(CSA Newsletter: Week 34)
Meet this week’s vegetables:
We still have eleven more weeks of CSA harvests left in 2009, but thanks to your surveys we are already actively reflecting on this year’s season. Reading the survey responses has been very fun — thank you to everyone who has responded so far (if you haven’t responded yet, please feel free to do so when you have the time).
Most of the feedback we received from CSA members was positive and right in line with what we’ve been seeing from our vantage point: a continued improvement in the quality and quantity of CSA vegetables. After three years of scrambling all season long to catch up with our own goals, this year it finally felt like we hit our stride. We expanded the CSA but we also stopped going to market, so our overall increase in production was minor compared to some previous years. Additionally, we hired our two employees, Erika and Daniel, effectively bumping our labor power at the same time. The two combined gave us so much more time and energy than we’ve had before. We felt like we were able to really focus on producing high quality vegetables for the CSA.
Overall, we saw a continued increase in the quality of vegetables this year. It was probably a less dramatic shift than in any other year, simply because some of those changes were very significant. Here on the farm, we especially loved many of the over-wintered greens (cabbage and kale rapini in late winter are so sweet!), spring cauliflower, cucumbers, sweet peppers, sweet corn (our biggest ears yet!), the yellow beans, eggplant, and sweet potatoes. We were also very pleased that we managed to fill the CSA shares through the winter and spring, in spite of weathering through a particularly cold and nasty winter.
However, there were a few areas that didn’t meet our goals. This spring was a bit of struggle for many reasons: inadequately prepped ground, weed pressure, craziness in our life, and less gentle weather that we’d have liked. As a result, we were disappointed by the small quantities of peas and almost complete absence of some of our favorite spring greens: arugula, spinach, and Asian greens. Fortunately, we have plans for preventing a similar series of spring crop frustrations next year.
We were also disappointed that we never had enough melons at once to share them with the CSA. We’re still uncertain about what exactly doomed our melon crop, but we think it was connected to the fierce wind and hailstorm that attacked our farm on June 4 of this year. That storm represents a low point in the season, when we watched many of our crops be completely destroyed (including some of those delicious spring greens I mentioned just now). It also set back many of our longer-term crops, including the melons and cucumbers. We were able to replant some crops and nurse others back to health (a big success!), but apparently the melons were too tender to be fully revived. We’re always trying to figure out ways to mediate possible extreme weather events, but they’re unfortunately unpreventable.
In terms of things we can control, we’re also contemplating how to ‘deal’ with some of our prolific summer fruiting crops in future years. Crops such as zucchini, summer squash, cucumbers, and green beans have to be continually picked in order to continue producing reliably good fruit. For us, that reality means a lot of time each week spent picking, picking, picking. For the CSA, it means the possibility of mid-summer monotony (which a few people mentioned on their survey responses). Since we don’t have a clear idea of who rejoices each week we give out zucchini and who shudders, we err on the side of giving it all out. This usually bumps the value of the week’s harvest way above what you’ve paid for, which we figure will help make up for people who just can’t bring themselves to eat more beans. But, even with that, some folks get bored. We’ll keep thinking about possible solutions to this quandary as we go through winter and look towards another summer.
On another positive note, having more time and labor this season has also given us the opportunity to work on important, non-harvest farm work. Some of what we have accomplished are things you can’t see each week at pick-up but are very important for the future sustainability and health of our farm. For example, for the first time ever we have been able to actively manage our fallow acreage. We leave over half our acreage in fallow each year, and this year we were able to carefully tend that ground by sowing cover crops, irrigating and mowing through the entire season. Now we’re going into the rainy season with well established clover and grass cover crops that will continue to grow and enrich the soil all winter. This is a big step towards achieving our long-term goals of a plant-based (i.e. legume) fertility system on our farm. We’d love to someday ‘make’ all the nitrogen our farm needs through clovers and other legumes!
In conclusion, when we reflect on the 2009 season so far, we’re very pleased. We feel like the two big decisions of the year — to focus on the CSA and to hire employees — have been good ones for our continually evolving farm business. In fact, so far we don’t have many significant changes planned for next year. We feel good about the CSA concept, our long 45 week CSA season, the pick-up system, and the size of our farm. The two minor changes we do have planned are to build a strong permanent hoop house for our tomatoes (since the moveable one has now fallen down at some point every single year we’ve used it), and decrease the total number of participants in the CSA ever so slightly (from 125 down to around 100). Don’t worry! If you want to return, you will be guaranteed a spot! But we might not be pulling new members from our waiting list to fill any empty spots. (We will give you the opportunity to officially sign up for 2010 in just a few weeks.)
Why the slight decrease in CSA size? We feel like something around 100 shares is about right for our farm’s acreage and infrastructure. While we have more acreage than we crop each year, we want to preserve that fallow system and avoid the temptation of cropping more and more ground every year. Our season is very long, so even 100 shares represent a lot of vegetables for us to grow and harvest over the year.
Also, if we hire two employees again next year, we’ll still be a little short on labor compared to 2009. Why? If you haven’t noticed yet at pick-up, I (Katie) am seven months pregnant with our first baby — a very special crop to tend indeed! Baby is due to arrive on the farm sometime in December. We’ll see whether the big event happens before or after the final CSA pick-up. The last few weeks of this season could be exciting and somewhat out of the ordinary, but Daniel and Erika will be more than prepared to keep the veggies flowing even if Casey and I aren’t around for a week or two. We hope you all will be patient and understanding if there are any blips in the usual smooth CSA routine.
Either way, having a baby around next year will certainly change everything! So, we’re trying to be very realistic about our goals and not take on anything significantly new or different. We hope our big life transition can happen without disrupting the quality and continuity of this awesome CSA farm we started in 2006.
Thanks to all of you for being such a significant part of making this farm possible. As we read through the surveys, we were both struck by how incredibly awesome our farm community is. We feel so blessed to be able to sell all our vegetables directly to wonderful people living here in Yamhill County. As we reflect at the close of each season, one thing is always consistent: we are continually grateful for the Community Supported Agriculture model. Our CSA is such a real, vibrant, thriving entity. Thank you for being an integral part of our farm! And, as always, enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
Payment reminder: for those of you who are on the four or three payment plan (depending on when you signed up), your final payment is due by the end of this week (or ASAP). Check your original invoice for the payment amount (either $225 or $200), or check with Katie at pick-up.
Also: We’re moving soon! We have one more week of pick-up at our current location and then we move down the street to the inside of the YCAP Food Bank warehouse. The first pick-up at YCAP will be on October 13.
