What's in a CSA Share?

As CSA farmers, we will be the first to admit that CSAs are a bit weird. I mean, you are getting a box of veggies that you don't have a complete choice over, which in some ways is kind of the opposite of many modern shopping experiences! On the other hand, it's fun because it makes us all try new things (and who knows, maybe find our next favorite vegetable!).

As a CSA farmer, I can tell you that our number one winter planning priority is really trying to nail down the best mix of crops for those boxes to try and make the majority of our members happy and excited by the veggies each week. We spend at least two full weeks each winter just working on this, assessing feedback and how things meshed for the past seasons, and planning out better mixes for the upcoming season. Yup, we plan out every single item in every share for the whole season, though Mother Nature doesn't always cooperate on making those plans work out!

In general, we envision the shares as having a nice mix of certain "types" of crops each week: something salad that you can enjoy raw, something that's a cooking green for all our greens lovers, at least one fruiting or podded crop (for all but the first weeks, as these guys tend to need warm weather!), at least one root crop, and usually one unique or herb sort of crop. During the height of the season when we have more options, we add in more of the fan favorite veggies (broccoli, carrots, and tomatoes), and on weeks where we have some of the more interesting crops or things we know that a number of folks won't like--fennel haters, we are looking at you! ;), we make sure to stock those swap baskets extra well!

This year we made a handy dandy graphic to help share a better sense of what will be in the boxes and in the U-Pick fields each month... let us know if you have any questions, have veggies you want to request, or if you want to sign up for the CSA!

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Are you stressed out? Anxious? Overwhelmed? Confession: sometimes so are we! (A farmer’s guide to building peacefulness on the farm and in the kitchen)

This winter I’ve worked part-time for the Northeast Organic Farming Association of NY, which plopped me down into an office a couple days a week (okay, it was my farm office so there was a cute puppy distraction hanging around) and sent me around to a number of food and farm conferences. Spending days in cars and windowless rooms gave me a HUGE refresher glug of appreciation about our farm and how special and beautiful it is being outside and surrounded by growing things!

Farms can be hectic and crazy places—we certainly know about stress between the weather, trying to cram a year’s worth of work into a six-month growing season, and the deep well of uncertainty and chance that lies at the root of farming… Will these seeds germinate? Will there be a hailstorm/drought/freeze/[fill in the blank with your disaster of choice]? Will folks want to eat the crops that we grow?

But even amidst the chaos of farming, there are these amazing moments of peace that overwhelm you sometimes… like when you are pulling a late night to finish planting in the dark, with the deep blue sky perfectly highlighting the trees and then a shooting star flares down… or when you've been with the crew looking down all day weeding a field and then look up at the end of the day to the feeling that everything is perfect for a moment… or all the thousands of little daily unexpected gifts like the glimpse of an osprey catching a fish from the pond, a fifteen minute migration of hundreds of thousands of red wing blackbirds, or even just the peace of the crops waving in the wind.

Things are crazy out there in the world now—we’ve talked with CSA members and market customers a lot about this in the past year. Things are so mean and toxic that many of us are tuning out social media and emails, which seems both understandable and healthy. We feel your stress, but at the same time as we join the crowd and tune out some things, we are also trying to figure out how to best share and spread the peacefulness and vitality of the farm.

We want our veggies to carry the sense of growing happy, out in nature, bringing some of their wildness into the kitchen so that every bite has a bit of that farming zen, of some calmness and sanity in the midst of nature’s or our human world's chaos. And even more, we want eating vegetables to be a fun and relaxing experience, and not cause folks any added stress about how to handle or cook them.

So what can we do to make farming more peaceful for us and for you? Here’s our plans for 2018:

Make using vegetables less scary—we know some of you are kitchen pros, but other folks find using the veggies harder, especially when pinched on time. We know this first hand, because we too sometimes have weeks where it’s easier to eat a bowl of cereal or grilled cheese for dinner rather than making something from the amazing veggies we have piled all around us.

That’s why we finally dredged up the nerve to start doing videos, especially in the kitchen. Videos have been one of our goals now for three seasons, but were intimidating because it involves being on camera (my phobia) and having a kitchen that doesn’t horrify all of you (it’s good now, but just wait till August rolls around). But since not everyone can make it to the farm or the market, we realized that this might be the best way to bring the vegetables to you. Also, on our personal sanity front, it takes a LOT of writing and thinking to get things like recipes or cooking techniques into words, and it’s so much faster to just demonstrate and record it!

The challenge for us is that while we know our way around the kitchen, we aren’t really pros. But we hope you will be patient with us as we pick up where last year’s veggie charts left off to explore some of the delicious classic preparations of vegetables. We are looking forward to pushing our own culinary boundaries with you.

Let us know if you have anything you struggle with in the kitchen or that you’d most like to see demonstrated and we will work on it for a future video!

Make the CSA as easy as possible for all of us—Besides focusing more on hands-on kitchen prep, we’ve started streamlining our CSA signup and management process and have it all on our website now. As the season gets nearer, we will also add a “Members” page on the website so everything is easy to find and access. We also really enjoyed getting out to our remote sites last year and plan to do that more regularly this summer, where we can bring more extras to each site and get to see everyone in person regularly.

We also are making the U-Pick garden our top priority this year—okay, I know that we said this last year, but this year we are putting one of our employees in charge of it, and their sole job one day a week will be to keep things all ship shape and boss us around to get things done. The U-Pick honestly has been a challenge the past two years, because in rough weather, we have to push it aside to keep the main CSA share crops going.

What we really came to appreciate this past year is how the U-Pick garden has so much importance beyond picking a few flowers. It’s the chance for our community to come see the farm and experience some of both the vibrant chaos and amazing peacefulness that somehow peacefully coexist. And equally important to our own sanity, it gives us a chance to see the farm fresh through your eyes as you enjoy it at the end of your work week.

And finally, we are hosting regular farm tours and three volunteer days this year for folks who have requested more time to get involved (thank you!). The regular monthly field tour will be one Friday every month during the U-Pick and CSA distribution, open to all who are able to come to pick some flowers and see what’s growing. We are also holding three volunteer days to help deadhead U-Pick flowers in July through September (the main task that overwhelms us that involves taking off the old flowers so that the plant keeps producing new ones, jam band music is optional).

We would love to hear your feedback—we always love pictures and suggestions, because it’s so helpful to have a fresh set of eyes looking at things. Over the next few months you can also find us sharing all the peaceful moments we can around the farm on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, this blog, monthly emails, at the winter farmers markets, or come by and snowshoe if you want!

Until later, we hope you have a peaceful day!

Maryellen, Matt, and Beulah [okay, Beulah is the opposite of peaceful and likely wishes upon you have an amazingly crazy 18-hour day filled with five other puppies, twelve disemboweled squeaky toys, a rabbit or two, and seven 10-year-olds throwing sticks non-stop]

Flashback to 2016: May!

Arlo as permanent guardian watching over the U-Pick fields

Gentler soil management with the "new" chisel plow--it helps keep soil biology intact!

Pattern for the summer starting--lots of wet feet keeping the irrigation going and crops growing!

Farmer self portrait, plowing under the winter cover crops that protected the soil from erosion.

Winter wheat and dandelions--building up the soil for future crops!

Needing rain but only getting rainbows!

High May Day--rich pasture grasses, wind in the windmills, and glorious sunny skies!

End of an era--started off the summer sadly saying good bye to our best farm dog ever...

Onion planters hard at "work"...

First pototo popping out of the ground!

New irrigation task: make sure to remove toads from the lines before you turn the water on!

Scallions thriving despite super dry conditions.

This year's piglets in their electric fence training pen, learning to stay inside!

Inspecting the drip irrigation on the onions. We are torn on using plastic mulch, but in this crazy dry summer, it definitely saved these onions!

This year's weed nemesis: Canadian thistle. Pulling it out one spiky plant at a time!

Opening up a beautiful new field in the far back of the farm--Maine (we name all our fields after states) will be our "main" field for 2017!

Tunnel tomato planting day! We use 10 year reuseable landscape fabric in here to trap in moisture, and increase tomato yields about 10 times over outside plants!

Piggy's first mud wallow! Pigs can't sweat so they rely on us making mud for them to stay nice and cool!

Pollinators buzzing everywhere, especially the hardy bumblebees (who outwork honeybees by miles)!

Irrigation pumps were a-buzzing too this summer, keeping plants alive despite skimpy rainfall!

Wrestling with row covers to protect the plants from pests before the next storm rolls through...

Teenage chickens, you aren't doing the roosting thing right! New hens need a few weeks to learn how to be chickens...

Some days are just disasters--this May we had a dust devil form and destroy about $3000 of row cover in less than 30 seconds...

Seeding an endless array of flats (620 or so this year)! We use the extra few weeks as a jumpstart to keep the veggies ahead of pest, disease, and weeds!

One of this year's new tools--a rolling row marker to save us time planting. We love it!

Can you see the evidence of this visitor? Need to get the henhouse far away from it...

Legions of squash and cucumbers, about 1 week out from being ready to transplant!

More of our favorite toady farm friends. This guy got relocated into the high tunnel, where he hopefully feasted on slugs!

This year's staff capital improvement favorite--the waterwheel. It saves employee knees and backs and time, as well as being mega-fun to use!

More farm friends--we love building habitat and providing spaces for all the wild things, some of which move a bit slower than others...

May on the farm in one image--baby plants, pest control row covers (and their hundreds of rock bag weights), weeding and more weeding, and a little bit of slug control...