Well, we are now rolling with the sprouts! I did my first harvest on Friday (May 22) and harvested much more than I expected. 12 trays gave me 78 bags!, which is 6.5 bags per tray – much more than the 4 I predicted. I sold 36 bags to local retailers and a few to passers by on the street outside my house! It looks like the retailers will be regular buyers, so that is nice.
With the first harvest it too a while to get into the swing of things. I could not remember all the systems I had used before, so it was a bit slow. But once I got going it was more smooth. I did all the harvesting at the Farm and then I did the bagging at home. In the future the bagging will be done at the farm as well.
But of more interest in the past while is the minor sprout catastrophe that occurred about a week ago. I came to the farm to see that one of my benches had collapsed! I’ll let the video explain the rest…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4zPIieokSU]
So what does this mean? Well, I am considering just continuing with one bench for now to see how it goes. The operation will still run a profit and I should be able to pay off the expenses and make some money this year. After doing my first harvest I realized that harvesting 54 trays would be a huge undertaking and that is a lot of sprouts to sell. However, If I get regular supermarket sales and they sell well at the market, then I can quickly put the bench back up. But I would definitely need to hire someone to help me. I may do so anyway
as it would make things go more than twice as fast.
So to end on a good note, here is a nice picture of a full bench with a batch ready to be harvested in 2 days and the second batch which will be harvested in 4 days:
