Rolling Out 2017 CSA Shares!

2016 Vegetable Share

It’s hard to believe this is our final week of CSA deliveries and Christmas will be here in less than two weeks! As we wrap up another year, we are already looking ahead to another CSA growing season. Regardless of how a year may unfold, we always strive to be prepared each year, with a plan for success in hand. 2017 will be no different and we’re anxious to put our plans in action and see what will unfold.

We’re excited to roll out our 2017 offerings and are already receiving CSA sign-ups for next year! You’ll find our updated CSA sign-up form on our website and there’s a link to it in this week’s email. We are offering an “Early Bird” sign-up offer again this year for members who sign up before February 14, 2017.  You can find more details about this offer on the front page of the sign-up form.

Our share offerings will remain the same for the 2017 season. We are continuing to offer the same vegetable share options, summer & autumn fruit shares and a coffee share in partnership with Kickapoo Coffee Roasters. While the pricing for our fruit shares will remain the same, we did apply a small increase to our vegetable and coffee shares.  As we discussed the 2017 coffee share price with Kickapoo Coffee, they felt it was important to institute a small increase this year as coffee prices are rising.  The good news is that this increase will be passed on to the producers!  As for our decision to increase our vegetable share price, we’d like to offer a little background.

2016 Fruit Share

For the past six years we’ve chosen to hold our vegetable prices at the same rate.  Back in 2010 we reached our peak in CSA membership and were packing 1,100-1,200 boxes per week.  We enjoy growing vegetables for CSA and consider it a very important part of what we do.  Our plan, at that time, was to maximize our CSA membership and decrease our production for wholesale accounts.  Unfortunately, the year we made this decision was the year we started to see a slight decrease in our CSA membership.  It was also about the time we were experiencing the economic recession and we assumed the decrease was associated with a change in consumer priorities and resources.  When we consulted with some of our core, longtime CSA members and shared with them what was happening.  They advised us to hold our prices steady, continue to do a good job and ride out the hard economic times.  Word of mouth advertising has always been our greatest way to sell CSA shares, so we decided to hold our prices to make it affordable for our members and focused on looking for ways to increase efficiency, decrease expenses, etc.

Unfortunately we have continued to see a slight decrease in CSA shares each year and overall the decrease each year has added up to about a 25% decrease in vegetable shares since our peak in 2010.  We’ve queried our membership as well as other growers around the country who are also experiencing the same reality.  Why is this happening?  Perhaps it is related to the fact that organic food has become more available at farmers’ markets as well as in mainstream grocery stores, Wal-mart and even the local Kwik Trips and convenience stores!  While it is good to see growth in the organic market, we believe it has impacted consumers’ choices to shop at other outlets instead of choosing to “eat out of the box.”  We continue to value our direct relationship with our CSA members. We believe sourcing your food through CSA provides a value beyond just the price you pay when purchasing food at Wal-Mart and the like.  We continue to invest resources, time and effort to produce the highest quality vegetables with good taste and nutrient density.  We try to do our part to connect you with “your farm” and provide a transparency that is not always present in our food supply today.  We understand that “eating out of the box” is different than shopping at the grocery store and do our best to provide our members with resources so they can find success in using the vegetables and creating delicious meals.

So, despite the fact that our CSA numbers have decreased, we still value CSA and want it to be part

Weighing strawberries at 2016 Strawberry Days.

of our business.  The reality though is that we cannot continue to absorb the increases in expenses we’ve experienced over the past six years.  The cost of some packaging and field supplies has gone up, at times fuel prices have been high, and the cost of labor has also gone up.  We recognize our crew works hard and we want to continue to support a living wage.  Thus our final decision was to increase our vegetable share price by about 3% on average across the vegetable share options.

Most of our CSA Sites will remain the same for 2017.  In the Twin Cities we are adding a new site in the St. Louis Park area.  We are still looking for a new site location in the North Plymouth area on the west side of Minneapolis.  If you are in this area or have a friend who may be interested in hosting a site, please contact us for more information.  Additionally, we are continuing our partnership with Lunds & Byerlys which allows us to expand our delivery options to the greater Twin Cities area with delivery to any of their 27 store locations.  If you are interested in learning more about this option, please reference the “Lunds and Byerlys CSA Sign-Up Form” on our website.  In the Madison area we will be closing our Marinette Trail site, however we will be adding a site located nearby on Robin Circle.

Before the end of the year you will be invited to participate in an End of the Season Survey.  We appreciate your feedback and this is your chance to offer input about what vegetables you might like to see in the boxes next year (Time to grow jicama again?  Radish seed pods, escarole, lemongrass or cardoons?) or communicate any other ideas or thoughts you may have for the future of our CSA.
In closing, we’d like to thank you for your support of our farm this year.  While we had some weather challenges to deal with and certainly miss having sweet potatoes this fall, knowing our membership was behind us is a huge encouragement for us.  We hope you and your families have a peaceful and restful holiday season and winter.  We look forward to growing for you again in 2017.

Sincerely, Farmers Richard and Andrea

Spring Farm Update

by Farmer Richard

Crew transplanting onions.

This has been a weird and unpredictable spring!  It warmed up in late February and March. The snow melted, the maple sap started to run….perhaps a bit too early? The ramps came up in early April and by the second week of April we started harvesting them.  All indications pointed towards an early, warm, dry spring! We planted our first salad greens, radishes, beets and carrots on April 14. Early?  Yes, but we love it!

We had fairly dry weather early in April which allowed us to get the overwintered parsnips and sunchokes out of the cold winter ground. The overwintered spinach looked pretty good and by the end of April we started to see signs of the asparagus starting to come up. We were thinking “Yes!  We’re going to have nice early season boxes for our members!” ….and then our fortunes changed.  Cold, damp weather going into the first of May slowed all growth to a crawl!  Some crops did continue to grow, despite the cold temperatures. The garlic, rhubarb, and spring onions looked good, until we had an unsuspected and freakish hail/slush storm with strong north winds. It was quite a

Jose Manuel and Alvaro laying plastic for sweet potatoes.

storm! It moved through quickly but managed to dump about two inches of hail and sleet balls on us in just about 15-20 minutes! Unfortunately the rhubarb and overwintered onions took a beating as the hail hit the tops of the onions and the rhubarb stalks. The wind was coming from the north, so one side of the plant looked pretty bad while the other side of the plant was virtually untouched!  Whoa here, what happened to our early spring?!

After the storm, it was on the dry side so we continued to plant on schedule, even early sweet corn and green beans. The first 24 hours after a seed is planted are probably the most important.  If we plant on a warm day and plant shallow, we can usually germinate the seed. Voila!  Our first planting of beans germinated, pushed through the ground and were looking good. They were just coming up and then on May 15, our average last light frost date, we had a freeze!  27-28°F was our low temperature that set in for about 6-8 hours overnight and into the morning. The green bean sprouts that were still under the ground froze!  The sweet corn froze too, but recovered with new shoots. Most of the beans, however, did not survive.  Despite the fact that we had a cover over the strawberries, some of the blossoms were damaged. It looks like about 40% of the blossoms were damaged, but still a lot of smaller strawberries are ok and coming.

   
The zucchini and cucumbers were under a cover as well.  While the zucchini toughed it out and had a pretty good survival rate, the cucumbers in the same field didn’t fare so well.  They had about an 1% survival rate. So sad. On a brighter note, the beets, carrots, chard, burdock, broccoli, fennel, cauliflower, cabbage, etc are all alive and just waiting for warm weather to grow!

We picked the asparagus hard before the frost on May 15, but some asparagus still froze off and we lost 5 days of production.  That’s why there was such a small bunch of asparagus in last week’s box!  We were very happy to see larger harvest numbers this week when the crew picked on Monday.

Captain Jack supervising.

 No, the asparagus season is not over!
 
 With some extra time on our hands, we turned our attention to that which we always turn to when we have a free moment during the growing season….weed control! Can you believe it has been so cool that even the weeds haven’t been growing!! While we’ve been waiting for the vegetables to grow, our crew has been busy trimming around fields, has done a lot of landscaping, painted our barn and the nursery greenhouse, cultivated and cleaned every small weed from the plantings.
 
Finally, this week the warm weather came and we have been busy transplanting some of our warm weather plants including eggplant, tomato, pepper, squash and melons. While it has been a challenge to manage things this spring and provide a nice box, the tide is turning. The crops…and the weeds will grow!