harvesting while also getting back to seeding in the greenhouse.

The new year marks the completion of the third year of Farmboy Organics and us having our own farm.

There have been so many amazing opportunities we’ve had in 2024 that have helped us in numerous ways.

The two most recent opportunities we’ve had are the properties that we have been able to lease to add to the farm.

We worked a good amount behind the scenes getting all of it sorted out and making sure it was very beneficial to everyone.

Talking to other farmers in the past couple of years we mentioned a lot how we would like some tree crops which don’t require daily work on them like veggies due.

Both the new properties were opportunities we could not pass up on and would provide much benefit to the local community.

We haven’t mentioned it before but this year the farm was able to purchase a van in spring after a couple of years of renting a van every week. Renting worked at the beginning but by this year we knew we needed to have our own so we could use it whenever we wanted and to have more space for veggies than the cargo van we rented.

2024 saw us expand our farming network by joining the Kitchen Table Advisors cohort of farms that received business advising from them to help build sustainable farms. Much of the work we have done with them is helping us have the framework to make decisions for the future of the farm.

We also worked with California Farmlink, another wonderful organization that helps farmers and participated in their Resilerator program this fall that has assisted in building the resilience of the business.

Photo By Kelsey Joy

You can’t have only highlights on a farm and there were numerous challenges we faced throughout the year from spinach not germinating to lots of peppers being by animals and seedlings being munched on in the greenhouse.

Those experiences all helped us learn how we need to make improvements in different aspects of the farm whether they be small ones or larger ones.

We were able to implement some changes immediately while others can only be done with the new season of the veggies which is starting with seeding in the greenhouse today.