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122 members, 80 different varieties of vegetables, two harvest days, five pickup locations, six employees, 7 working shares, and, always, the weather. This is how we did it, with lots of community help.

Shares
Colchester Farm offered three sizes of membership shares: small, medium and large. We also offered ‘working shares’; for 10 hours of work a month members earned a small share, for 15 hours they got a medium share, and for 20 hours a month a large share. We have experimented with a variety of ways to determine what makes up a share (number of pounds or number of boxes is complicated when one week may include watermelons and another three kinds of lettuce). So we have come up with the idea of a “unit”. A unit is the size of what you might buy at the grocery store, one watermelon for example, or a bag of spinach, or a bunch of carrots or three tomatoes, perhaps three heads of broccoli or one big red cabbage. Each week we figure out how much produce we have been able to harvest and determine what our units will be. When members come to pick up their vegetables they choose five units if they have a small share, eight units for a medium share, and fourteen units for a large one. When the weather provides, shares will be bigger, when drought, wind, heat, bugs etc. make the harvest smaller, the shares may be smaller.

Harvesting
We harvested on Tuesdays and Fridays. Often on both days we had a working-share family that helped. The Betley family arrived early in the morning, especially on hot, hot days. Christine and her four children worked alongside our interns, John, Natalie, Christina, and Emily, and helped where needed. Once picked, the vegetables are weighed, recorded, washed twice in the shed, then bagged and boxed for delivery. The family working with us then got to take home their share of the vegetables in return for their hard work.

Delivery and pick-up
Having started out pretty modestly, our delivery and pickup locations have grown over the years. Some members picked up at the Farm, others at two locations in Chestertown, one in Dover, and one in Wye Mills.

Tuesday’s harvest went to:
County Government Building on High Street (in the back stairwell) – available from 3:30 until the building closes around 4:30pm. These deliveries were done by the box, with the vegetables chosen and packed at the Farm. Sometimes the boxes were still there early on Wednesday morning, but usually one of our members there, Carla Martin, distributed whatever was left behind to anyone in the building who wanted some of the produce.

Kingstown Garden Center – from 4:00 until 6:00 we spread out the available vegetables on a table and invited the members who pick up there to choose the number of units they had signed up for. Our table was outside in the southern parking lot of the garden center, towards the back under a tree. There was plenty of parking space and we are eternally grateful to Liz Starkey for permission to use the space for our weekly pick-up location.

Wye Mills location – Early on Wednesday mornings Rob Etgan, Executive Director of the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, swung by the Farm on his way to work and picked up the boxes we had prepared for the members who picked up at the Wye center. This particular delivery site we owe to Andy Andrews who used to work there, before he moved on to Pennypack Farm in Pennsylvania. Many thanks to Rob for picking up this delivery leg.

Friday’s harvest didn’t go anywhere:
Members who found it convenient, or pleasurable, or interesting, came to the Farm to pick up between 4:00 and 6:00 on Friday afternoon. They turned off Route 213 onto Georgetown Cemetery Road, past the Colchester Farm Store on the corner, and back about a half mile of dirt road to the ‘veggie shed’ where we had the vegetables laid out on tables for them to make their selection. This often turned out to be a bit of a social event, since the thirty or forty people who gathered on and off in the two hours often wound up exchanging news, gossip, and, of course, recipes.

Colchester Farm Market
We planned to pick just the right amount for our shareholders plus some to sell at the Colchester Farm Store on Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 10:00 to 5:00. The Store is located at the end of our Farm lane at 13910 Augustine Herman Highway (Route 213) just south of the Sassafras River Bridge. We are slowly building up a group of loyal customers from Kent and Cecil Counties as well as from the boatyards in Georgetown harbor. Word about our pesticide-free vegetables being available just 0.3 miles from the docks is spreading up and down the east coast boating community. As always, we have recipes available.

Chestertown Farmers’ Market
This was the last location we distributed to, and we did so only when we had extra production we needed to find a home for. Needless to say, estimating exactly how many plants to plant and how much to harvest is a fine art. Often we had excess, which we gladly sold at the Farmers’ Market in Chestertown from 8:00 until noon on Saturday mornings.

Donating Food
If we still had produce left over after all these outlets, on Monday morning we dropped off free food at the Kent Family Center in Chestertown and at the Meeting Ground, a homeless shelter in Cecil County.

Interesting in helping? We welcome volunteers. Just call 410-648-5609.