By Farmer Richard de Wilde
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| Fall Garlic Planting photo by Katie Koranda |
Fall is a very important, and somewhat challenging, time of year for us. Not only are we dancing around the weather in an attempt to finish our fall harvest, we are also making decisions and preparing for next season. In fact, we’re already planting crops for next year! We are happy to report the 2021 garlic crop is planted! We had selected the biggest and best bulbs from this summer’s harvest, over 1,000#, and last week we “cracked” it into individual cloves and planted the biggest ones which will produce bulbs of garlic that we’ll harvest next year. The smaller cloves were planted as well, but we planted them thick and will harvest them early in the season when they produce green garlic. Garlic is a crop we grow only for you, our CSA members, with the exception of green garlic and garlic scapes which we do also sell to distributors and retail stores. We invest a lot of time, money and resources into a crop of garlic. In fact, we’ve already invested about $10,000 of garlic that we saved from this year’s crop. Is it worth it? Absolutely—we all get to eat garlic nearly every week next year!
Garlic is not the only crop we’re investing in for next year. Before the end of December we’ll order strawberry plants so we can put in a new strawberry field next spring. We won’t harvest from this new planting until 2022 and 2023. We are also planning to plant another asparagus field and will increase our rhubarb planting. Both of these crops require two years of growth before we even think about harvesting from them. As you can see, farming requires planning and investment! However, with resources and a plan in place, we are very capable to execute.
Weather has been much more favorable this year than in recent years, but we are experiencing a cold fall with precipitation in the forecast. Given the garlic is planted and the snow and rain wasn’t forecasted until Tuesday, we made sunchoke harvest and planting a priority for the first part of our week. We are so pleased that in one long day we were able to plant 2 acres of sunchokes for next year! I know, this is not as popular of a crop as garlic, but it’s a very valuable and important crop for our farm and we hope you will all come to appreciate it along with us as you find new ways to enjoy these tasty tubers!
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| Raddicchio & Lettuce, protected from cold under a double cover with hoops |
We have lettuce, escarole and radicchio under a double cover with hoops to keep the covers from resting on the plants. Even if we see temperatures in the mid to low twenties these crops should be well-protected. Our hemp crop is harvested and dried. We’re now ready to embark on the trimming phase of this project so we can send it to the processor to turn it into CBD oil which will be available for purchase in December. Of course, we can’t forget about the Brussels sprouts which are looking quite nice this year! We are caught up on harvest of mature cabbages, cauliflower, broccoli and Romanesco. There are significantly more remaining in the field, so we’re hoping they make it through this cold spell and we get a few more nice warm days!
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| CSA Box packing line, pandemic style with masks! June 2020 |
As we finish this season and look ahead to a new year, we understand there are many uncertainties we face, one of which is a burning question on our minds, “What will the demand for our CSA be in 2021?” Early in my career I saw the wisdom in having diverse markets established, thus in addition to growing for CSA we also grow for wholesale distributors and retail stores. Back in 2009 we were at the peak of our CSA membership and were packing 1200 boxes per week. Unfortunately, after that peak year we started to see a gradual decline in membership which had dropped to about 650 boxes in 2019. As these numbers dropped we increased our wholesale sales to make up the difference. This decline in support for CSA was not isolated to our farm alone. In fact, it caused several longstanding area farms, who did a nice job with CSA, to throw in the towel and quit growing for CSA. At the start of this year, we had a goal of increasing our membership in 2020. In fact, we needed to increase our membership this year in order for CSA to remain a viable and sustainable part of our business. We knew we could not continue to run trucks that were half empty and operate at 50% efficiency while carrying a lot of fixed overhead expenses. We committed to hang in there for one more year and were not willing to quit even when many of our peers were doing so. We still believe CSA holds an important place in our society and were confident it was not going extinct. Our direct connection to customers through our CSA program has been undeniably the best thing for our farm since we started back in 1993. We didn’t anticipate it would take a pandemic to build our CSA membership back up, but we’re happy we’ve been able to grow food for all of you this year! We did not know how the pandemic would impact our CSA, but it was very clear that you, our customers, wanted to source your food from our farm and were depending on us to produce vegetables and meat for your families!
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| Purple Kohlrabi Field, June 2020 |
So as the pandemic escalated this spring, we quickly established protocols for a safe delivery and pick-up process after spending hours on Zoom calls and webinars talking with other farmers around the country. And then the phone started ringing, the emails started flooding in, and when we were just weeks away from our first delivery we found ourselves surrounded by piles of order forms! Our dream was coming true, but we were faced with processing the amount of orders we typically would’ve processed over a few months in the course of just a few weeks while trying to get our spring planting done, conduct annual crew training and get everything ready for our new pick up procedures. It was a challenge to say the least, but one we are most grateful to have accomplished!
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Summer CSA Box Contents, August 2020 |
We ended up more than doubling the amount of boxes we packed this year in comparison to 2019. In fact, we’ve surpassed our highest number in history as we’ve packed over 1200 boxes most weeks of this season and will pack nearly 1500 boxes a week in November and December. We know how to pack CSA boxes, we have over 25 years of experience doing so. The challenge we were faced with was that we were planning and planting for about 800 boxes and quickly found ourselves committed to packing 1200! We had a hard time turning away people who just wanted a safe option for sourcing healthy food, especially at a time in our history when healthy food is so vital! Instead, we changed our plans at the last minute and were able to accommodate the increased CSA demand. Dare I say, all things considered, we did quite a good job of packing some very nice boxes this year! That is a reflection of not only farming experience, but also the effort and skill put forth by our professional, dedicated crew members who have gone above and beyond this year and for whom we are most grateful. You, our members, have also done a good job with pick-ups! We added quite a few new members to our CSA this year, and many of you are trying CSA for the first time ever. We were a little nervous how things would go given the need to change our pick up process and helping so many new members figure out the system. But honestly, we’ve had very few issues at pick up sites and everyone has been very cooperative! So, despite the challenges, we’ve had a pretty good year and CSA continues to be our tried and true preferred market for which to grow!
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| Travel the world through cooking & food! Salerno Style Italian Grilled Eggplant |
As we continue to move forward, we need your input to help us plan for next year. I have read several different reports indicating a dramatic rise in the number of consumers who are now cooking at home in comparison to pre-pandemic days. Will these behaviors continue? Will people continue to value organic, healthy food even as they become numb to the COVID-19 pandemic and as it fades into our memories? Most likely it will be awhile before this pandemic fades away, and no one knows when the next pandemic may fall upon us. We can only guess what next year will bring, but we want to ask you “Will you continue to source vegetables through our CSA? Which shares do you plan on purchasing? Do you have friends, neighbors, etc who may be interested in joining?” We can do a better job and be more prepared as we start the season if we know who we’re growing for!
We expect that COVID will still be with us and we are prepared to continue the same safety protocols on our farm and at our CSA delivery sites as we’ve implemented this year. These protocols have been a large expense for us in both additional labor as well as supplies. However, these protocols are also what has minimized the risk for contracting the virus for all of us, both on the farm and at CSA sites, so we see no option aside from continuing them indefinitely. Who pays for the cost of safe food? We have promise that our Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan will be forgiven. We also have applied for the USDA’s Coronavirus Food Assistance Program 2, but have not received any payments to date. Our feeling is if the government comes through, then your tax dollars have covered our COVID expenses.
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| The bounty of summer fills the cooler! August 2020 |
What we need most is the support of our community to back us in 2021. With your support we look forward to another good year! In this week’s “What’s In the Box” email we’ve included a short survey that will only take you a few minutes to complete. We would appreciate if one member from each household would complete the survey. The purpose of the survey is to see how many of our current members are planning to continue with our CSA in 2021 and which shares you are planning to purchase. We are not planning to make any major changes to our program or delivery season. We are still evaluating prices and need to confirm our delivery sites, but aside from minor tweeks, you can expect a similar season as you experienced this year. We are not looking for payment or a formal sign-up form now, just a forecasted commitment. This information will be valuable as we continue to craft crop plans, make seed purchases and determine acreage we need to commit to CSA crops versus other land that we can use for our primary wholesale crops. November, December and January are the months in which we lay the ground work for the 2021 season, so your input now is so very important to us!
In closing, thank you for joining us for the 2020 CSA season. It’s been an interesting year, to say the least, but we’re thankful for your support, encouraging notes of gratitude and for the opportunity to fulfill our contribution to this world. We hope you’ve found nourishment for your body and your soul with each delivery you’ve received. Thank you in advance for sharing a few minutes of your time to complete the survey. In exchange we’ll do our best to deliver bountiful boxes again in 2021!
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