If you’re not familiar with the term “urban farm,” you can get a good look at one this Saturday. Tom Flanigan reports the Ten Speed Greens farm is located in a quiet otherwise residential corner of Tallahassee’s Midtown area.
This is really the story of two young entrepreneurs. One of them is named Claire Mitchell.
“We’re both in our 20s. Danielle Krasniqui is my co-worker. And we’re from Florida, and we like it in Tallahassee and we want to stay and this is our way of doing that," she says. "We didn’t see any jobs in town that we liked, so we made jobs for ourselves.”
The venture began with taking over a one-acre tract in the Levy Park neighborhood.
“We heard about it through the friend of a friend who had been working on it before, and she had started a community garden there. But she had a new job and had to leave it, so when we came into it in October it was totally overgrown with weeds and it was a mess, and we have pictures of it on our Facebook of what we’ve taken it from, and it’s a drastic improvement," Mitchell says.
Thus Ten Speed Greens was born this past November.
“We grow salads to sell to restaurants. We sell to nine restaurants in Tallahassee and Monticello. Eventually when our production picks up and we actually have everything planted, we’d like to sell to the public through the Red Hills Online Market, which is an online farmer’s market where folks can shop for produce online and then pick it up once a week," she says.
Oh, and where did the name Ten Speed Greens come from?
“When we get money for our bike trailers, we’re going to attach bike trailers to our bicycles and deliver to the restaurants in the Midtown area," she says. "We’re right down the street, and we figured it made sense to start working on great legs and also drive us to be a carbon-neutral business.”
To help make that and expanded production possible, Mitchell and Krasniqui have a farm-to-table dinner planned for this Saturday at 5 p.m.
“Coinciding with our event is the kickoff for our fundraising campaign. It’s similar to Kickstarter where folks donate money to give our business some start-up cash," she says. “We’ll have garden tours to show people how we grow. We’ll have some appetizers and sangria for people to walk around with. And then at 6 we’ll be sitting down to a three-course meal. We’ll be having salad with goat cheese and chili and bread. Also a dessert made from a local dairy and we’ll be having ice cream – vegan coconut milk ice cream, and it’s going to be made by the dessert chef from the Cypress restaurant.”
Ten Speed Greens can be found at 400 W. Sixth Ave. You can’t miss it. It’s the only farm on the block.
