Ch.. ch.. changes: Our First Big Covid Change on the Farm

Farming in 2020 has been weird mostly by not being weird.

Sewing cabbage leaves turned out to be a bit more difficult than expected. Duct tape to the rescue!

The world around us shut down, switched to virtual, masked up, and moved outside, all hugely different from normal. Most farms of our size, however, more or less trucked along like always—still working outside, usually at a distance from others, following food safety rules, and wearing scarfs against sun and cold half the time anyway. On the day to day level, Covid hasn’t changed that many of our physical operations. (Psychologically, yes, but that’s a whole other blog post!)

Harvesting storage carrots before the freeze (and check out that future rhubarb planting!)

Bizarrely, Covid made some aspects of being a small, direct to customer farmer a little better than before.

Kids are way more interested in vegetables and cooking (I am so excited to see what this group of kids cooks up in ten or fifteen years as they start living on their own!). And our customers, like we were ourselves, were a bit shaken at the initial rockiness of our supply chains.

I know that we are more thankful for being farmers (and I’ve been seeing so many of our members, neighbors, and community being thankful for having farmers around).

Sunrise always puts on a show, regardless of what else is going on in the world…

As the 2020 world flails deeper into dumpster fire territory, farming and gardening and growing things, farmers markets where we get together with other humans (distantly in open air), and CSA pickups are like a reminder of normal life, nice things, and good times.

So it’s belated that we have to make our first scary big change around Covid nine months in (because masks and distance and sanitizing aren’t really *big* changes). But we’ve decided not to attend our indoor winters farmers market this year as vendors.

Racing storm clouds to get the last outdoor farmers market harvest in…

First, don’t worry—we are still here and will be back in summer (or in-person at any event that can be held outside, because we are crazy northerners and willing to stand outside and sell veggies in upstate NY in winter!). Our fall/winter Extended CSA is still on, and we have online sales for farm pickup (Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays) and local delivery (Fridays).

And the great winter market is still going on the first and third Saturdays at the Legion in Cazenovia.

Tiller practice as we prep the greenhouse where next March’s harvests will come from…

As customers, we totally will go hit up the market.

It’s just from a vendor’s perspective of staying indoors in close quarters for five hours rather than fifteen minutes, we really had to examine our risk levels and tolerance. It’s one thing to know that you might have some pre-conditions, but another thing when data starts to show that your chances of not surviving Covid are higher than anticipated.

So we are still going to be farming and going to any markets where we can be outside, but are not going inside (except to zip in as a customer). Amid all the changes in so many peoples’ lives, this isn’t really a big thing, but it’s scary for us (because we love and rely on the winter market).

We hope you enjoy your shopping, inside or out, and hope that for local folks, you can check out our online ordering options for farm pickup or local delivery!

More sunrise shows… I can watch these all day!

2020 Wasn’t All Bad (on the Farm)!

I have to confess, most years I don’t blog as much as I want to in the summer because I’m too tired to write. But this year, it was more like I was too down to write, and I didn’t want to take that down-ness out into the world (because in 2020, who needs more of that?).

But I wrote, just keeping the less happy pieces off line, and I’ve been working on pulling them into something more like a look back onto the season. It feels easier to do, after this first round of frosts, when the fields are a little bit quieter, but I’m also a little bit more relaxed and able to breath—the brilliant sun that seems to never quit shining this year (a rarity here!) lightening up the softly turning leaves.

But now that it’s fall, it’s time for a big ole blog dump, starting with the sunshine times, because as in all moments, there were bright spots and joy on the farm…

We kicked off this year with a mid-May snowfall (remember that? Because I sure didn’t until I was looking through my pictures last week!)… Fortunately all those crop covers worked to keep the veggies alive and happy for early CSA shares and markets. And the early season wouldn’t be complete without a mask (or fifty)… the silver lining to making all the masks for our team was to remind me how much I enjoy sewing, and to inspire me to start sewing more farm schwag for next year!

Every year on the farm, more nature seems to pour in, for better or worse sometimes (I’d like to take a hard past on some of the pesky critters!). From rampaging foxes to hard working assassin beetles (good bugs that hunt and kill some of the veggie pests), there was plenty of wildlife to go around (and feed the next generations of bug hunters)!

Per usual up here along the escarpment, Mother Nature put on quite a show in the sky as well! Hands down, this was the sunniest, most pleasant to farm in summer we’ve ever had up here, and despite a shortage of rain, the pond held up well!

No year is complete without a great team, and Brooke, Rachel, and Angela helped us hold down the fort. Beulah was mostly along for comic relief and occasional majestic photo shoots.

But even in this crazy year, the vegetables are at the front of our minds… getting all the deliciousness we can from the fields out to folks’ bellies…

And we planted extra onions, potatoes, beets, carrots, and cabbage for the fall to keep the local food going longer!

And every season farming occurs as one piece in a longer term vision/picture of the farm… even as we harvest this year’s crops, we are working to make the farm more vibrant and healthy and functioning next year, no matter what the end of 2020 or 2021 brings us all! From soil testing and cover cropping, to building new sheds and trialing weed smothering tarps and tons of new varieties, there’s always something exciting going on at the farm!

We've Got a Plan for That

So, in the realm of things I never thought I’d have to write an email or farm post about, global pandemic is pretty high up on that list.

And yet here we all are.

For our CSA members and market customers trying to figure out your future eating, we wanted to let you know our farm plans.

First of all, we are doing a LOT of the things that come naturally to us as vegetable farmers—washing hands, social distancing, and planting all the things.

The greenhouse is up and humming, high tunnel planting started, and we are seeding up a storm, because that’s what farmers do. We all need to eat, and our goal is to do our best to keep providing healthy, delicious food to you, our community.

But like you, we are watching the news, worried about how Covid-19 might impact our older or immune-compromised family and friends, those with underlying health issues, or the many of us with jobs where you can’t work from home or take a leave from. We worry about the cracks showing in our fragile health care system and the household finances affected by the economy.

Yet it’s spring, and so we plant (or in Matt’s case, help Critz Farm make maple syrup).

Having worked before as a farm food safety educator, I sat through a slew of trainings and helped write a lot of farm food risk management plans. One of those trainers (thank you, Betsy!) emphasized that while you hopefully never need an emergency plan, when s#@! goes down, you will be thankful to have thought about it.

All the flats cleaned and ready to start seeding in!

And here we are, digging into that contingency plan:

• Our main focus is to keep on planting on like normal. Our goal as a farm is to grow healthy, delicious, local food, and get it to you, our community and customers, the best that we can, and in the safest manner possible.

• For farmers markets, it’s an evolving situation, but with two months to the start of summer markets, we have time to prepare, both as a farm and as a market. Some of the options we are looking at include: pre-bagging all of the food, taking online orders in advance, having extra folks there so one farmer handles the veggies and the other any money, and of course, a lot more sanitizing and hand washing! We will not be reusing bags, bands, or baskets this year (I know, we really want to cut down on waste, but we also want everything and everyone clean and safe).

• On the CSA front, we have contingency plans for distributions, depending upon how things look by summer. In the ultra-worst case scenario, we plan to deliver pre-bagged shares to porches/garages/etc, if folks are stuck in their homes. We haven’t worked out all the logistics on this because we really, really, REALLY don’t want things to get to that point in the world, but home delivery is on the table if needed. In the less than worse case scenarios, we will have lots of hand washing facilities at the pickup sites and around the farm.

• We also always build a buffer of a few weeks at the end of every season in case of bad weather. If things are unsettled because of Covid-19 all summer, this buffer will let folks take a week or two off the CSA when you have your hands full at home, and then make it up at the end of the season or into the fall. Likewise, if we have sick employees or are sick ourselves, this buffer allows us to stop distribution for a week or two until we are back at full health on the farm, and make up those shares in the fall. Again, we haven’t fully figured out the logistics of managing this, but we wanted to let you know that we are working on building in a bit more flexibility to the shares.

• Finally, we understand that there’s a lot of economic anxiety going on, and we have explored recurring payment options. For CSA, the idea of committing to a whole season helps us farmers manage our plantings and cash flow. But we totally understand the hesitancy folks might have to commit to a long-term relationship with a CSA veggie box right now when you aren’t sure what the future might bring. We do have the capacity to set up automatic monthly and bi-monthly payment plans that can help give your household a bit more financial mobility.

Yes, you’re nervous and we are nervous, and we hope we don’t need to dig into these plans. But we also all need to eat, so we will keep doing what we do best—growing healthy veggies, washing our hands a lot, and getting our farm’s bounty to you!

With peace and hope, Maryellen, Matt, and Hartwood Farm

The Lure of Seeds: Deciphering the Seed Catalog

One of the hardest things about farming is avoiding buying too many amazing seeds at this time of the year. Outside, it’s gray and gross and cold, but inside are fantastic catalogs filled with amazing color and mouth-watering beauty.

I try to control myself (it gets insanely expensive fast if I don’t!), but a few things always slip though… this year that heirloom red Romano bean just wouldn’t stop staring at me. Or all the other sprouting broccolis and cauliflowers that proliferated in the catalogs (guess we weren’t the only ones who had a delicious trial with them last year!). What about that new speckled lettuce? Or fancy new carrot? Or sweeter Sugar Snaps? And I can’t even look at tomatoes anymore.

But after years of buying, growing, and trialing seeds, I’ve finally learned to take some of the descriptions with a grain of salt.

For instance, last year a particular winter squash a particular winter squash enticed us with it’s claim as “the squash of choice for the apocalypse.” Surely, we thought, this would be a great option for our at times extreme site in Fenner? And if the world ends, at least we’d have seeds from one crop.

What we learned this description actually meant was a plant that easily grew 30 to 40 foot vines that reached across one field, across the road, and into the high tunnel where it attached itself to the eggplant and tomatoes. Each of these vines only held one fruit, which perfectly blended in with the grass, leading to multiple incidents involving mowers (mower-0, squash-2), tripping while carrying totes of tomatoes (a saucy scene), and at least five incidences of face planting, including one by the dog, at which point she savaged the offending squash (unsuccessfully—you need a power saw to cut into them). I will admit, their flavor is fabulous, but we aren’t growing those bad boys again unless the apocalypse really is nigh.

So in the interest of helping out fellow farmers and gardeners, here’s our guide to interpreting the real meaning of all that flowery language in your vegetable catalogs:

“Prolific.”

50/50 chance that you either get a nice decent supply of the crop, or that you get so much of the crop that your CSA members begin to threaten to shove it back where it came from or start a petition against it. (sorry, guys)

“Might self-seed.”

Definitely, for sure, and completely a 100% probability that everyone of the 400 million seeds created by this crop will come back and choke out all other living entities on that piece of ground for centuries. See: husk cherries, tomatillos, some tomatoes, and that unidentified flower that we grew in 2013 that never seemed to form a flower, yet somehow produced seedlings that keep regenerating today.

“Needs a long season.”

Won’t produce fruit north of the Mason Dixon line, but will grow big enough to smother out the hardworking and producing crops next to it, while convincing even the most hardened skeptic of a farmer that surely it will produce fruit next week, right? Aka, why we have sadly stopped trying to grow sweet potatoes up here in Fenner.

“Commercial standard.”

90% odds that it tastes like cardboard. See also:

“Better Flavor than other Varieties.”

We don’t want to emphasize this, but all our other varieties of this crop taste like cardboard.

“Fancy,” “Elegant,” or “Parisian.”

These fruits are going to be just enough smaller than other varieties to become a complete PITA to harvest, leading to fights among the crew over who has to pick them, which generally end up in comparison of hand sizes and forcing the smallest handed person into a harvest season of misery. (Matt always gets out of these, not that I’m bitter or anything!)

“Dependable” or “Reliable” or “Easy.”

Even if you have a brown thumb, you think you should be able to grow this. You pour your heart and soul and sense of self-worth into it for a season, and then when it doesn’t do well for you, it plunges you into deep gardening despair. [Pro tip for home gardener or gardener wanna-be mental health: sometimes those who are writing the descriptions are writing for a totally different place than where you live—don’t take it too hard!]

“Longer harvest period”

You won’t have to check on these every ten minutes to get them picked when they are perfectly ripe. Hopefully this also means that your poor CSA members don’t have to eyeball another 4 pound zucchini!

“Bold” or “Intense Flavor.”

At least one child will cry after eating this. Or maybe an adult. They then won’t make eye contact with you anymore at the farmers market for fear of being asked if they want more of the veggie. [Farmer pro tip: if engaging in hot pepper eating contests, make sure you get the first bite at the pepper since the tips are often less spicy than the middle!]

“Unique.”

No one, including you as the grower, will have any idea on how to use this vegetable. You can tell people to “just saute it,” but inside you ask yourself: can they really? Is this crop even edible or just a sick ploy to entice you to buy more seeds? [Funny thing, a few winters ago I bought a frozen package of spinach at Wegmans (I know, even veggie farmers start jonesing for veggies mid-winter) and it was disgusting. I ended up spreading out the leaves to examine them and realized that the whole package, which likely means whole trailer loads of frozen “spinach” was actually Garden Dock, a super common weed that vaguely looks like spinach. I guess even the big guys make mistakes?.]

“Heavy” or “Dense.”

One or more people on the farm will throw out their back while harvesting this, and it’s likely going to be you. Make sure you update your workers compensation policy in advance. On the bright side, at least it’s better filling out an accident report that the box was too heavy, rather than filling out one about how someone tripped over a post-apocalyptic squash!

I hope this helps fuel your seed dreams—we can’t wait to get our tasty starts to summer planted now!

And for those who wonder, we buy most of our seed from High Mowing Seeds out of Vermont or Johnny’s Selected Seeds out of Maine. But other companies that we love and recommend include Fruition Seeds and Hudson Valley Seed in NY, Baker Creek in Missouri, and Fedco Seeds in Maine.