By Andrea Yoder & Richard de Wilde
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| Rows of gorgeous Green Garlic! |
Spring is here and we’re just 3 weeks away from the first CSA deliveries of the 2021 season! Every day we see a little more green filling our valley as our wooded hillsides come out of winter hibernation. Despite the fact that we’ve had a quite chilly week with temperatures in the low thirties overnight, we would still describe this as an early spring. Things are changing quickly and the growing season is starting to take shape. Here’s a little glimpse of what’s happening on the farm.
Remember those gorgeous sunny, warm days back in March? Those were the days that jump started the garlic crop and we had to strip back the cover and loosen the mulch to make sure the sprouts could push through! The green garlic looks quite nice and we are planning to start harvesting some next week. Richard can’t remember ever putting green garlic in the first CSA box of the season, but it will be in the first boxes this year!
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| Unloading our first ramp harvest this week! |
You cannot talk about spring happenings at Harmony Valley Farm without talking about ramps and overwintered spinach. These are two crops many people, ourselves included, look forward to every spring. We started harvesting overwintered spinach last week and yesterday we did our first ramp harvest! We know everyone would like to receive these two items in the first few CSA boxes in May, and we hope we’ll be able to include them. Unfortunately, we’re at the mercy of Mother Nature and the season for both of these crops is starting a little early this year. So if you are one of those people who needs to get your fill of ramps and overwintered spinach before their short season is over, we encourage you to head to your local food co-op and stock up on these items now! If we are still able to harvest ramps in May, they will certainly be in your box. And that overwintered spinach? We are doing our best to manage the crop and hope to be able to time it just right so we can do a second harvest off these plants for the first few CSA deliveries.
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| Antonio hand-harvesting Overwintered Spinach |
We are also happy to report we had a very good harvest of overwintered parsnips and sunchokes. The parsnips are so sweet and delicious, they need nothing more than to be tossed with oil, salt and pepper before roasting them. Our spring sunchoke harvest was very plentiful and we’ve been staying busy washing and packing them for our wholesale partners. Not only are they an important part of our spring diet, they also help us financially while we’re getting the season underway.
Last week we did our first plantings of salad mix, baby spinach, arugula, cilantro, radishes, baby bok choi, dill, hon tsai tai and baby white turnips. While we plan to plant these crops in the first week of April, we seldom have the opportunity to actually do so! The radishes are already up and we’re crossing our fingers that they will be ready for the first week of deliveries!
While we are anxious to plant more crops, it takes awhile to get fields ready in the spring. Over the past two weeks the guys have been working hard to spread compost and minerals, subsoil, rototill and shape beds for planting. This year we partnered with a new supplier for our compost and we’re very pleased with the product. We had to pay a little more for it, but it is well-made, easy to spread and for the first time in many years we have had favorable conditions to be able to spread compost on all of our fields in the spring! We also invested heavily in mineral applications, including trace minerals. Adequate fertility in the soil is a key to producing delicious vegetables, but it’s also important for producing healthy plants that pass their nutrients on to us! We were also able to put minerals on our pastures where we graze our animals as well as the fields where we grow hay to feed them in the winter. Just like humans, animals can taste the difference and always favor the mineral rich parts of the pastures. I guess you could say they are grass connoisseurs and definitely have discerning palates!
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| Germ testing beet seed in the greenhouse to test seed quality |
As we finish preparing fields, we’ll move on to planting. We hope to see warmer temperatures next week which will be more favorable for direct seeding beets, carrots, parsnips, chard and possibly even the first peas. We did start transplanting onions a week ago. It takes quite awhile to plant all of our onions and we hope to finish them today. We are anxious to transplant more crops including the first broccoli and cauliflower, kohlrabi, cabbage and leeks. We are also anticipating a shipment of strawberry and asparagus plants today, purchased from Nourse Farm in Massachusetts. It’s already time to plant next year’s strawberry field!
While we’ve completed about three-fourths of the plantings on our greenhouse plan for this year, we still have plenty of greenhouse work to complete over the next few weeks. Next week we’re scheduled to plant our first tomato seeds in the greenhouse and we hope to plant zucchini before this week is finished. It’s also time to transplant the herb packs we’ll deliver for you in mid May!
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| Leonardo, Antonio and Isidro transplanting peppers |
So who is doing all this work? Good question! We welcomed back 24 of our field crew who comes from Mexico on agricultural guest worker visas. We were happy to see them on March 29, but from a distance as they had to quarantine due to their recent travel. Thankfully they had an uneventful quarantine period and everyone remained healthy and well without so much as even a cold! While we all wish the pandemic would move into the past, we also acknowledge it is still very much a concern at present. Our crew members understand the importance of how our individual choices impact the work we’re able to do at the farm and they did their part to minimize their risks of exposure both before they departed their homes as well as during their travels. Their efforts were clearly effective and we are thankful they are all in good health, ready and eager to work! We are looking forward to welcoming another group of workers the last week in April and have our fingers crossed that they will arrive without any delays. We are also grateful for the opportunity to work with Family Health La Clinica, an organization that offers mobile health services to migrant workers. They have been an invaluable resource for our farm as they have helped us navigate managing our workspace throughout the pandemic to keep our workers safe. They will be coming to the farm to administer vaccinations to any crew members who would like to receive it. In the meantime, we continue all of our precautionary practices to do the best we can to remain healthy so we can all keep farming!
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We’ve received several emails from CSA members inquiring about the use of plastic liner bags in the CSA boxes this year. Just as we are continuing our precautionary practices on the farm, we will also continue to take a precautionary approach to CSA deliveries as well as with CSA pick up procedures. While we hope that we’re collectively making forward progress in moving past the pandemic with vaccinations, etc, we also feel that we need to continue to be precautionary and would like to continue to offer a safe pick-up option for all our members knowing some of you are high-risk individuals or live with high-risk individuals. We realize the concerns for transmission of the virus on touch surfaces may be less than we thought one year ago, however using the plastic liner bag in the CSA boxes serves other purposes as well. We want to limit the time each member is in the site and continue to ask that only one member enters the site at a time. The use of the bag also helps achieve a quick in and out pick up. Thus, we will continue to use the plastic liner bags for now. We’ll certainly reassess as the year goes on and if at some point we feel it is appropriate to discontinue using them we will do so.
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| Repurpose CSA bags as covers for storing artwork! |
In the meantime, we do ask all CSA members to continue to follow the pandemic procedures we laid out last year to facilitate a quick, safe CSA pick-up. This includes wearing a mask when you go to pick up your share, physically distancing at the site and only one person enters the site at a time. As for the bags, we encourage you to find ways to repurpose them in your own homes or communities. Last year we compiled a list of ways you, our members, were creatively repurposing them in your homes. You can view that list HERE, and we ask that you continue to send us your creative ideas as you find more ways to repurpose them. If your collection goes beyond what you can use in your own home, you may also consider checking with other organizations in your community such as your local food pantry, schools, community centers, etc. They may be able to use them for projects, etc. in their organizations and might appreciate the donation! At the very least, the bags are recyclable.
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| Transplanting onions one week ago.... just before it started to rain! |
This certainly is not everything we are doing on the farm, but at least it gives you a snapshot. We are looking forward to growing food for you and your family this year and hope you are ready to start cooking and eating some tasty meals! We do still have room to accept more sign-ups for all of our delivery areas, so if you haven’t signed up yet we encourage you to do so! If you have a friend, neighbor, or know of someone who is interested in joining, please refer them to us. We will keep adding members until we’re officially sold out!
Enjoy the rest of April and we’ll see you in May!
