Every week we intend to share our thoughts and photos here. Most weeks the physical part of farming dominates and doesn’t allow our thoughts to hit the interwebs. But here we are today…Bubbling up inside us for the past week has been the desire to share here how we approach communication. The values that business owners choose to infuse into their business hopefully get a chance to shine through. But while opening a Farm Share box of vegetables, or perusing a table of tomatoes, it isn’t obvious that we care anything at all about communication. Eating a Salad that we grew, one can’t tell that we have any thoughts about kind communication. But we do! If this doesn’t interest you at all, that is just fine, and you can scroll to the bottom of this for our harvest list for this week.
We think it is important to communicate kindly with each other! We stress this in our parenting and hope that our influence bleeds into how our children (and their future adults selves) choose to interact with others. But we think it is so important that we make kind communication a discussion topic amongst our farm employees. Each year with our staff, we review a code of conduct of sorts which outlines what we think are the most important things to remember about how to be as part of a small team. Kind communication is top on the list. We discuss this document as a group and require agreement about its contents in order to employ an individual here.
We promise our staff that we aren’t perfect but that we will keep our attention on communicating with kindness. Kindness and effectiveness can co-exist very happily! We explain with staff repeatedly that a very effective way of handling a moment of tension is to tell someone *kindly* what it is that you want.
We encourage our staff to communicate with one another with these intentions present. We hope that we are all, always, communicating kindly with our Farm Share members and our farmers’ market customers. We have a friend who has a shirt that states “Kindness Matters.” We agree, and we hope you can feel it.
One can enjoy the vegetables and flowers that we grow, and the bread that we bake, and not share our pledge to communicate kindly. That’s okay.
And we’ll keep it up anyway. Because Kindness Matters, and communication matters. We people are all here, all together on this earth, living life the best way we know how. We are all different, with different values and interests, and some of us are a lot dirtier than others! But we can communicate kindly and all of us be better for it. Maybe some of this betterness spills into the food and flowers that we produce. Either way, we’re happier because of it and that’s enough.
This week’s harvest includes:
Basil, Beans (new variety! long ones!), Rainbow Chard, Eggplants – sweet and buttery round Italian ones and adorable Fairy Tale ones, Flowers Bouquets, Garlic, Lettuce Mix, White Onions, Mint, Salad Mix, Scallions, Sweet Peppers, Snack Size Peppers, Non-Spicy Jalapenos, Okra, Tomatoes (slicing ones and cherry tomatoes), and our Breads that we bake Saturday morning…this week’s varieties are Seed Loaf, Roasted Pepper & Onion, Raisin & Cinnamon, Whole Rye, and Baguettes.
We have all these veggie beauties in our FarmStand at our farm, which is staffed on Saturday mornings from 9-12, and open and self-serve from 9a-8p daily. Plus, we’ll bring these items on Saturday to the Farmer’s Market @ St. Stephen’s – which is outside in the parking lot from 8-12.
Keep an eye on what we have available via Richmond’s only online farmers’ market: FallLineFarms.com.
We’ll see you at the farm and at St. Stephen’s this weekend~
Enjoy ~
Janet, Dan, & the whole Broadfork crew
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