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End of Year Reflection, and Planning for Next Year
- Take time in the off-season to reflect on this year.
- Look at what didn’t work out this year.
- How can you prevent it going forward?
- What if anything can you change to avoid those types of problems?
- Start laying out a schedule for your days and weeks in advance. It will take the stress off and allow you to better utilize your time.
- Just starting out? How to use the off-season?
- Try to identify the leverage points and focus on those first.
- Try to visualize and optimize those systems ahead of time.
- Start laying out your land.
- You can start building your processing equipment and setting up that infrastructure.
- Think about and develop your post harvest processes.
- Think about – This is what I have to do now to hit the ground running, and this is what I can do later.
- Get rid of the negative voices in your life. Those relationships will hold you back.
- “You’re the average of the five people that you spend the most time with.”
- The best time to do it is now.Â
- Take on tasks now. Pushing them off makes them harder to come back to do.
Learn More from Curtis Stone:
Listen to The Urban Farmer audiobook
john
This series over the season was very informative. I planned my Wednesday evening to listen to the latest episode. everyone needs to go through the process discussed in this episode to plan for 2016 season. I have taken on more land and am using the process to plan out everything from seed needs, plot layout and how to market increased production. Thank you
Diego
You’re welcome John. I hope 2016 goes well for you. Diego
Ben
Thank you so much for doing these episodes! I found it about 3/4 into the season and have been playing catch up. I recently bought a four and a half acre farm just outside of New Orleans and the information in this program and Curtis’s videos have been invaluable to me. I can’t believe this is free because this information is truly worth a lot. I am following Curtis’s advice to start small so I am beginning with micro greens. I get a lot of negativity from people saying that I won’t be able to farm without a tractor and this show and other resources like the market gardener have given me much needed positivity that I need. Hopefully you guys will do a season 2 of the urban farmer with 40 more weeks of high-grade information. My farm is called Be the Change Farm so be looking out for me in the next few years. My farm plan: year-round microgreens, shitaki mushroom logs, a quarter acre of annual vegetables, and a 3 acre high density orchard. Thanks again and I love permaculture voices! Keep it going!
Diego
Thank you Ben. Great to hear. Good luck with it all down there.
Danny Deadnettlez
40hoursTUFpropaganda a poem.
Curtis stones and Diego have quite a rapport
I know that their next year has much that’s in store
I myself learned quite much from their pontifications
my urban farming endeavors will have acceleration
my workflow is tuned to the get stuff done beat
I listen to their voices not sitting on seats
but sharing my produce and my herbs thats for sure
Thanks for your wisdom distributed more .
the value you bring to the life of my people
is surely unmatched yes it’s surely unequaled
my urban farming tasks have now a new zeal
so proud of yourselves you surely should feel
While mostly I find detestable; stridently capitalist,ideology
or the Tony Robbins themed abundance psychology;
through such language I learned quite a lot
so I won’t write you off as loose, west coast brained sots.
But cherish your thoughts in a fond place in my heart
growing food for the people is where Union starts.
Diego
Thanks Danny. First poem comment. 🙂
Caroline
This show has been incredibly informative and helpful over this year as I’m starting my own small farm in 2016. It’s some of the most easily accessible and highest quality information I have found out there. Again and again, Diego and Curtis discuss topics that I have wondered about or questioned. It was a great balance of technical gardening information with business and marketing tips. Many thanks to both of you!
Diego
You’re welcome. Good luck in 2016 Caroline.
JimS
Fantastic series. I’ve shared this on facebook and google + as well as telling anyone who will listen. 🙂
Big thank you to you and Curtis for sharing it.
Diego
Thanks Jim. I appreciate you sharing it as well.
John
From a home gardener point of view I enjoyed this series and found it very informative. Some of the items were not applicable but provided good food for thought while others are directly scale-able to my smaller garden. I would like to as quickly an as efficiently plan and execute my garden so that it provides an abundance of food year round, follows permaculture principles, and allows me to spend time pursuing other hobbies instead of laboring away un-nessessarily in the garden.
What I would like to learn more about, at a smaller scale, is how to plan the seed starting, planting, harvesting, etc to maximize yield in my smaller space. Plus, some day I might get to a point where i can scale up my gardening and enter the business full time.
Thanks, keep up the great work.
Diego
Thanks John. Glad to hear that it applies to the home scale as well. I will see if we can tackle those subjects of seed starting next season.
Grey Klein
Diego, thank you for making this series happen, as it has been, by far, the most critical resource in adjusting the trajectory of my life for the next several years.
As a second-year college student, I had little enthusiasm for my chosen field of study, even less so for spending any more time in “higher education” than the four years for which I had signed up. I knew at this point that I didn’t want to have a 9-5 office job, even with the impressive starting salaries and job security that might be offered to me. Although these factors were what initially influenced my decision to pursue a degree in Mechanical Engineering, my ideas for how to live and what to work toward began to shift dramatically ten months ago.
Once I came to recognize the mounting ecological, social and economic problems of the world as symptoms of a society speeding toward collapse, I became obsessed with figuring out what to do about it. I immediately began to alter my habits of consumption and spent hours a day reading about and listening to what other people were saying and doing about the issue. The wealth of ideas for building a better future for myself and global human civilization grew with each passing week, but I still didn’t know where I would start out in the real world. My awareness of the scale of ecological and social destruction caused by our industrialized, globalized fossil-fueled food system (and of the widespread ignorance and complacency toward it) governed my research in self-sufficiency. That’s when your podcast introduced me to Curtis Stone and the urban farming business model.
It had seemed apparent to me that if I were planning on pursuing my interest in growing my own food, then I would need a job with a salary once I graduate. All of the models I had heard of, from permaculture to aquaponics, required tens of thousands of dollars in capital and years of education and experience. I took it for granted that I would have to ease myself in to the life that I actually want to live while doing work in which I was relatively uninterested just so I could make ends meet. In my mind, urban farming either took the form of a community garden or a business selling food grown on rooftops/indoors; the latter demands some high-cost real estate in a city setting, and the former doesn’t make money. I began listening to Curtis talk about what he does, and the pieces immediately started to fall into place right before me: farming unused, readily accessible land, connecting with local residents and businesses, producing crops with high values in high densities. Everything he said made sense to me, if not at first, always after his detailed anecdotal experience and your summary of his points. I don’t remember which episode I listened to first, but I do remember that by the end of it, I was quite aware of the wealth of information that I was about to consume.
I have listened to every episode of TUF and will probably do so again. I received Curtis’s book for Christmas and am just under 100 pages away from my first read-through. Outside of classes, I do volunteer work at a local urban farm, a permaculture-inspired community orchard and a campus community garden. Each day I spend doing these things and interacting with people doing the same, I am further assured that, once I graduate, every day that I work I will be building the life that I want to live.
Again, thanks to both you and Curtis for creating these podcasts. Thank you for all of the information you’ve made available for free at the expense of your own time and energy, and thank you for showing me that I don’t have to wait to build a life of growing my own food; I can make a living doing it right away.
I’m eagerly anticipating season 2, and if you ever end up touring the East coast, I’ll be sure to thank you in person!