Blue Glass Farm · Woodinville, WA
We're Alex and Tyler. We started this farm because we were tired of grocery store produce that doesn't taste like anything. It turns out that when you pick a vegetable at peak ripeness instead of shipping it across the country, it tastes completely different. Shockingly different. Here's how we do it.
Flavor is mostly freshness, and freshness is mostly distance. Our vegetables are picked when they're actually ready and travel a few miles, not a few thousand. Produce shipped up from California can't match that. By definition, it can't be as fresh.
We've grown over 700 varieties. Each year about 150 favorites make the plan, alongside 50 or so new experiments. Most years we grow over 50 varieties of tomatoes alone. Why the obsession? Flavor. We're always looking for crops that thrive in our unique climate and growing systems. Many of them you simply can't find in a store.
No pesticides, no herbicides, no fungicides. Nothing. This is as clean as produce gets.
We farm regeneratively and don't rely on tillage for weed suppression. We're experimenting with some initial tillage to improve the soil before a bed goes into our no-till system. The goal is simple. Set the soil up to be healthy from the start. Then build it up, season after season, instead of wearing it out.
Everything is planted, weeded, and harvested by hand. The whole farm runs on small hand tools and battery-electric equipment, like our new Farm-ng Amiga. It's a little slow. We think it's worth it. Every plant gets looked at by a person who cares. Hand harvest also lets us grow varieties the big producers can't touch. Too tender, too full of sugar, impossible to pick by machine.
We cut all the right corners. Our vegetables never ride a truck for a thousand miles, never sit in a warehouse, and never have to look picture-perfect. So we get to grow for one thing: flavor. The bonus surprise? Produce this fresh keeps beautifully in your fridge.