Farm Shark Tank

Have you ever thought about how ridiculous a business idea the local CSA farm is? Generally commercial farmers have always focused on growing large volumes of shippable commodities for the essentially limitless regional or national market. Which is to say, they focus on what grows the best at their particular location at any particular time of year. Why would a farmer choose to grow a crop that grew less well than some other crop, or to plant something at a time of year when it clearly might have trouble?

I mean, if I went to a bunch of average farmers and pitched the business plan of "grow a big variety of crops for six months out of the year, and have them all look good," they would think that's nuts! The farmer from the Northeast would say, "Why plant brassicas with such hot weather down there, when you could focus on peppers and eggplant?" The farmer from the south would say, "If you want early tomatoes, why don't you just buy them from us instead of trying so hard with your hoophouses and rowcover?" And someone else would remark that cucumbers grow great in Virginia but why are you trying to plant them past June--it's too hot! The big organic grower Lady Moon Farms (you've seen their stuff in the supermarket) even has land in three different regions--Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Florida--so they can maintain a greater variety of produce all grown at the optimal time and location.

And here we are deliberately putting ourselves on the hook for pushing out 6 different vegetables every Friday for 6 months out of the year, week in and week out. We keep high standards, given the constraints we're working with, but in a very real way we are competing with perfect-looking grocery store vegetables since the "global marketplace" can provide any vegetable 52 weeks out of the year, all grown in ideal conditions somewhere in the world. That's what most people are used to in their lives.

But, unlike those commercial farmers, we are constantly pushing the envelope--trying to get a crop to come in earlier or extend the season later--in order to have enough variety at every time of year. We pitch "eating seasonally," but what does that mean when farmers push the boundaries of the ideal vegetable season? I suppose what we really mean is not to eat seasonally, but in fact to eat locally--to eat the food that is produced nearby, rather than produced around the world. (If you think about it, everything in the grocery store is seasonal--it's all in peak season somewhere!)

The real answer for those skeptical farmers is that no, this business makes no sense at all from a production standpoint. But it's how I learned to farm and what I've practiced doing, not because it is a simple idea but because it is an endlessly fascinating and confounding one. What ties it together and makes it successful are the local eaters (that's you) who are drawn to the idea of getting the bulk of their vegetables from a single farm for most of the year. As a production farm, there is no WAY we could make it, even competing on just the regional scale. On a local scale though, given the sort of vegetables we can turn out, it seems like there are enough people who appreciate what we do for this to be quite a good idea after all.

American Stock Characters: The Farmer

Recently one of the local farmers market organizations sent out some publicity that caught my eye. It was a pitch for farmers markets, encouraging people to attend in order to “learn where your food comes from.” I found this interesting, because the very idea that touring a farmers market would teach us something about the origin of the food we eat is connected to the prominence of the “small family farm” in our cultural memory that I wrote about this last week.

As much as we'd like to believe the ideal, our food does not come straight off the iconic “Fisher-Price Farm.” Its red barn and silo represent the cultural symbol of a farm--a stock character alongside “The Cowboy” and “The Pioneer” (and perhaps “The Founding Fathers”), but the reality of these memories has always been more complex than our American narrative allows. The Fisher-Price Farm was originally released in 1968, just three years before Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz's exhortation to “get big or get out” brought us into the modern age of industrial farming. Would Jefferson be proud that the small-scale land holder is what comes to mind as the mainstay of American agriculture? Or would Jefferson be proud that American farms today are in many ways more similar to his operation at Monticello than to the small-scale farmer setting up at the local market?

If you are a regular grocery store shopper, as most of us are, you may notice the largest of the farmers-market farms showing up in the “Local” display at Giant, or an artisan product finding its way onto the top shelf at Whole Foods. But the farms at a farmers market are simply not the farms that supply our grocery store shelves. The general-audience food that Americans eat is produced on a national, industrial scale not a local farmers-market scale. And industrial agriculture has little in common with the sort of farm you might learn about at a farmers market or by reading these CSA emails.

When you join a farm-based CSA, (like you have), you have a close connection to where the food in your bags comes from, not a simple window into mainstream food production. Connecting with a local food system for your vegetables is inherently different, separate from our national food system. And so, to edit that farmers market pitch, I'd say, "Join a CSA so you CAN know where your food comes from." That possibility of unbroken connection to the source is perhaps the biggest difference here.

A Jeffersonian Fourth of July (maybe?)

If tomatoes mean summer agriculturally, certainly the Fourth of July means summer for us culturally. As a topical nod to farming and patriotism, check out this article, Why the founding farmers wanted Americans to be farmers, which ties together a number of themes we think about around the CSA. It is an accessible read that builds the narrative of how food production became a key determinant of American independence, with seeds serving as the organic capsules containing the roots of liberty. Seeds represented autonomy and independence. 

"...Farming represented a means of both procedural and distributive justice. The right to own property and the opportunity to work the land protected Americans from “the arbitrary will of another” and offered the privilege of receiving the benefit of one’s own labor directly. This sort of self-reliance and self sufficiency—at first a rallying cry against British colonialism—would become the underlying principle of our economic system today..."

This sort of small-scale family farming is still rooted in our cultural consciousness (as the marketing department of corporate food production well knows), and is at the core of our American story. As you may remember from grade school—or from Hamilton—Jefferson was a proponent of this agrarian vision, where agricultural production and land ownership forms the basis of a free country and, in fact, the basis of democracy itself.

But however universal those ideals, in practice Jefferson's agrarianism was based on the labor of people enslaved and sold to power those idealistically-American agricultural enterprises. And voting itself, the fundamental activity of democracy, was for the first 80 years of our nation restricted to white property-owning men. Our nation's agricultural origin story does not mean the same thing to all Americans. In a way, my farm is the sort of small farm Jefferson had in mind, and we could use the Fourth of July to consider how being part of a small-scale CSA enterprise strengthens the fabric of democracy, returning us to the Founders' ideals. On the other hand, we could remember that the large-scale players—for example, the Jeffersons and the Washingtons, and now corporate agribusiness—have always been the ones in power. I'd say that by supporting a small-scale farm, and its regenerative rather than extractive growing practices, and the person-to-person economic and social fabric that local business creates, you are supporting the independence of the people. As the grand finale of the neighboring town's fireworks shines through my window, I wish you a happy Independence Day

Election Day

“Eating is a political act.”

--Food journalist Michael Pollan, inspired by agrarian writer Wendell Berry

Why are you here in this CSA: what values drive your participation in this sort of agricultural, environmental, and social enterprise? Here are some common reasons people join CSAs:

For environmental or ecological reasons:you value caring for the natural world that we rely on

“Know your farmer,” the personal connection to your food:you value integrity and honesty in what you eat

For your and your family's health:you value access to what you need to lead a healthy life

To boost local small business:you value supporting the livelihoods of proprietors and employees of “main street” businesses

Eating rarely feels political, but whether you are here to make change in the world or just to buy some good food, it is very much a political act in that your choices drive social, economic, and regulatory change in the directions you care about.

You likely joined a CSA because of some of these values, and these values are front and center in our political world as well. If they are important to you when deciding what to feed yourself and your family, please consider these values when you cast your vote on Tuesday.

The adventure of farming, and, Why do we do this, anyway?

This time of year on the farm is always a combination of slowing and hustle. The days are shorter, the workers and crops growing fewer, but there is still much to be done to be ready for winter. Most of these winter-prep tasks have no particular deadline, but this season's weather constraints have persisted to the bitter end resulting in a worklist that has felt more like July than October. Which is to say, the last couple days have felt like quintessential farming days to me: a weather-imposed deadline for critical planting, resulting in a complex sequence of fieldwork and tractor work, which necessarily involves mechanical breakdown, all while managing the workflow so that essential picking doesn't fall through the cracks. Which is to say: exciting, challenging, rewarding. This time of year it isn't a cash crop we're rushing to plant, but a covercrop (in this case rye, which maintains and improves the soil over winter, before being tilled under in spring), since Friday's rain will close the window of opportunity for tractor work for a long time. Over the last two days we dismantled and tilled up quite literally half the farm, ready to seed with rye.

We prepared the long-dead cucumber and squash field, taking up the hoops that supported the fabric rowcover and pulling up the drip tape that irrigated the rows all season – a tool and tractor borrowed from a neighbor helped get it out of the firm ground. Then it was time to mow, but a few minutes to being finished with the field, I heard a disconcerting clunk and looked back to find that the shaft connecting the mower to the tractor had sheared off and broken free. Fortunately, neighbors will step in in a pinch, so I went to borrow their tractor to finish up. They were also preparing to seed covercrop, completing the same tractor sequence as me. I turned their tractor on, and it immediately ran out of fuel and died. We were surprised but filled it with fuel, I drove off, and stopping to open the gate noticed that fuel was now streaming out of the tank (from the bottom, where the drain plug should be). Well that explains why it was out of fuel! After running to find a n empty jug, calling the neighbor to help, getting buckets set up and settling in to let the 20 gallons of fuel drain right out again, I went to hook up my big disc to be ready for the next days' tillage. There's always a bit of unexpected setup and repair to do on such rarely-used equipment; this time a tire had gone flat and needed to be re-seated on the rim and a couple critical bolts needed to have the threads cleaned up with the tap&die set. I so enjoy the flurry of work that these sequences require, and the diversity of skills I get to employ – experimentation, problem-solving, equipment operation, and creative repairs to get the job done.

Today, luckily, everything went according to plan with the fieldwork. I drove the disc over half the farm, and over the one neighbor's field, and then the other neighbor's, since I have the big equipment for the tillage job and today is the right time to use it before rain. All the while the two workers were picking for CSA – but it took quite a bit longer than expected, because this season's weather and resulting lack of vegetables has forced us to rely on a couple terribly time consuming items this week. We finished the day by lifting the last two rows of potatoes with the tractor and potato digger, since waiting until after the rain would mean having to dig them out by hand.

Meeting the challenge of shifting weather, labor, and equipment logistics is always difficult, though it really is something I enjoy about this business: “Can we get this done? Let's find out!” In the end, the covercrop project will be a success, turning half the farm from crops to open ground seeded in rye, ready for the rain. However I'll have to do the seeding Friday morning, which means that I won't get the CSA packed in time, and hence the note about being late to deliver this week. In the midst of all this we did get the vegetables picked, which certainly feels like its own kind of success. I'm sorry to be off on the timing, and wanted to give you a little window here into what we're up to at the farm, so you can understand something of what's behind all those vegetables that appear in the blue bag. It doesn't always go according to plan, but farming always seems to offer an endless supply of challenges to meet and problems to solve, making it an endlessly rewarding livelihood.

We're all in the same boat, it turns out

In the last couple weeks we farmers have been talking. At times we each can feel alone on our own farms, lamenting our own personal vegetable failures and wondering why it is us who have such uniquely poor fortune. But the reality is that the weather has affected all farms equally and we're all in the same boat.

One neighbor, who usually buys in vegetables from many other farmers (including me!) to supplement their CSA, has been forced for the first time to rely solely on their own vegetables–their usual sources have nothing extra to part with.

I called a friend up the road to check in with her farm, and to see if she might have anything to sell extra later on in case I needed it; she reported, “Nope, we don't have anything here either–except a boatload of winter squash, for some reason.”

I hear tell of another farm, who was forced by lack of vegetables to give a pepper and a cucumber to some of their smaller shares, that's it. Somewhat extreme, perhaps, but an indication of the dire straights some of us were in.

It's the same story even as far away as New England. I took a trip up that way over the weekend and happened to meet another farmer, and you can probably guess what we discussed. I asked him, in the way that farmers make small talk, how the weather had been for him up there. “Oh, terrible, the worst season we've had in 20 years,” was his reply. I told him that yeah, we were doing all right most of the season--spinach even came up well in the summer, a great stand of spinach but then it rained for two weeks with the hurricane and most of it evaporated. “Same here,” he says, “Same here.” Two universal farmer complaints: weather and spinach.

Rain, Rain, Go Away

Wow, well, have I mentioned the rain recently? We do our best to fend off its effects, but, as in a chess game, the weather makes moves to improve its overall position and eventually gain the upper hand. We made our own strategies for fieldwork, timing the tillage and planting to take advantage of the brief dry periods, not trusting the forecast to stay clear for any longer than necessary, and kept picking every last vegetable out of the field until long after the wet and damp had taken its toll on the plants. And, despite the early disappearance of summer vegetables and the delayed onset of fall greens, we still manage to squeak by, holding out for the relief that fall storage crops will be bringing next month.

It's almost comical--I mean, it IS comical, in the way that people smile in wonder at astonishing events--the way we think we're doing everything right and staying ahead of the weather, but then the weather takes it to the next level. For example, we have deluges every year, and wet periods are nothing new. We know what to expect and how to handle this. And, though the soil may stay frustratingly wet for too long, the days themselves return to the normal weather pattern. This is the first year I've seen where the big rains are followed by long periods (weeks!) of foggy, cool, cloudy, drizzly days where not only the ground but the air itself is saturated. This has had novel affects on plant growth--not the least of which is the salad mix, which actually got unusually tall and leggy from so little sunlight. The lack of sunlight may also have had something to do with how the peppers have given up ripening (just a hunch!), and so you have green peppers this week instead of red.

While the weather has certainly affected the plants on the farm, and thus the mix of vegetables you see each week, this is the first time out of all the flooded, rainy weeks this year that it has had a direct, physical, effect on what you're seeing in the bag. I had planned for potatoes this week, relying evidently too much on the weather forecast saying rain Monday and clear the rest of the week. Instead, it was calm Monday and rainy the rest of the week, leaving the potatoes locked underground in the mud for the time being. So, instead, you have green tomatoes (admittedly not an equal trade but they ARE great breaded and fried). On the other hand, it would usually be too early in the season for carrots this size–in general they are still too small to pick–but since the ground was so wet it was possible to select the individual, large outlier carrots and pull them out by their tops, yielding enough bunches of full-size carrots for everybody in a week where it would otherwise be too early to see such carrots. (By the way, do take the tops off the carrots if you're not eating the carrots right away; the tops suck moisture out of the carrot roots.)

The next week is looking beautiful though, with no rain in sight--apparently the first time in quite a while where we've had 5 days in a row without rain. I'd believe it!

Florence, or, the rain

The hurricane was every farmer's focus of conversation this past week. It's hard to remember now, but a few days ago Florence was a huge concern. How to prepare, how to plan, and how to conceive of yet more rain on already-saturated fields. Do we rush to harvest crops that might be blown to bits by the big event? Will fields be washed away, plants too waterlogged to grow? Should we dismantle hoophouses, lest they be destroyed by tropical storm winds?

All those decisions were relatively minor and could be made later compared to the biggest decision: What to do about Friday CSA delivery? I couldn't quite ask you all to pick up your shares during the very afternoon a hurricane arrives. So I figured we could move the delivery a full day earlier this week, though that would require some advance planning–plans that needed to be made, really, before the forecast firmed up. I was ready to make that decision Tuesday night, and then the forecast started to shift in our favor. Wednesday morning, it was looking even less dire, and I thought we might deliver the CSA half a day early but again delayed deciding. And then, in the end, the hurricane kept moving south and the early delivery plan kept moving later until we were right back to the normal Friday schedule, no hurricane in sight. We might have some significant rain and wind next week, but most likely in amounts we can cope with, and not on the CSA day. We are feeling pretty lucky.

The big surprise then, is that last weekend's unexpected 5 inches of rain is the big rain story of the week. We have already received our full year's worth of rainfall plus some, and it's only September. There was a time when 5 inches of rain was an incredible amount, but no longer. This climactic shift is indicated more by how unremarkable these rains have become than by how high the rainfall total continues to climb. Remember the two weeks of saturated ground in May, just as the summer crops were going in the ground? And the two weeks, again, of ridiculous rain in late July just as the summer crops were hitting their peak? And now we have two weeks of tropical storm rain and then hurricane rain, which is putting a decisive end to those summer crops and delaying the fall crops as they sit languishing in saturated soil under the clouds and fog.

Let's just note, for the record, that this is quite unusual. Although I've been pleased by how well we navigated the crazy weather patterns this season and still managed to get all the crops in the ground, we're starting to see the real effects now. You'll notice, for example, the comically tiny amount of tomatoes, a vegetable you will likely not see again this season. Every single zucchini, cucumber, and eggplant we picked this week went into the CSA bags.

Although in most years the shift from summer to fall vegetables is more a product of the arrival of fall crops rather than the disappearance of summer crops, we have definitively made that transition this week, and all of a sudden. Expect to see much more fall-like bags from here on out. I hope you're ready, because we sure are!

Why I am NOT certified Organic.

What do you think when you see this label ?

• Food grown by hippie farmers?
• Products certified to be grown using environmentally sound growing methods?
• Food from farms that follow a USDA regulatory regime certifying that they only use products from an approved list--a list which is drawn up by the Organic Standards Board to exclude non-biological substances no matter the ecological (or, the logical) reason?

Of course, if you've read about my growing and selling practices, you know I think it's the latter.

I recently received an email that so clearly demonstrates the thinking of USDA ORGANIC that I wanted to share it with you. We use paper pots to transplant some crops, and various small-farm groups are petitioning to get these paper pots approved for use on Organic farms. You might think this would be a slam dunk, especially since the use of paper is already allowed under Organic rules. But can paper be allowed...as a pot? Recycled paper is currently okay, but what about the use of...non-recycled paper?

Here's the email I received from someone working to to get paper pots approved (edited for length and clarity):

“Over the course of many phone calls and meetings, I have learned that while the initial concern regarding the paper chain pots was the resins used, a fundamental issue is that the use of paper as a paper pot is not part of the Organic rule. The Organic rule currently only addresses the use of paper as a mulch or as an ingredient in compost. So, before ANY paper pot product can be approved, the Organic rule needs to be amended to allow the use of paper as a paper pot.

The petition being submitted requests that the Organic Standards Board approve the use of non-recycled paper for use in paper transplant pots. Currently, the allowance of paper is restricted to “newsprint and other recycled paper.” It is the contention of those submitting the petition that non-recycled paper should also be allowed. Not surprisingly, a large number of additives, resins, glues, inks, and other materials are commonly found in paper. Given that “recycled paper” comes from “non-recycled paper” the petition argues that paper-use on organic farms should not be restricted to only recycled paper.”

Government regulation in general serves a critical purpose in protecting things that our country values, but which businesses value less than profit. The Organic regulation serves a critical purpose in providing a financial reason for agribusiness to use less-destructive methods. In the past I have seriously considered going for Organic Certification, but I know that I wouldn't be able to put up with this kind of ridiculousness when my reason for certifying would be to communicate to customers that my farm uses non-exploitative, environmentally-sane farming practices. Unlike big business, I can talk to my customers directly, rather than communicating through the regulatory label. When you buy from big business, I do hope you look for the Organic label. But when you buy from local farmers like me, I hope you will just talk with them about what you care about, rather than finding meaning in the Organic regulatory label–a label riddled with exceptions favoring the practices of the large agribusinesses who have more “money,” ie, “speech,” a label whose meaning is being eroded by the agribusiness reps who sit on the Organic Standards Board hoping to someday permit even GMOs under Organic.

The more ubiquitous Organic products become in national supermarkets, the more customers look for that label in their local farmers market and other small-business settings. And when this increasing customer demand for the Organic label drives local direct-marketing farmers to certify under a program guided by and most appropriate for big business, agribusiness has won. This is why I am not certified Organic, and why I encourage you not to care about such labeling when buying food from people like me.

Trust your farmer, not the label.

Something I Love about Farming

Something I love about farming year after year is that past experience allows me to perceive ever greater levels of detail in the process of farming, offering the possibility of making ever more precise decisions in order to effect the desired outcome. An outcome like having spinach or carrots, for example. And spinach and carrots are two things I've been thinking a lot about these past few weeks.

In my early years of farming I read the seed catalog, picked a planting date, dialed in the seeding rate, and hoped for the best. This was met with mixed success. Even though we assume seeds will germinate into plants with some regularity, there is much that holds them back, and so naively setting the seeder according to the book and running it on the proper planting date may or may not yield a good crop in any given season.

It's been a few years since I learned to plant at the proper time of the weather rather than the proper time of the calendar. And even more years since I reluctantly had to admit, having studiously dialed in the seeder settings with ever more precision, that I had been erroneously attributing problems of spotty emergence to the easily-adjusted mechanical certainty of the seeder, rather than to the uncertain climactic conditions under the soil surface.

It was only after examining the failures of many past seasons and comparing the conditions and results in the present instance with the conditions and results of  previous trials that I could begin to tease apart the innumerable variables of these quite uncontrolled experiments. And in the classic way of “the more you know, the more there is to know,” I do enjoy being able to juggle these micro-level details and make my best gamble about how to provide the optimum conditions required.

I last planted carrots a few weeks ago, before the big rain, which I thought would be better than waiting until after, especially since if they didn't work I'd still have time to re-plant. Carrots need constant moisture to emerge (so two weeks of rain is great!) but they are quite wimpy and liable to stall out pushing their way up through firm soil, germinating successfully but never making it to the surface. Water makes the soil soft, but lots of rain compacts and settles the soil into a firm mass--a firm mass that requires even more water to loosen, which will dry and harden on the slightest sunny day. Planting shallowly offers a shorter path to the surface, but it dries out quicker up near the sun and germination can suffer. It's also hotter near the surface--though afternoon irrigation can cool the soil. Spinach germinates erratically above 90-degrees, compounding the difficulty of matching these factors to provide the ideal conditions to the seed for the 5-7 days it takes to (hopefully) break the surface.

On Wednesday I made my gambles with the last carrot planting and first spinach planting, both critical crops, and I enjoyed every minute of seeding-rate calculation with math and measuring spoons to settle on a rate that might be high enough for a reliable stand but low enough to limit the work of thinning, setting the depth (shallow) and planning to irrigate frequently--but lightly--and waiting until these cooler days which, however, have a higher chance of blasting thunderstorms that can pound the loose soil into crusty cement in an instant.

Whether all this effort and consideration will have the desired effect I do not know. And if the seeds do emerge, exactly at the right spacing, can I attribute the success to my care and precision? Who can say. Certainly I will have no idea which variable was the critical factor, although I might guess. Many years from now perhaps the trends will be clearer, and if the success rate continues to rise, only then might they hint at a causal relationship. Until that time comes I'll continue to pay attention and do my best, and enjoy every minute of it.

The true environmentalism of local agriculture

We use a lot of plastic bags in the CSA, for holding vegetables that need portioning, or are dirty, or shouldn't be rolling around loose in the bottom of the blue bag. I realize this isn't very environmentally-friendly. I've looked into waxed paper bags, which would resist the moisture from that lettuce head or those just-washed potatoes, but haven't found a good solution yet. So as an experiment last week I went ahead and tried out regular-old paper lunch sacks for the tomatoes, and so far it seems to be working.

There are a lot of environmental balancing acts in small scale farming and CSA distribution. The use of plastics is a big one, in packaging and in irrigation supplies. The use of fossil fuels is another, burned in tractors, mowers, and vehicles. We know that many people join CSA for environmental reasons, and it is true that you are doing better by the environment. But, this farm is still a product of the society in which we live. Paper and tin packaging is no longer used, I can't buy canvas irrigation hoses, and our world is measured at the scale of the car, not the horse. I drive a tractors a LOT on the farm, yet driving the vegetables to you accounts for 75% of the farm's fuel consumption. In fact, back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that driving local vegetables to CSA stops and farmers' markets in small but inefficient farm vehicles consumes just as much fuel as it would take to truck food across the country in a packed 18-wheeler.

The biggest impact you have by joining the CSA may not be my farm's specific ecological footprint, but your choice to not participate in big agribusiness. I would say that it is large scale corporate enterprise that does the most ecological damage. By signing on with the small scale local business, it is your economic action that in fact does the most good for the plant–along with supporting the kind of society that you would like to see in the world--even if some fossil fuel gets burned to get those crops to your doorstep.

CSA...and the fabric of society?

When was the last time you bought something from an actual person?  From a business run by someone in your community?  Or even from an employee who you recognize and who you knows you as one of the regulars?  I could talk all day about how fresh the just-picked vegetables are, not two days out of the ground.  Or how it's environmentally better to eat food from a small local farm than from corporate agribusiness more concerned with profit than with ecological sanity.  But consider the idea that meeting your day-to-day economic needs with businesses that are part of the local fabric of society -- having a person-to-person relationship with not only the seller but the producer of those goods -- may in fact be the most important result of buying your food from a local farm.

There's something we enjoy about the small business and the old-school main-street.  The "Towne Center" developments (Fairfax Corner, OneLoudoun, Reston Town Center, etc.) capitalize on this desire for small-town character, but in facade only.  While actual main-streets are comprised of local businesses creating a center of local culture, these faux main-streets are dominated by corporate business, islands lost in a sea of parking where even the ice cream shops and yoga studios are national chains.  Our politicians also capitalize on this appreciation of main-street businesses, with their talk of supporting "America's small business owners," but their policies have little to do with the main-street small businesses that enrich our day-to-day lives.

As much as people would like to live in this sort of world, when was the last time you interacted with a business like this?  Perhaps you stop at the independent coffee shop?  A local bookstore, or deli?  Maybe your mechanic owns the garage, or your hairdresser rents their chair.  But for your day-to-day goods, the go-to source is almost certain to be a national chain or box-store retailer--or Amazon.  These places are so convenient, and with such low prices, that it takes some real work to shop at a business owned by a real person.  We don't often have an easy opportunity to buy our day-to-day goods from the kinds of businesses we would like to see comprise the fabric of our communities, and even when we do, most of us rarely take advantage of it.

And so I encourage you to think about signing up for the CSA not because of the fantastic vegetables, or because of the great recipes every week, or because eating seasonally and sustainably increases your connection to the natural world...but because it enriches your life for something so critical as the daily food on your table to come from a local farm -- from local people.

Week 21: Surprise, low of 20 degrees!

Wow, we're nearing the end--only one more week to go! 

Suddenly, after weeks of unseasonably warm weather, on November 10th we see a forecast low of 20 degrees. When the weather report changed a few days ago, I thought this was a miscalculation. A fluke, surely to be corrected soon. Crops that laugh at 30 degrees risk real damage at 20. We had a long, wet day today in preparation for the surprise freeze--but in a way, this is what we signed up for. These sorts of days are an adventure, in a way, a test: can we do it?

We began with the CSA picking, then after lunch we covered the at-risk plants (fingers crossed!), and set into the soon-to-be-frosted pepper patch to pick as many green peppers as we could in the time remaining. We finished picking in the dark, which was rather comical, though surprisingly possible. A day of work well done--but not done yet! We still wanted to pack the CSA bags, since Friday morning will be freezing cold with 18mph winds--no time to be outside.  With the bags packed and loaded into the van, I ordered celebratory pizza for us all and, although we were cold, damp, and tired after spending 12 hours outside under the November clouds, I knew that we were quite happy to have done just that. Quite happy to have seen the challenge ahead of us this morning, to rise to the task, and to know that we accomplished the critical work right when it needed to get done. That said, dry clothes never felt so lovely!

Week 19: Vegetable life cycle complete

There was a change in the air today and nobody knew why, but we all agreed: it smelled like winter. Cold, wet ground and cold, windy air, a characteristic winter look about the farm--no longer the beautiful sunny fall days with still-vibrant plants. Though it was cloudy and cool all day we still had to work to keep the just-picked greens from wilting--not from sun and heat this time, but from the unrelenting wind. All plants are noticing this change to the cold months; nothing but the storage crops is in its prime anymore. We're just getting vegetables out of the field while they're still useful.

The individual vegetables in your share might not look too different from week to week, but over time we all get to see the full cycle of production from these plants here at the farm. Remember when the spinach was huge and meaty, each leaf picked individually from the plant? Now the leaves are small, clear-cut with a knife to get all we can.  This is perhaps the biggest difference from grocery store vegetables: the fact that the size, shape, and taste of the produce varies over the course of the season as the plants mature and then decline. Commercial farms grow precisely what works best with their soil, at the optimal time of year, harvest it all at once at the peak and then it's on to the next crop. Winter spinach from the south; summer spinach from the north. Greens from California and its balmy bug-free climate. Tomatoes from Florida and carrots and cabbage from New York, or even Canada. No commercial wholesale farmer in Virginia would even think of having this variety of crops all in production at once, but for farmers like us, that's precisely the point. You get to have a connection to what's actually happening on the farm, in real time, as borne out by your weekly "snapshot" of production. 

Week 17: The botanical roots of seasonal food

As you may know from trivia night, many of the "vegetables" we eat are actually fruits. A fruit, botanically speaking, is a seed-bearing structure from a flowering plant--such as a tomato, pepper, eggplant, or squash. Vegetables are all other plant parts, such as roots (carrots), leaves (salads), or flower parts (broccoli). Well, then there's tubers (potatoes), which are neither roots nor fruits, though they do generate new plants... but we'll leave that to another day.

To grow the fruit we eat, these plants must first grow a plant, then flowers, and then finally the food. This is a lot of effort for a plant, and plants that reproduce this way grow primarily in the summer when there is a long period of high-energy growing conditions. In the cool fall, with their seed-producing work complete, the warm-season fruiting crops slow way down. Our work turns towards the true vegetables.

We don't need to wait for vegetables to grow a fruit, since we'll just consume the plant itself. Moreover, unlike the summer crops, these plants (think spinach and kale) LIKE to grow in the cool fall weather and don't mind that there is no time to grow a fruit. They are simply aiming to get a head start on spring by producing a plant this fall before hunkering down for the winter. In March, when the weather warms, they will send up a seed stalk straight away before the competition even has a chance to germinate. And those beets, turnips, carrots? That's where the plant stores its energy for the long winter, to send up new shoots in spring. All these root crops and tuber crops are traditional fall foods because that is the time when the plants are stockpiling energy for spring. And the storage crops like carrots, beets, and potatoes are our traditional winter food since they store well through the winter when outdoor plants are frozen and dead -- precisely why the plants create those storage roots in the first place.

Week 16: On squash longevity

Contrary to popular belief (of some), winter squash does not grow in the winter, ready to be picked and eaten at will. Rather, the plants grow just the same as other squash:  in the heat of the summer. It's the fruits that persist into the winter. Summer squash (like zucchini) is an immature squash, with minimal seed development and tender flesh. Winter squash, on the other hand, is completely mature, with viable seeds and a hard rind to protect them. We're lucky if a zucchini plant stays alive for a month after beginning to produce fruit, but winter squash has to stick it out for a full 100 days. We sow the seeds mid-June and, while the tomatoes arrive, the peppers inundate us, the eggplant surprises us, the squash just grows. We work every day with those other crops, and the butternut squash--well, all we do is watch it. Finally when all those summer vegetables wane with the coming of autumn, it is time to clip and gather the winter squash. Then they cure in a warm place for two weeks to turn starches to sugars, and now, finally, arrive in your shares this week.
 

Week 14: Spinach!

Happy Autumnal Equinox!

As if on cue, you will find the first spinach of the season in your bags today! And there's plenty of it to look forward to in your fall future, too. This year's spinach is some of the best I've grown--and it will get even tastier after frost hits.

Spinach is a beautiful crop, an amazing sight to behold--particularly because it is so darn finicky to grow! Picking it this morning, I couldn't keep from carrying on about how fantastic the rows look this year.

In any spinach-growing locale, spinach is seeded in the ground, emerges four days later, and produces beautiful green leaves in six weeks. We are not in a spinach-growing locale. It's too hot in August for spinach seeds to germinate reliably or at all, but delaying planting until cool weather would yield a crop in November--far too late to be useful this season.

A typical farmer conversation about spinach:
Me: "Spinach is going all right this year, I gave up on direct seeding and I'm growing all my spinach from transplants." 
Farmer: "Yeah, spinach, it never comes up!"

We all know this, yet persist in direct seeding some because it should be such an easy crop.

Now, you see...I DID plan to go through the hassle of transplanting thousands of spinach plants again this year, but then the weather forecast showed a period of cool rainy weather in early August at the perfect planting date for fall spinach. I seized the day. It worked. Five days of unseasonably cool days and moist soil established an excellent stand of spinach. And, thanks to the nitrogen-producing covercrop planted there last spring, the plants are beautiful and green instead of small and yellow as results from, well...too little nitrogen, or too much water, too little water, too low pH...and who knows what else. In any case, factors aligned this year and having seen all the ways the crop can go wrong, I'm really excited about spinach right now.

Week 12: Winter already?

While Labor Day often marks the season change from Summer to Autumn, the actual first day of Fall is September 22.  I always look forward to September and its beautiful fall days, as a light at the end of the summer tunnel, even though I grudgingly remember that the weather only changes towards the end of the month.  Not this year, though!  This cool period is proving not to be a momentary blip, but a pattern here to stay.  We're wearing winter caps and vests in the field and today marks an Autumn milestone for the season: Your first brassicas! Brassicas are the crop family containing the leafy cool-weather crops like kale, broccoli, cauliflower, turnips, etc.

While the cool rainy weather has been making the brassica plants grow like crazy, the summer crops just can't hack it.  Tomatoes are on the way out, the expected flood of peppers was dampened by the rain and low temps, and zucchini is quickly succumbing to powdery mildew.  You'll still be seeing these vegetables for a little bit though, and there's plenty of new greens and roots on the way. This is a delicious time of year, with the blend of seasons.

Week 11: The Story of the Rutgers Tomato

The red tomatoes this week are (mostly) Rutgers tomatoes, a variety introduced by Rutgers University in 1934 as an improved and locally adapted general red tomato for processing and fresh market. It spread out of New Jersey, where thousands of acres of tomatoes were planted in the Garden State, across the country and became the standard red tomato variety nationwide for some decades. It might very well be "The tomato you remember from growing up."  Being an open pollinated rather than hybrid variety, the seeds were selected and adapted by local farmers to excel in their particular locality, and the original Rutgers strain that started it all is long lost.

However!  In a sealed vault some Rutgers researchers chanced to find original seeds for the parent tomatoes originally crossed (then selected and stabilized) to create the famed Rutgers tomato. For the university's 250th anniversary their plant breeders grew and then crossed those same original seeds, selecting a variety that matched the characteristics of the original Rutgers.

Out of interest in such a historically important tomato, I planted this reconstructed Rutgers as well as Rutgers VFA, one of the strains available in modern seed catalogs. And here, now, this week, I have the results of the trial! The verdict is...well...they are both somewhat lackluster. And disappointingly, the newly released Rutgers 250 is decidedly inferior to the Rutgers VFA! Both are more susceptible to various blemishes and defects than the hybrid reds you've been getting up until now. Fortunately, the Rutgers tomatoes are determinate, meaning they produce most of their fruit all at once, so we won't have to deal with them much longer.

Week 4: We're all on the vegetables' schedule

Heirloom tomatoes! Half a pint of cherry tomatoes! Eggplant! Green pepper! That's some summertime excitement, all of a sudden. We shouldn't be surprised, and yet we are taken aback by the sudden flood at a time when we're usually still in a dribble. Peppers and tomatoes did not make an appearance until Week 6 last season, when the spring was unseasonably cold. Eggplant didn't show up until Week 11! The last couple weeks it's been a bit of a scrounge to even line up enough eggplant for just half of the CSA, and today, to our amazement, we picked more than 500 pounds. This goes to show you how much the weather affects plant growth even if they are planted at the same time each year .

This is the point in the season when we switch gears. We are now working on the vegetables' schedules--not our own. We've been doing work, but on our own schedule, as modified by weather and worker availability. Now we pick vegetables on their schedule, in whatever quantity exists, and adjust our lives accordingly. I didn't expect more than a continuing sprinkle of tomatoes today, and so harvested these green peppers as a new item this week. We gave out eggplant recently thinking it wouldn't be the real deal for a while, but having a quarter ton on hand by surprise, well...plans change. We had to throw our whole original vegetable list out the window and start fresh when we saw the reality of what came in from the fields.

So, just like us, you are now on the vegetable's schedule. Your expectations of what might be in the bag might not be correct either, but just roll with it.  Lettuce and chard are ready for you whenever you like during the week, and potatoes and cabbage will wait patiently to become dinner anytime. But tomatoes? Tomatoes tell YOU when to eat them and that's that. Leave them on the counter until they're ripe; too soon and they're uninspiring but too late and they're mush. Let the vegetables tell you what to eat for dinner, and your CSA meal plan falls into place.