Return to our New Haven roots
Here at BOTL Farm, we have a strong affinity for New Haven. Although we grew up in Michigan and New Jersey (guess who grew up where!), Danielle ended up in New Haven for grad school and lived there for 10 years (note that grad school didn’t take that long, she just stayed for a bit afterwards). New Haven was (and is) the biggest city she ever lived in, and when she first moved there and heard people talking about ‘The City,’ she mistakenly assumed they were talking about New Haven and not New York City or Boston.
The diverse community of foodies, restaurateurs, and farmers in New Haven is what slowly stewed us into farmers, rather than continuing as a scientist and construction manager. For the longer version of this story, listen to Nick’s episode of the Choosing To Farm podcast. We wrote our original farm business plan, sitting in our favorite New Haven spots, imagining how we would feed ‘the city’ residents. The point is, we always hoped to return to the big, busy farmers markets there. This summer (finally!) we are starting to vend at the main farmers market in New Haven, Wooster Square. The market season is long, starting the first Saturday of April (eek, that’s this weekend!) and going until December. We are pumped to be at every Wooster Square market until mid-May, when we’ll switch to every two weeks for the remainder of the season. We are still doing the markets we’ve done for years, Assawaga Farm and Sturbridge, MA. But we’re pumped to be going back to the ‘have’!
A farmer goes to the office
As you may or may not know, Danielle has an off-farm job working for the federal government (at least she did when we wrote this). If you have been living under a rock and not looking at the news (good for you!), working conditions for federal government employees have recently changed. Despite Danielle having been hired as a fully-remote employee with her colleagues scattered around the country, this month federal employees were ordered to “return” to office. She is now commuting to downtown Hartford every day. You may be asking yourself ‘what does this have to do with my beloved BOTL Farm?’ Good Q: the change in working conditions necessitates that she spends hours (previously spent working on the farm) commuting, sitting in traffic, and prepping meals that can be reheated in the office microwave. Since we don’t have a microwave at home, there was quite a learning curve.
We will still get the farm stuff done and we will continue to grow, but we are going to have to cut some of the services we offer. We will no longer be offering home delivery and shipping.
Hopefully this is just a short-term hiccup in our operation and Danielle does not have to sit in traffic for too much longer. If you know anyone looking to hire a remote PhD theoretical molecular physicist with an interest in data science, let us know.
Come on a Sausage Adventure with us
As small business owners, we get some pretty weird spam emails, including lots of offers to send us free gloves or custom-printed cooler bag samples, and requests to ship fresh meat to Nigeria. We, like all other desensitized people, ignore and delete the spammy emails. This past month, we got an email that was an offer to sample certified organic sausage spice mixes and we were intrigued to discover that it was a legit offer (totes not spam!).
We talked to them, they sent us samples of their spice mixes, we whipped up many sample batches of sausages, did some taste testing, and passed out some sausage patties to some unsuspecting (lucky?) farm store customers. The feedback was all over the place – every sausage flavor was loved by someone and not-loved by someone else. So we did what any enterprising farmer would do and bought an assortment of spice mixes. The Sausage Adventure begins! We’ll use the spice mixes to make one-off sausages until we run out. Look for new and fleeting sausages in our repertoire, like the Sage & Spice available now. This is a loose sausage with a prominent sage flavor and lots of other supporting spices, but is not spicy or hot.
A grubby mistake
We order super-premium animal feed by the pallet a few times a month from New Country Organic’s Virginia feed mill. When the pallets are delivered, they are always exactly what we ordered – except for that last time. We assume they had a new person filling orders, or someone was having a very bad time, or maybe a particularly big sunspot formed. Whatever the case, the pallet that showed up was only a loose approximation of what we had ordered. So, we have lots of 1.5 lb bags of grubs that we didn’t order. These are dried soldier fly larvae, raised in the US, ready to feed as a nutritious treat for your feathered friends. Honestly, for some reason, our farm dog loves them too and she has zero feathers.
All that to say – we never ever do sales, but since we got these 1.5 lb bags of grubs by mistake, we’re offering them ‘buy one get one free’ until they’re gone. When you place your feed order online, just add an even number of 1.5 lb grub bags to your cart and we’ll reduce the price when we confirm your order. Add the phrase ‘grubs for my dog’ into the comments section on your order. Or don’t. Everyone wins!
Find us this month
On farm store: Tuesdays noon - 2pm, Saturdays 1 - 3pm. Pre-order
On farm self pickup: Everyday 8:30am - 8pm. Pre-order only
Wooster Square, New Haven CT: Every Saturday from 9am - 1pm. Dates we’ll be there in April: April 05, April 12, April 19, April 26. For obscure reasons, we can’t offer pre-order for this market.
It's too many numbers! Save me!
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