Orange County NC Website
Approved 12/12/16 <br />OC Board of Adjustment – 10/10/16 Page 45 of 113 <br /> <br /> <br />Barry Katz: Well your kids are about to enter into organized sports, and other social events and I think it 1 <br />seems inconceivable that they’re going to spend much time out there. So you have down here 10 staff 2 <br />during events and when there are no events the number of staff is 5? 3 <br /> 4 <br />Kara Brewer: Approximately, it depends on what we have going on? 5 <br /> 6 <br />Barry Katz: What are they going to be doing? What did you anticipate them doing? 7 <br /> 8 <br />Kara Brewer: Helping me with the flowers, flower harvesting and that sort of thing. General maintenance. 9 <br />As the chestnuts come into maturity we’ll need help with the harvest. Just things like that. 10 <br /> 11 <br />Barry Katz: Ok. 12 <br /> 13 <br />Karen Barrows: Ok, Andy? 14 <br /> 15 <br />Andy Petesch: And I’ll just finish up a few things with Ms. Brewer here. I understand it’s already getting late 16 <br />and I don’t want to slow this process down at all. But I do need to have her testify to a few more facts. So 17 <br />we went ahead and talked about some of your farm plan specifics, if you could just discuss the agricultural 18 <br />activities in a little more detail in terms of what you’re doing with the flowers? 19 <br /> 20 <br />Kara Brewer: Sure. So we are using the barn as the storage for the flowers. As we harvest the flowers we 21 <br />come into the barn, we section everything out into our buckets, that’s where we wrap and put them in 22 <br />bouquets or however it is that we’re going to do it. And so we will be storing the flowers in there as well. We 23 <br />are doing you pick operations with the flowers as well so that’s part of everything. 24 <br /> 25 <br />Andy Petesch: And are you using any specific technique in terms of growing the seeds? 26 <br /> 27 <br />Kara Brewer: Yes. So I’m doing a technique called soil blocking. It’s actually really fascinating. Something 28 <br />that they use in Europe quite a bit and what it does is it cuts down on your plastic waste. So when your 29 <br />seed starting and we’ll be doing thousands of seed starts per season we start and you essentially block up 30 <br />the soil and that’s the container that the seed germinates in so then when they’re ready we take that into 31 <br />the barn and we have racks and growing lights available, and then we take that block directly out into the 32 <br />field and plant it and because it’s in a block the transplant shock is much less as well. And like I said, we 33 <br />have been experimenting a little bit on the property now just to see how the soil blocking method works and 34 <br />it’s actually been doing really well compared to the direct seeding. So I’m excited about that as well. I think 35 <br />that’s going to increase our flower production. 36 <br /> 37 <br />Barry Katz: You had quite a large area there where you’re going to grow flowers. Do you have any estimate 38 <br />about how many blocks you would need to fill that up? 39 <br /> 40 <br />Kara Brewer: Thousands, yes. 41 <br /> 42 <br />Barry Katz: How many? 43 <br /> 44 <br />Kara Brewer: Thousands. Because just one bed is 70 foot by 4 bed, depending on the type of flower and 45 <br />depending on the spacing of course it varies. It could be anywhere from 400 to 900 plants in just one bed. 46 <br /> 47 <br />Barry Katz: The size of the plot was 70 by what? 48 <br /> 49