About Patchwork Gardens
Patchwork Gardens is a young small farm with a diverse operation. We are getting ready to start our fourth year of growing vegetables and raising chickens. Most of our chickens are egg-laying hens that spend almost all of their time scratching around the pasture and traveling around in our mobile chicken house (the “Egg-mobile”). We’ve also raised several rounds of pastured meat-birds for our friend and neighbor, Matthew Keener who has started a local meat CSA. These birds are raised in a mobile pen that is moved to fresh pasture daily. The chickens are a great source of manure that provides the basis of fertility for our main occupation, growing vegetables.
Come spring, summer and fall, (and even into the winter) we grow lots of vegetables in our 6 acre garden. We grow our vegetables the old-fashioned way, with no chemical sprays or fertilizers - with manure and lots of hard work. We currently have 6 greenhouses that we are starting to use to extend our growing season to almost year-round, and we are planning on increasing that number whenever we have the time to build more. We’ve also recently invested in a dump truck and bobcat so that we can haul away manure from local horse farms and provide a great fertility boost to our garden.
We grow all of your standard vegetables and some heirloom varieties. We really like greens and grow a lot of them here - kale, chard, arugula, tat soi, mustard, beets, turnips, broccoli raab, spinach, and more. We also have several large patches of strawberries, several rows of blackberries and raspberries, and young peach, pear, apple and nut trees. As we grow, we hope to apply more principles of permaculture to improve the productivity of the marginal (i.e. very wet) areas of our property and provide a sustainable source of a wide variety of delicious and healthy produce.
Most of our produce goes to our dedicated CSA members who receive the first choice of our seasonal fruits and vegetables throughout the year. We also sell to some restaurants, to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, and through the Liberty Market of Kettering. You can find us Thursday and Saturday at the Farmers’ Markets in Yellow Springs as well as the Sugarcreek Township farmers’ market on Fridays.
Give us a call or just come by check us out. We are happy to provide farm tours and we are almost always looking for anyone who wants to work hard, eat well, and have fun to join us as a paid intern.