(CSA Newsletter: Week 18)
Meet this week’s vegetables:
Last Thursday brought a bitter end to an otherwise beautiful, productive week of work out here on the farm. You most likely experienced the big storm in your own way. Here’s what happened here:
We spent Wednesday and Thursday taking care of the many new plantings we’d put in the ground over the previous two weeks: trellised the tomatoes, weeded lots of stuff, and diligently irrigated during the gorgeous warm sunny weather. Things looked good.
Thursday afternoon we received calls about a big storm heading our way. We naively dismissed the warning, because we’ve often heard talk of big thunderstorms headed north that never arrive here.
By four o’clock, however, a truly ominous looking cloud filled the southern sky. We were finished hoeing the cucumbers and began to think more seriously about what those clouds might be bringing our way. We looked around, tightened some of the ropes on our field greenhouse, picked up scattered tools, and headed up to the house for the day.
At 4:20, the four of us watched the storm hit. The best words to describe what we saw: dramatic, intense, forceful, dark, powerful. Strong wind blasted out of the south, bringing with it driving rain. Instantly, everything changed on the farm.
At first, we were a little excited by the change in weather. But we soon realized that our tomato field house was bursting at the seams. This modified poly-hoop house is what we call a ‘three season’ type of greenhouse. The poly is held on with ropes, and the resulting structure performs fine during mild normal late spring to early fall weather — but it can’t stand up to extremely strong gusts. This storm brought extremely strong sustained winds and gusts (later we heard that Mac measured 75 mph winds!).
We ran out to do our best to salvage the house and/or the tomatoes and peppers inside of it. We tried to pull the poly down, to eliminate the kite effect, but the winds were whipping and snapping it 40+ feet in the air above our heads. As we worked, the storm picked up intensity, driving more rain and hail into our backs. Eventually, we could no longer hear each other screaming back and forth and could barely see 100 feet away. After 10 or so minutes or struggling, we realized the futility of our actions (and the danger) and retreated to shelter.
We were soaked through to our skin. Casey and I left enormous puddles all over our house as we peeled off dripping wet clothing and changed into dry clothes. The storm continued raging for another 10 or 15 minutes. We could barely see out of windows to the south, which were covered with continual sheets of water and hail. We watched puddles and rivers form on our fields as the rain fell incredibly quickly.
Eventually, things quieted down. The storm didn’t even last an hour, but our farm was completely changed. Almost all our crops were flattened to the ground in a clear pattern from south to north. The texture of the ground itself had changed. Before, the surface was loose and made out of many different sized chunks of soil. After the hard rain and hail, the surface was incredibly smooth and looked like the beach after a receding tide. The hail battered most of our crops as well, especially our mature tender greens: lettuces, chard, bok choy. You’ll see marks from the hail on almost everything in this week’s share: dings on the peas, slashes through some salad mix leaves, broken leaves on the lettuce.
Fortunately, most of our long-season summer and fall crops are still small and were damaged lightly enough that they’ll most likely recover. They will probably be set back by the stress of the event, which we hope won’t make them more susceptible to disease and pests while they regrow. The hard rain also splattered mud on everything, so even the less damaged crops look a lot less pretty than before.
We’re grateful for the help of our employees Daniel and Erika and a few other special friends who came out on Saturday to help us start cleaning up the farm. With their help, we hosted a highly productive workday. Our crew picked up branches that had blown into our fields, started taking apart the tomato house so we could rebuild it again, cleaned up row cover that blew off of beds, staked the seed crop that blew over, and sowed over 90 flats of vegetables. The sowing was partly for fall, but also partly to feel like we’re moving towards good quality vegetables again. Doing something positive felt like a success after such an enormous dramatic setback. As with all aspects of farming, our work can’t produce instant results — the newly sown seeds will take time to grow, and the crops in the field will take time to recover. But we’re moving in the right direction now.
We’re also extremely grateful at times like this that we are a CSA farm. While we’re still very disheartened by the damage, we also don’t have to worry about a significant loss of income too. Even though we’d always prefer to give you absolutely perfect, beautiful vegetables, we also know that our CSA members would rather receive slightly damaged food than no vegetables at all. Thus, our farmer-eater relationship can continue even during rough times. If we were primarily a wholesale or market farm, we would have little to no flexibility in dealing with imperfect produce — it’d be an almost complete loss.
This week, we’ve amazingly managed to scrape together enough good tasty vegetables to fill the share to full value. In the three and a half years that we’ve been producing vegetables for the CSA, we’ve so far never had to dip below our promised weekly value. Hopefully we’ll continue to be able to do so, but the aftermath of the storm is still uncertain, and we hope that you will embrace the reality of this extreme event if future weeks are lighter than normal. We’re still watching and waiting to see how this turn of events affects the season and the harvests. Thank you for your patience, generosity, and understanding as we progress forward together.
But the weather can only keep us down for so long. We’re smiling again on the farm. And, how can we not, when we still love our work?! Despite the damaged veggies, we hope that you too delight in this week’s share of yummy spring treats. The fava beans are one of our favorite late spring delicacies, so make sure you try them out.
More than ever: thank you, thank you, thank you for supporting real local agriculture! And, enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
