Another cold week

(CSA Newsletter: Main Season Week 3)

Meet this week’s vegetables:

I’m writing this newsletter early on Monday. Casey is outside cultivating our celeriac (which has miraculously recovered from the heat wave burn!). He went out earlier dressed in just a t-shirt and down vest and then quickly returned, shivering, to grab his winter hat and windbreaker running jacket. It’s cold outside. Very, very cold.

Fortunately, we had a nice break from the chilly weather yesterday (our day off) — I’m sure the plants loved the warm sun as much as we did. But most of the week our farm has seen below average temperatures, hanging out in the low to mid-50s. Thursdays’ market was especially uncomfortable, as we didn’t quite bring enough clothes to stay warm against the biting wind. By the end of the day, my arms and legs had begun cramping from shivering to stay warm. When we arrived home that night, we built our first woodstove fire in over a month.

It’s still June, right? A farmer friend of ours recently titled a blog entry, ‘Juneuary.’ I wouldn’t go quite that far, but it definitely feels more like March or April than June.

Some aspects of the week’s weather were welcome, however, such as the inch and a half of precipitation. We’re having problems with our well again, and it came to a head last Friday when the pump installer came out to investigate the source of small rocks we’ve been finding clogging our sprinklers. The entire bottom of the well, including the pump, were clogged once again with sand. The pump installer made a few adjustments that we’re hoping will reduce the velocity of water movement at the bottom of the well (thus leaving the sand where it belongs), but we came to the conclusion that our well needs more serious work than the pump installer can do. We need to completely re-develop (or develop for the first time) the well.

Fortunately, we now have a good lead on doing so, but this has been an on-going source of frustration and stress for us. We thought that maybe this year we wouldn’t have to worry about running out of water or having our well poop out on us, but that doesn’t seem likely now. Getting anything done to the well will probably not happen until the end of the irrigation season, so we’ll be limping along again with a mostly not functional well and the surface water (which we haven’t begun to use yet and had hoped not to use this year at all). The fact that it was pouring the day we received this news definitely buffered the shock.

Friday’s rain also put a temporary deferral on our fieldwork, which allowed us to attend to other pressing matters, such as our need for a new delivery vehicle. Since the CSA main season and market have begun, we’ve realized that we have now officially maxed out the capacity of our E350 cargo van. ‘The Beast’ (as we’ve affectionately called it this last year) has served us well, despite its broken window, broken horn, and broken power steering. But it’s full now twice a week, so we’re researching our next options. On Friday, we looked at two slightly larger delivery vehicles: an older ‘stepvan’ (similar to UPS or FedEx vehicles) and a newish ‘cube van’ (smallish box-style delivery truck on a van chassis).

Making these big purchasing decisions always overwhelms us, especially when concerning vehicles. We worry about buying a big expensive problem vehicle that will drain the rest of our finances to fix. In this case, we were also just concerned about choosing a type of vehicle that might not work out in the long run (based on hauling capacity, drive-ability, etc.).

So, we decided to tap into our large farm community’s experience base and emailed a bunch of farmer friends asking for their thoughts. Man, people are great. Farmers are great. Email is great.

Within 24 hours, we had received three recommendations for a entirely different style delivery vehicle: an Isuzu ‘cab-over box truck.’ So, we’re redirecting our search and hope to find something within the next few weeks. (Update: we bought one Monday afternoon!)

As always, we have much to think about and many possible future expenses ahead of us. Farming is more expensive than we ever anticipated. Fortunately, it is also more rewarding (financially and personally) than we anticipated as well. It does work out, even though moments like this week can be trying. Even as we faced challenges, we were also rewarded at the same time. Market, despite the cold rainy weather, was great. Our truck search is hopeful and was an opportunity to connect with some distant farmer friends. And, after the rain ended, we went for a thoughtful field walk on Sunday and saw beautiful growth everywhere! We should be harvesting peas and broccoli next week for the CSA and carrots aren’t far behind. These are very hopeful notes in an otherwise slow season.

We hope that you all are keeping warm and dry this week. We also hope that this week’s share fills your belly with spring’s sweet goodness. Enjoy the vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla