Boutique farm finding new ways to get its produce to consumers
With restaurants, supermarkets closed, there’s less demand for greens and vegetables
Who is that little girl and what have they done with my daughter? wondered Tammara Soma, an assistant professor in the school of resources and environmental management at Simon Fraser University.
Her six-year-old had just eaten some freshly picked buckler sorrel and declared it tasted better than sour candy.
“We’d never had sorrel before and she had a bowl of the leaves,” Soma said. “It tasted amazing, a lemony, tangy flavour. The produce was so fresh, you could tell it had just been picked, there was still dirt on some of it.”
Soma had put out a call on a group mailing list of fellow parents living at UniverCity atop Burnaby Mountain after hearing about a boutique farm’s plight from a colleague, who is a neighbour of the people who own and run Hannah Brook Farm, the husbandand-wife team of Paul Healey and Rebecca Haber. It feels good to support local farmers and their heirloom produce, Soma said, and Healey would agree as he and his wife hustle to find new markets for their greens, and soon vegetables. Normally they would be delivering 200-pound bags of mixed salad daily to high-end restaurants around Metro Vancouver.
Their farms in Burnaby and Maple Ridge grow a variety of herbs, edible flowers and greens, and their salad mixes vary week-to-week, depending on the time of year.
They have micro-pea tips, four types of mizuna, eight types of mustard, red-acre cabbage sprouts and red-vein tatsoi, four types of arugula, 15 kinds of kale, as well as wild greens.
That barely dents the list of what’s available, and then there are the vegetables that will be ready to eat in the coming weeks.
“Right now we’re doing OK, we’re selling half of what we’d normally sell, but it’s just the beginning of the season,” Healey said.
As the growing season progresses, farmhands pick up to 1,000 to 1,200 pounds of greens a week, along with 1,000 pounds of vegetables, he said.
So he’s on the lookout for more groups like the one organized at UniverCity. Ideally, he’d like orders to be worth at least $100 to make delivery viable, but he’ll make exceptions during the COVID19 lockdown, he said.
Another way of getting his produce to market was setting up a covered table in front of his house on Lakewood Drive between Third and Fourth avenues, with a pay-asyou’re-able can set out.
“People were coming back and telling us how great it was,” Healey said.
But someone complained to the city, which sent out a bylaw officer to shut it down. You can still order the Healeys’ produce by emailing hannahbrookfarms@gmail.com.
“It’s home delivery, I’ll bring it to you,” he said.