A little update and some mysteries explained...

Here we are in August! We got a few dry spells long enough to get most of our fall crops prepped and planted. Our amazing crew has stayed positive and energetic through the peak of the heat and since we are now in the middle of what we call “picking season” we are happy to be pulling hundreds of pounds of tomatoes, eggplant, beets, potatoes, carrots and many other things out of the field. We’ve welcomed a new team member, Anna who has come on with fresh energy at just the right time! We’ve also been blessed with a few friends and volunteers in the past few weeks coming to help with big projects - farming sometimes takes a village!

Farming for CSA shares is a particularly tricky thing to plan and I thought I’d try to explain a few CSA mysteries. We start out the season with a week by week schedule of what to plant, where, and when it will be harvested. This plan is based on past data of harvest yields and the projected number of shares we would like to provide for and requires about a dozen different excel spreadsheets. We also try to take into account the changing weather challenges as much as we can. For instance, as the seasons shift we have diseases that used to arrive in late summer but are now arriving in time to affect our earliest plantings. This is why we decided to scale down some crops such as cucumbers and scale up on crops that aren’t as affected like carrots. Additionally, once we have seeded and planted a crop it is too late to ‘add’ any more even if we wanted to - we simply cannot change the plan. Our garlic crop was planted last fall when we had not decided the number of CSA shares for the following year. While we have enough for a small quantity for each member we cannot offer more than there is. BUT we are happy to offer larger quantities of things that are in abundance as a balance to the finite nature of some items. We are constantly adapting to what grows well here and what will taste the best for our members. We hope you’ve been enjoying your shares and the experience of eating what is growing right here right now.

Please enjoy some pictures from the past few weeks!