(CSA Newsletter: Week 21)
Meet this week’s vegetables:
At the end of last summer, we here at Oakhill Organics faced a tough decision. We were realizing that we’d taken on too much for our small farm: our market sales kept going up, and our CSA was continually growing in demand. We couldn’t keep up with both venues without significantly expanding, something we weren’t ready to do with our land and infrastructure limitations. So, after much analysis and mulling, we decided to become a CSA-only farm (with a few restaurant sales on the side).
Although it was very strange to not prepare for market this summer, the streamlining has allowed us to be tremendously productive in the fields. We now have four plus days for doing ‘field’ work (planting, weeding, etc.) instead of two and a half. The difference is continually startling to us, when we realize we once again have actually completed the tasks on our weekly ‘to do’ list.
Although we’re still learning so much about the best way to manage our farm, we are no longer falling behind the way we did the last three seasons. Back then, once market season began, our time became extremely limited for anything other than highly urgent tasks (usually harvesting, planting, and weeding). Until market ended again, we rarely had time to catch up on mowing, extra ground prep, or infrastructure projects.
But, the tides are turning. We’re hoping that this year sets a new precedent. The combination of more time and added help from our hired employees has completely changed our ability to keep up with the less urgent (but still incredibly important) tasks.
For example, this week we tackled a project that has been on our ‘to do’ list for almost two seasons: building a new, bigger cooler for post-harvest veggie storing.
When we harvest vegetables in the warm season, they come out of the field incredibly warm (farmers call this phenomenon ‘field heat’), and our first task is to cool them as quickly as possible for best storage and freshness.
For us, the first step in cooling is usually a dunk/soak in a clean bathtub of cold clean well water. (This serves the second function of washing clean many of our veggies.) The water helps start the cooling process quickly, but for best chilling, we need a cold place to store the vegetables until we have to transport them to town. Ideally, we want to bring their temperature down below 40° and keep it there for as long as possible.
In 2006 we built a simple inexpensive cooler structure that we have used up until this week. It’s an insulated 4’x5’x7’ stick-framed moveable shed with an air conditioner unit mounted in the side. The air conditioner’s thermostat is broken (so that it can cool below 55°), and we have it plugged into a greenhouse thermostat to regulate the temperature. The system works quite well; however, with the expansion of our CSA harvest this year, our Monday/Tuesday harvest has outgrown the space threefold. The last few weeks, we’ve had to pull chilled product out of the cooler in order to make room for newly harvested veggies, which sort of defeats the point.
We’d been planning to build a bigger cooler since 2007 (we even bought a larger air conditioner unit and new thermostat system that fall), but the project keeps getting put off. Last summer we were simply too busy, and in the winter the urgency of chilling hot vegetables lessens. But as the weather began to heat up again, the urgency returned. Last week, we were trying to find cool shade under our walnut tree to keep our many, many bins of greens and lettuce cool.
So, we did. Wednesday morning, we started framing (we’d already poured the slab foundation a few weeks back), and late on Thursday the cooler was operational. We still have a few finishing details to make it completely air tight and ready for winter weather, but it works!
The new cooler is a similar design: stick frame construction and super insulated. We have a slightly different thermostat system, called the CoolBot, which was designed by a small farmer on the east coast. And the best part — the new cooler is an 8 x 8 x 8 cube, giving us over four times as much chilling space as we had before. Awesome!!!!!!!!!!
We’re very excited. We’re excited because we have more than sufficient cooler space to keep your veggies in the best possible shape. But, we’re also excited that we had the time and energy to work on this project in late June. It’s hard to imagine making that possible when we were trying to do the CSA, attend market, and do restaurant sales every single week.
Just to make it clear: refocusing our farm’s energy hasn’t made farming easy or simple. But our continual task list doesn’t feel quite so out of proportion with the amount of time and energy available to us. We feel infinitely saner, especially in hard moments such as the storm last month. We have much more flexibility in our schedule for dealing with whatever comes up: whether it’s been planned for two years (the cooler) or is completely unexpected and scary (the storm). Hoorah!
Enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
