The 1st Newsletter! And the longest!
The world has changed since we last posted. And while the rest of our lives are irrevocably different, the farm and the farm work has been our anchor. We are incredibly privileged to get up every day to do work that we love. When we decided last fall to scale down our production , close our market, and focus on customized CSA boxes, it seems it was a strangely fortuitous decision. We could not have known how “essential” our work would become in between the growing season. The response to our offering of safe, local food and plants these past couple months has been overwhelming and wonderful. We are committed to our small scale production so that we can focus on the health of our workers, customers and plants. While we work and work and work to get crops in the ground we are hopeful that the world will be a safer one when the crops are ready to harvest.
Between installing new sanitizing measures, making masks, staggering crew members, navigating social distancing and figuring out new order systems, it has been a challenging spring to be farming. In our 10 years of spring planting, we cannot recall such a cold, gray and windy April/beginning of May. Crops that we planted a month ago have barely grown an inch. (in comparison, we were harvesting full heads of lettuce and kale bunches from the field this week last year!) Direct seeded greens have germinated poorly due to low soil temps and the winds have put our tunnels to the test. Our plantings have been on-schedule and we are so grateful for the sun these past few days. We are hoping our little plant babies will start to grow with warmer temps in the forecast.
Because of these conditions we have decided to start the first CSA boxes on June 11th. This will be full share sizes and bi-weekly group A. (We will be sending a schedule along soon!) We are confident that once the season gets rolling, we will have a wonderful abundance to choose from, but the first few shares may be a slightly limited as our spring plants catch up on growth.
We can’t thank you enough for joining is this season. We are humbled by your support and by the need for fresh local food in these crazy times. We will do our best and we are so excited to get the harvest season under way.
Here are some scenes from the farm this spring, you can follow our progress!
