Thank you helping us stock back up on packaging! We were able to accumulate more delivery supplies last week thanks to your attention. We are trying to make use of materials in the harvest and delivery process as simple and low-input as possible and your effort to recycle with us is critically important. We really appreciate your efforts!

We sowed five sweet corn varieties, mostly bicolor, to extend our harvest window this summer. We were really happy with the opening harvest last week. Each family received four of our best ears from our earliest maturing crops. This harvest, we’ll continue down the row, grabbing primary ears from the later-maturing varieties that are shuck-ready. Through the end of July and into August, secondary, smaller ears fill out low and slow on the stalk for later fresh eating or preservation.

As much as we make an unreasonable effort to harvest our produce the morning of deliveries and pick ups, sometimes it doesn’t work out, or make sense that way. Last week, before the rains came and while we were still experiencing a legitimate mini-drought, we ran a casual garden-check. Our focus has been on the big fields of summer garden vegetables like peppers, tomatoes, squash, and maize. Some spring crops like carrots, onions, potatoes, cabbage, and some garlic, remained in the ground, not necessarliy to grow actively, but to simply stay put in living storage, giving us time to direct our attention elsewhere while we wait for the right harvest opportunity.

But last week, we noticed a rotting cabbage and freaked out a bit. We impulsively harvested the whole row of heads, paranoid the rot would spread, or the conditions that led to the rot would be felt more broadly (it didn’t, they weren’t). An early, impulsive harvest isn’t such a big deal with a storage cabbage like this. Like an onion or an egg, its outer leaves protect and preserve even when storage conditions are less than ideal. All this is to say that some cabbage this week will lack its squeak and uniform color. They’re still great eating, and should last a good while once they get in the refrigerator or fermented in a crock, but you may choose to sacrifice an outer leaf layer or two.

We were similarly startled by the condition of one of our onion rows at the peak of the drought last week and decided to impulsively harvest. We have generally distributed onions fresh out of the ground, like new potatoes, without the shelf life you would expect from a long-term storage grocery store onion, but with an eating quality you can only expect from fresh vegetables. For onions to have long-term shelf life, they need to be sun-cured for as long as a week. This effort helps encase the bulb in its outer layer, protecting it from elements and preserving the interior for later use. Because we decided to harvest early and impulsively, we needed to attempt to cure them- and then the rains came. So, the onions you receive this week are sort of “half cured.” This wasn’t an ideal harvest but again, good eating, you’ll just likely have to sacrifice a layer or two. You may wish to keep these refrigerated, especially if they lack a papery outer layer.

Mild pepper production is going as well as we could hope. We have plenty of greens to pull and share, while still leaving maturing fruits attached to turn red-ripe with warm nights. This week, we’ll return to long sweets as we continue to alternate with bells.

Dragon Tongue beans this week. Snap off the stringy tips, snap them again into forkable portions, boil them and saute with oil and seasoning. Thanks to our CSA volunteers for helping us keep up with these prolific legumes!

As we harvest, ripen, and share our full-sized tomatoes, we’ll try to make an effort to give families a ripe tomato ready to be used quickly and one that ought to spend a few days on the counter to finish ripening. We have red Moskovich slicers, pink Martha Washington slicers, and big funky purple beefsteaks. We’ll revisit our basil patches this week as a compliment to ongoing tomato shares.

We’ll have fresh bouquets to brighten up your space. This time of year, the swarms of pollinators sharing our airspace is a reminder of how beneficial it is to incorporate these ornamentals into our garden design. It feels good to share these blooms with our ecosystem.

Sweet Corn and Tomatoes! Our returning shareholders will recall our issues with these two crops last season. We made some mistakes and we had some misfortune. Our corn rows were too tightly spaced and were toppled by a heavy windstorm. They made a strong effort to recover, only to be ambushed by critters, stealing or mutilating nearly every ear. We are awfully relieved to have full ears of corn to share this week. We planted six rows of five sweet corn varieties in an effort to extend our harvest window and keep everybody shucking for a good while. Our early super sweet variety going out this week filled out nicely and will surely be a tasty summer treat raw, boiled, or grilled.

Many of our tomato plants encountered an even more elusive enemy: persistent herbicide. It was ironic, with all the energy we put toward avoiding any pesticide or herbicide spray, that we would ultimately lose hundreds of crops to something like glyphosate (but mysteriously not glyphosate). We were baffled to see our plants’ foliage curl, crumple, and club into an unrecognizable deformity. Our county extension office investigated, ruling out any fungal or viral pathogen. Our property is surrounded by a treeline, which made it unlikely that drift from neighboring conventional agriculture was a problem. It seems our mistake was incorporating barn litter, consisting of a good accumulation of hay, straw, and animal waste, into our first few summer garden beds into which we transplanted tomato plants. If this is a strategy we wish to retry in the future, we have to be much more strict about where we source our hay and bedding.

We’ve started pulling full-sized tomato varieties. This week, we have pink slicers, red slicers, and big pink heirlooms. We don’t yet have each variety for each shareholder, so we will distribute as available. You can expect either one big juicy fruit or two smaller slicers. They’re ideally ripe when they’re mushy and a consistent color throughout. Because our tomatoes are grown in the field, in order to avoid too many blemishes and imperfections, we’ll often harvest before peak ripeness- when color has started to turn and there is some give to the fruit when you squeeze. If you receive a fruit that still has some time left to ripen, leave it on a windowsill for a few days or put it in a brown paper bag with an apple (check on it frequently).

We’re started picking mini aubergines eggplants to share. We don’t eat eggplant very often, but we’ve been happy with the following quick stove top preparation:

Peel skin (our preference)

Cut into quarters, longways, making thin slices.

Dip in egg wash

Roll in breading: bread crumbs, crushed crackers, etc.

Fry on medium heat until each side is golden brown.

After a few weeks without much trace of it, we have much-needed precipitation in the forecast! We experienced another moment of catharsis and renewal during this ever-ebbing experiment in whole food production.

There isn’t a lot of automation involved in our irrigation strategy. Like other systems on our regenerative farm, it requires time, attention, and effort- three of our most valuable resources allocated with patience and planning.

We’re reluctant, but during dry spells like what we’ve experienced this June, when it becomes sadly obvious that we can’t rely solely on the sky and must take the matter into our own hands, we have to move a lot of water, hundreds of gallons of it, specifically out to our two far-away 5,000 square-foot summer garden blocks.

We stock a small trailer full of 55 gallon barrels, fill them up at the house with a rainwater/fish waste blend collected and stored in a reservoir. Our drains and downspouts feed rainwater into the reservoir, it’s cycled through a fish tank/ potential aquaculture system, and can be ultimately pumped out to our irrigation trailer.

We then have decisions to make. Referring back to the perennial pie chart distributing time, attention, and effort, we have to determine- What resource is most available to us?

So we hitch that irrigation trailer, loaded with a couple hundred gallons, to the jeep and haul it out to the big gardens. If time is the resource most available to us, we drop a car battery-powered water pump in the 55 gallon barrels, attach a hose with a wand and get to work gently watering the bases of hundreds of tomatoes, peppers, and other summer bushes, one by one. The water moves automatically, but the process is slow, requiring a lot of time but not much effort.

If we’re well-rested, hydrated, and motivated, with effort being the resource most available to us and a deficit of time, we irrigate differently, traditionally. We use a bucket brigade strategy. We park the loaded trailer at the top of a row, fill up five gallon buckets, and get to work schlepping, drenching, and splashing- one bucket at a time, like yoked yaks. While this requires an objectively unreasonable amount of effort, it’s completed in maybe a quarter of the time.

Maybe, some day, we’ll find that attention is the resource most available to us and that automated, well-designed and attended-to professional (but plastic) drip irrigation systems are necessary.

So it goes.

We’re back! Deliveries and pickups resume this week and will continue through the middle of October. Thanks again for your patience and generosity allowing us to rest and regroup before our summer harvests ramp up in July. We are very grateful and privileged to be able to squeeze in some vacation time with friends and family these past few weeks.

This week’s update will be brief. Our 5th harvest of 2022 is quite a hearty summer pull…

• Our first pull of fresh, crunchy spring carrots.

• Our garlic crop is filling out, enough to allow our impatience to get the better of us. These fresh bulbs are not cured for long term storage and should be used sooner rather than later.

• Sun Gold cherry tomatoes bursting with juicy sweetness, freshly picked and vine-ripe.

• Our first mature cabbage crop. Gorgeous, firm, purple heads ready for slaws and what not.

• These Kennebec “new potatoes,” similarly to our fresh garlic, are uncured and are not suitable for long term storage like a standard grocery store spud. Paper-skinned and creamy, these tubers were pulled the morning they were delivered or picked up!

• Large and shiny bells for mutually appropriate raw and cooked preparations.

• Anaheims are long peppers similar to Italian sweets or bell peppers, but with a mild kick. Accompanying these specialty peppers are wrinkly Shishitos, similarly mild in flavor.

• Big, broad leaf curly kale, great for chips or tossed in a smoothie. Sprigs or Rosemary and fresh Basil bringing the aromatics to this week’s dishes.

With Erin, our resident florist, being out of town this week, ornamental offerings will be simple. Our layer hen operation has continued to pose challenges, but we have full dozens available this week for all who need them.

Livestock thrive and reach their potential when they are without stress. Sources of stress may include inadequate or inconsistent access to food, problematic weather conditions, overcrowding or over-competition between flock mates.

If a farmer’s single issue is to maximize yield as much as possible and by any means necessary, whether yielding eggs, meat, or plant products, it’s logical that conventional agriculture would arrive at the strategies traditionally utilized- animal confinement, synthetic nutrition and fertilizer, environmentally unfriendly use of chemicals and medications. As mindful farmers and CSA supporters, we all want eggs from happy, free-ranging hens. We’ve seen the difference it makes and we can’t really go back.

So our job on this small farm, with our flock of four score or so birds, is to practically and realistically manage the freedom:stress ratio. We like to think we’ve made an unspoken agreement with our birds: There is an implicit understanding that while we will keep you well fed and watered, sheltered, in a natural environment, without a barrier to the biodiversity we mutually appreciate on our land, those freedoms come at a cost. There will always be monsters just beyond the treeline. We will do what we can to deter them, but life is not without risk. The cost of their freedom is inevitably, paradoxically, anxiety and stress- a topical metaphor indeed.

These monsters just beyond, or just above, the treeline include Foxes, Coyotes, Bobcats, Mink, Raptors, and the omnipresent, ever-elusive Raccoon, all with its smooth criminal appearance and human hands- a pest we hate to love. In recent weeks, we have been battling the latter pest and it is inglorious.

Our neighbor was telling us of a time when he was losing chickens to raccoons and proceeded to trap one critter per night for 2 CONSECUTIVE WEEKS! This extreme example hasn’t been our experience so far, but it’s a challenge nonetheless.

If a predator is visiting regularly, even if the flock is ultimately safe during and after the encounter, the flock is unavoidably stressed and, as was previously discussed, when the freedom/stress ratio is thrown out of balance, yield suffers. As a result, our weekly egg production has slowed and we will only be able to share half dozens this week.

It’s easy for leafy greens to lose their rigidity in farmers market/fresh delivery circumstances, but we’ve found it’s surprisingly easy to revive them- so don’t overreact if your veggies seem to have lost motivation and wilted. They’ve lived their whole lives with wet feet and they don’t know they’re dead.

The Wim Hof Method for wilty greens:

Submerge the loose greens and heads in an ice bath for 5 minutes. The water will be the right temperature so long as the ice hasn’t melted. Drain the greens in a colander and toss them around to shake off some loose water (or use a salad spinner). Finally, lay out a bed of paper towels and lasagna your loose greens with the towels between the single layers (or roll them up).

In gardening, like many pursuits, “getting good” at something simply means “paying attention” or “devoting time and energy” to something. Crops are hard to grow when they require lots of attention or mental bandwidth and they’re “easy” to grow when you can ignore them without much consequence. One can imagine, with as many crops as we are maintaining, how challenging it can be to pay attention to everything all the time. So, sometimes we have to prioritize, redirect our gaze. You can keep all the plants happy some the time, you can keep some of the plants happy all the time, but you can’t keep all the plants happy all the time. I think Abraham Lincoln said that.

Like all brassicas, Bok Choy is bug bait. The flea beetles love it. While they’re functionally harmless and simply annoy the plant, they puncture small holes in the leaf tissue and leave the plant blemished. Whenever we encounter pests, having been unable to, or unsuccessful at, avoiding them proactively, we have decisions to make: Do we treat them aggressively or is this our “catch crop?” This spring, Bok Choy was our catch crop and we are left with Chinese cabbage that’ll be less enjoyable raw, but perfectly suitable for the stovetop.

Cut the root core at the bottom, separate the head into its individual stems attached to leafy tops, and toss them in a pan with lots of butter, salt, and pepper. Periodically covering the pan won’t hurt. The leaves will darken and melt- with any indication of prior pest damage quickly vanishing as the leaf tissue buckles and fuses in the skillet. Meanwhile, the stem is tenderizing. It’ll only take a few minutes for the cabbage to cook down and leave you with a buttery appetizer with a satisfying, creamy crunch.

Kale and Collards are cool season crops and as the sun gets higher and the top few inches of soil dries, Collard Greens especially get unhappy. Their growth slows, their defenses weaken, and they get ugly. We have about 150 plants from which we will carefully select the best leaves for your skillets, salads, and smoothies this week.

Beets are a joy to start, to grow, to harvest, and to eat. Our bunches will include the standard “bull’s blood,” candy cane Chioggias, and sweet golden-rooted Boldors. Beets are two for one, especially this Spring’s crop. The buttery green tops are fantastic- especially those of the candy cane variety. The texture is great raw or cooked and the flavor is subtle and sweet. We are really impressed with our first pull of the season. However you enjoy the roots, be sure to use the greens too!

Not a bad start to our 2022 growing season! Spring is for salads- spring spinach, lettuce varieties, and cool season brassica greens. Summer seems to be for side dishes- summer tomatoes, sweet corn, beans, zucchini. We’re watching our cool season crops mature in our spring garden while our summer garden blocks fill up quick with these future appetizers.

This week, we’re offering more cool season salad bases and ingredients. You’ll have lots of lettuce to work with- mixes for salads, crispy heads for sandwiches and wraps. With greens freshly harvested the morning of pick up or delivery, absurdly long-keeping as a result, you’ll have a diversity of varieties, textures, and colors with which to build salads and entrees all week long, overlapping with our first June harvest.

Our bed of mustard greens is over-mature, but worth harvesting this week as time and labor permit. The flavors are more intense- spicy like radish and nutty like arugula. They’re stemmy and stringy- more so than we prefer, but hard to deny as substantial. They’ll be less suitable for raw salads but consider tenderizing them in the skillet or including them in a smoothie.

There have still been plenty of nice radish roots to pull. We’ll continue to share as our 50 ft row produces. Radishes mature quickly and will be succeeded by their slowing growing cousins- Turnips. Other root vegetables to come include beets, kohlrabi, carrots, and potatoes.

Broccoli is a tough crop to justify as a farmer with limited space. Many commercial growers refuse to grow it as it is undeniably unprofitable. The plant takes up about as much row space and nearly as much time in the field as a tomato, but standard crown broccoli has maybe 1% of the output. For farmers focused on yield, broccoli is a tough sell.

One way we try to work around the issue is to grow bunching broccoli varieties that give us a longer harvest window and more output per plant. We will begin distributing these bunches this week- broccoli bouquets great for roasting to a oily crisp. We may not have enough for everyone right away, but the harvest window is long and we will do our best to account for who is owed bunches as they mature. If you don’t receive a bunch this week, expect it soon. It’s a slow start, but a theoretically extended harvest.

We have flat leaf and curly parsley varieties well established in our spring block. They taste like what carrots smell like. These herbs will accompany vegetable harvests for the next couple weeks, ideal for freshening up egg salads.

It’s hard to call a beautiful spring flower a “weed” even if it’s deep in a pasture competing with our sheep food. Erin has put a lot of effort and attention into selecting for and arranging these wildflower bouquets, making good artistic use of the volunteer ornamentals we forage for in our woods and meadows. We’ve included our winter rye cover crop which has matured to its “milky stage,” presenting a gorgeous flower.

Two out of Three of our garden blocks are planted! We’ve established rows of tomatoes of many varieties, peppers sweet and spicy, beans, sweet corn, eggplant, zucchini, basil, kohlrabi, onions, bok choy, cabbage, potatoes, garlic, beets, carrots, thyme, rosemary, leeks, oregano, squashes, and flowers (definitely forgetting something).

Our first offering features pretty standard Morckel Meadows’ produce in terms of variety and quality.

This box is a decent debut and reintroduction for our new and returning shareholders. Not without blemishes, but discernibly without chemicals. Maybe imperfect, but never insufficient. Wholesome whole foods.

On washing…

Wash your vegetables! Or don’t. We try to leave the consumer with options.

On our farm, we are inclined to intervene as little as possible. We want minimal soil disturbance, minimal tillage, minimal weeding, minimal cultivation, minimal human intervention with livestock. The same instinct applies to our wash and pack process. If we can avoid washing produce, we will. This is actually in alignment with recommended agricultural practices. Produce isn’t generally getting food-borne illness in the field. Ironically, the problems can be introduced with water during the washing and processing stage of production. The fewer hands that handle your produce, the fewer water sources your produce contacts, the lower the probability of any bad health outcome.

Garlic is traditionally planted in the fall or at the end of summer, often in November. Our understanding is that this is common because garlic prefers “40 nights under 40 degrees” to eventually trigger clove multiplication. Admittedly, we’ve never been great at planting anything that late in the season (we will get there) and always hold out hope that our spring-planted garlic will work out. There is hope, so long as we plant before April. This spring, timing was perfect and we have an impressive stand of garlic greens, rooting deeply and encouraging us that we will have plenty of bulbs to share late in the summer.

For now, we are able to pull every other plant to use fresh as “Garlic Scallions” or “Green Garlic.” They will come with long, pungent greens functioning as an herb for flavoring up dishes as you would using spring onions, as well as a small tender round to use as your would traditional cloves.

You’ll receive multi-color radish roots with nutritious tops. This harvest, on average, the radishes are mild with the occasional spicy troublemaker. We have fewer “splitties” than we had last year so far- likely a result of more consistent water and attention. Don’t throw out the green tops! Brassica greens are just useful. Although they can have some odd texture raw, they’re fantastic in the skillet. Quickly saute the greens from turnips, radishes, kohlrabi, broccoli, etc with a little bit of butter, salt and pepper.

We have many varieties of lettuce this spring with a couple variations on Romaine or Cos lettuce. We will distribute full heads of “Monte Carlo” romaine or “Parris Island” cos this week as available.

Collards, Kale, or Turnip Thinnings, as available will be included in your box. This was our first season growing Collard Greens and we were eager to try them out this Wednesday. For Sunday’s farm pickup harvest, it is unclear as to whether we will have available Collards, Kale, or Turnip Greens. Regardless, you’ll have super nutritious, thick-tissued skillet leaves to work with this week.

We really want to have microgreens available as often as possible for folks this season. They’re easy to grow but also easy to mess up (if that makes sense). They’re grown in a short period of time indoors and do require a different kind of attention and discipline- we can’t pray for rain or weather for the micros (bittersweet). They’re densely-packed with nutrients. This week, we will have brassica sprouts (kohlrabi, brassica mix) perfect for topping salads or sandwiches or tossing in with an egg scramble. Fresh cabbagey flavor.

Erin foraged through woods and pasture to arrange a beautiful seasonal bouquet gift with asters, grass seed heads, fern leaves, wild mustard and rocket flowers- newly bloomed Phlox (our livestock guardian dog’s namesake).

Our birds are clearly the happiest and healthiest they have ever been, in ideal conditions on pasture. They’ve reciprocated with rich dozens for us all this week.

We can’t wait to meet our new members and catch up with returning shareholders. Enjoy your fresh, local, regenerative food!

Recently we were asked “how far behind do you think you are this year?”-a harmless and appropriate inquiry considering this spring’s cold, inconsistent start.

We reacted reflexively with paranoid confusion- another symptom of how this ever-expanding project and lifestyle, in surprising and interesting ways, manifests. Immediately, with the assumption being that we are naively behind schedule, our anxieties ruminate-

“But seedlings are on schedule in the nursery, right?!…”

“We learned so much. We are far-better prepared. We have a well-functioning propagation house, efficient tools and systems, we are ready to go, right?!…”

“We don’t need to build gardens from scratch this year, we are maintaining, right?!…”

“We must inevitably be far, far ahead of where we were last season, right?!…”

We are, in fact, much better prepared this season physically, mentally/emotionally, and resourcefully. Last year’s expansion and corresponding growing season felt like a rite-of-passage or a “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere” category of challenge. We think we were probably about as ready as we could’ve been and were ultimately successful at producing a whole lot of food.

But the rookie fear and paranoia of “not knowing what we didn’t know” felt heavy, omnipresent, and exhausting- more of a load to bear than what accompanied all of the obvious bending, digging, and hauling involved in the human-scale agriculture to which we’ve committed ourselves. It wasn’t physical weight that was overwhelming, but rather fear of the unknown, a sense of impending doom, or self-doubt. By the end of our first season, there were sparks and there were embers, but we didn’t burn out.

By Thanksgiving Day 2021, after we’d completed a difficult inaugural season and delivered our final boxes, we had a chance to reevaluate. We found ourselves surprisingly whole- still in one piece, better for it, in fact. We think this was what gradual progress looked and felt like- like a marathon or a thru-hike, a long challenge, a test of perseverance assumed to be enjoyed at its successful conclusion. A step forward, two steps back, and finally a giant leap of an effort to make up for, and advance beyond, lost ground.

Conclusively, we feel evermore qualified and confident in our agrarian pursuits. But without the support of our CSA shareholders, none of this growth could have been an option.

But we are reminded that, whether the winds are at our back or we are running against them, separate and apart from our best efforts to be disciplined, organized, or proactive, we are unavoidably in collaboration with (and a product of) Mother Nature. The determining factor will not always be how well we are following a crop plan and schedule. Often, all that matters is how she has chosen to behave and this growing season, she felt trivial, chilly, justly apathetic, and she chose to wake up slow.

In the garden, her lack of urgency is most noticeable in rows of puny, wispy onion greens and baby-button potato sprouts. Within the garden’s surrounding wild woods, meadows, and pastures, we observe lethargic forage, canopies lazily-foliating, and belated blossoms. Because of this formal partnership with the elements, we’ve never been more aware of, or more attuned to, our natural surroundings and our place within them. It feels like a privilege, good and right, one for which we have our shareholders to acknowledge and thank.

Last spring, we had unseasonably beneficial weather, ideal for early cold season crops. As it is our sophomore (or maybe red-shirt freshman) season, we were able to easily work the ground and transplant seedlings on or ahead of schedule, anticipating even better results on account of our preparation and experience. Because of consistently cloudy skies and cool temperatures these crops did not take off as we’d hoped, but proceeded to simply stay alive. So it goes.

Despite these unavoidable irregularities and with some extra effort required to ensure an early harvest, we will nevertheless have our first seasonal produce boxes available Mid May as we’d hoped, loaded with salad greens, root vegetables, herbs, eggs and whatever else is mature and ready to be shared in the coming weeks.

Spring is, after all, going out like a lamb. A hot, high sun and dry conditions give us the perfect opportunity to complete much of our summer garden next week. We will finish shaping beds, transplanting nightshades, and continuing to direct-seed summer crops like the three sisters: corn, beans, and squash. Melons, Pumpkins, and Cucumbers will find their birthplace with fresh compost and organic fertilizer- settled and watered-in with rich collected rainwater from our reservoir. We will continue successions of salad greens and root vegetables.

We have a sun shining higher and higher each day, temperature forecasts gradually warming, and a near fully-booked 2022 membership! It’s with excitement and appreciation for our new shareholders and profound gratitude for both our returning 2021 members as well as those choosing not to renew, that we open this year’s growing season. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

We feel truly privileged that, through your investment and support, we’re allowed to do this kind of important work, to experience the challenges and and rewards of human-scale organic farming, and to be exposed to inevitable, priceless, unique lessons found on a farmstead. It’s not taken lightly, or for granted. The intrinsic value that we personally receive from the program is impossible to simply repay with a weekly box of food.

Your instinct to help grow small scale, local produce is admirable and humbling. While we can’t always replace the weekly trip to the grocery store in its entirety, it is ultimately our goal to help our families skip a few sections. We believe that by participating in CSA and supporting a regenerative, resourceful, functionally organic market farm and garden, you’re using your speech to promote short supply chains, mindful growing practices, and the importance of sourcing efficient, local calories.

After a long winter’s nap benevolently confined to their shelters and barnyards, livestock is back on pasture and have resumed ranging. Chickens again forage through leftover crop and weeds, fallow field stubble and litter. Our flock of sheep begin a rotational grazing schedule, only staying on the same paddock for a day at a time this early in the spring. It was a successful lambing season this winter as we introduced 10 new lambs to the world, happy and healthy, spending their days learning to graze grasses and forbs, and their nights sheltered, cuddled tightly with their mothers and siblings. Egg production has exploded with the season and collection has again become a regular chore.

And, of course, we are well on our way to producing a surplus of herbs and vegetables for our 2022 member families! Our farm has three gardens: Block A, Block B, and Block C. The A block is built to hold 24 rows of crops, 50 feet long and 3 feet wide. Our B and C blocks are much larger and each were built to hold 18 rows of crops, 100 feet long and 3 feet wide. At the peak of summer, when all the blocks are planted and established, we have over a half acre of row space in production.

Each block receives a spring planting and a summer planting so that, in general, there is a newly-planted garden for each of the six months of the growing season: an April Garden, a May Garden, a June Garden, a July Garden, an August Garden, and a September Garden.

Our April garden has been sowed, mostly, except for a few early warm season vegetables like Cherry Tomatoes and Early Sweet Corn waiting patiently for the threat of frost to clear. This garden (Spring Block A) is where we begin with hardier cool season vegetables, herbs, and ornamentals. This is the garden where we grow brassicacae like Broccoli and Cabbage varieties, Bok Choy, Kohlrabi, Kale, and Arugula. In this garden, we’re also including cool weather herbs like Rosemary, Thyme, Parsley, and Oregano as well as salad greens. Root vegetables including Carrots, Beets, Onions, Turnips, Radishes, and Potatoes are out there too.

Some seeds get planted directly in the garden while many have been starting slowly in our indoor nursery since as early as February. We are encouraged by upcoming temperature forecasts and as a result, this ought to be a big week for the farm. Now is the time to begin marching thousands of individual warm season seedlings like Tomato and Pepper varieties to continue their slow adolescent growth protected in the hoophouse.

For the remainder of the month, as our first garden is filled, our attention shifts toward preparing the large warm season blocks for Tomatoes, Peppers, Squashes, Melons, Sweet Corn, and Beans. Each row will be broadforked for deep cultivation, amended with compost (Price Farms’ “Zoo Brew”) and organic fertilizer (Ohio Earth Food), and shallowly tilled to incorporate the amendments and prepare ideal tilth for planting. By July, after filling our third garden, we will be back to our first block, harvesting any remaining crops and preparing for its second planting to be harvested in the fall.

The crop plan, which feeds over 250 individuals, is in motion and we are so very close to reaching our goal of 40 membership families for the 2022 CSA season. Thanks so much to our supporters for helping spread the word about the program organically- It has been critically important and helpful and we are, again, very grateful.

Expect further updates in these weeks leading up to our first harvest in Mid May and feel free to reach out with any questions or comments. We look forward to seeing our returning members, meeting our new shareholders, and feeding everybody this Spring!

Well friends, we’ve finally reached the bittersweet conclusion of a dynamic opening CSA season here at Morckel Meadows, and it sure wasn’t boring. We’ve gained heaps of knowledge and valuable experience and while the winter break is happily anticipated, we’re anxious to incorporate everything we’ve learned into next year’s crop plan and shareholder program. We’re looking forward to the process of incorporating hard lessons learned from our failures while we build on our successes.

It’s officially time to call it, to acknowledge that we’ve reached the end of the road whether we like it or not, to clear the field. For better or for worse, we must accept what is suitably mature and available for this week’s final share. The good news is, we’ll have some yams and sweet potatoes for everybody. The bad news, however, is that broccoli is sparse, as well with kohlrabi and rutabaga, having been slower to mature than we’d hoped and planned.

We feel lucky to have had this group of shareholders participate this year. You’ve been supportive, engaging and encouraging. This season was not only an effort and experiment in a small community sharing in agriculture, but small agriculture genuinely supported by community. True to the CSA model, y’all have directly and intimately shared in the successes and failures of our growing season.

We’ve had crop failures we can attribute to acts of god or bad luck, and crops failures we can only blame on farmer error. We’ve had some crops grow according to plan, some exceed expectations, and here and there, we’ve caught some good fortune. Your participation has been incomparably motivating, expediting the learning process and tightly concentrating valuable, irreplaceable experience into these past 24 weeks.

The following crops are left to be cleared from our garden beds. We will do our best to distribute what is available or mature, with home delivery shareholders being first in line for scarcer yields:

• Sweet Potatoes/Yams- shares for all

• Beets- shares for all

• Peppers- milds & hots available

• Lettuce- mixes & heads to be distributed

• Kale- shares for all

• Swiss chard- plenty for all

• Radish- plenty for all

• Turnips- plenty for all

• Broccoli- low yield, home delivery prioritized

• Japanese Parsley- will share if time allows

• Oregano- will share if time allows

We are two weeks beyond the average first frost date, still frost-free. We could have never anticipated picking fresh flowers, okra, and peppers on Halloween in Central Ohio. It’s been a welcome surprise but disorienting. This week, we will be including bouquets of our survivor ornamentals. We pulled our sage plants a few weeks ago, leaving them hanging to dry in the hoop house. With the dried herb, we’ve assembled smudges to assist folks in managing the leftover spirits of spooky season.

While wintertime certainly slows the pace on the farm a bit, there is still plenty going on at the homestead during the cold season. We’ll been clearing out the barn and piling up compost. We’ll be gathering, chopping, and splitting wood for the wood stove. We’ll continue keeping livestock happy and healthy and safe in the cold months. We’ll be incubating and hatching new generations of poultry. By February, we’ll have newborn lambs jumping around and the seedling nursery will be back in operation germinating onion, pepper, and herb seeds all over again. Keep in touch and follow our Instagram accounts for off season updates and stories.

It’s hard to believe the season has officially wrapped. We look forward to visiting with everybody this last pick up/delivery of 2021. Thank you all again, humbly and sincerely.

Happy Halloween!

Our inaugural CSA season is soon coming to an end and what an experience it was for farmers and consumers alike! For the next two weeks, we will be reaping our final harvests of 2021, clearing our garden beds of remaining leaves, roots, and fruits, crossing our fingers that fall crops will mature just in time for our final deliveries the first week of November. Much of our produce will be distributed “as available” these last two weeks. Though it is likely shares will be less bountiful toward the end, we will do all that we can to keep them diverse and uniform.

For this week’s penultimate CSA box, we will clear our beds of the following crops:

Sweet Peppers, Lettuce, Swiss Chard, Arugula, Turnip/Radish, Carrots/Beets, Kale, Oregano - and you can expect eggs and seasonal wreaths instead of flowers this week.

We have other fall crops waiting in the wings. Broccoli crowns have emerged and our hope is that they will sufficiently develop just in time for next week’s final deliveries. We anxiously await the maturity of Kohlrabi and Rutabaga as well, with sweet potatoes continuing to cure in the hoophouse.

Erin was creative and seasonal with her ornamental arrangements this week, foraging for fresh and dried wild flora from the property, displayed as unique autumn wreaths. We’re excited to share this homegrown, farm fresh artwork with our shareholders. Hopefully displaying them in your home brings joy comparable to Erin’s experience arranging them on our farm.

It has been encouraging to hear that some of our shareholders are already anxious to reinvest next year. If we hadn’t shown enough appreciation for your initial faith and support in our ambitious undertaking, let us be clear that your loyalty and ongoing commitment has been, and will continue to be, simply remarkable. If you were proud this season to vote with your dollar and invest in small scale, organic, regenerative agriculture close to home, we’re confident that your returns can only be expected to grow as we continue to learn, adjust, and evolve season after season.

What a season it has been! Thank you all again, so very much. We look forward to seeing and chatting with you all during these last two weeks!

Farmers like to complain. We were familiar with this stereotype before we pursued the occupation, but we’re surprised and a little embarrassed by how easy it was to find this behavior manifest and become a recognizable pattern on our farm. It’s hard to remark on how well things are going while they’re going well. Struggle just seems to be more interesting.

From time to time, we’ve recognized a trickiness in balancing the need to be transparent, disclosing our difficulties and failures to our shareholders while simultaneously expressing our gratefulness for the opportunity. We hope to be clear that our email campaigns are motivated by transparency, not an appeal for sympathy. It’s a privilege to have the support and opportunity to figure this out and it’s part of the value of a CSA membership to be brought along for the ride.

This week’s complaint sure is weird: Where’s the frost? There was a moment early last week when our crops were making it clear that they’d had enough of this strange hot & dry early Autumn. While our fall garden crops didn’t seem as rigid as they ought to be, our remaining Peppers and Okra were still thriving out in the summer blocks. We’re told to expect the unexpected as, on account of the changing climate, Ohio gradually becomes the new Tennessee.

It’s nearly Sweet Potato season. We’ve been keeping an eye on our rows, the plan being to harvest as soon as we get our first light frost. Our starter plants arrived late this year, so we needed to give them as much time in the ground as possible to grow into useful fat roots.

When we grew standard potatoes in the spring, we discussed the difference between “new,” uncured potatoes verses the traditional preserved grocery store potato. We assumed we could treat our Sweets the same way but failed to recognize the unique value the curing process has in bringing maximum sweetness to the Sweet Potatoes and Yams. Having learned this, we pulled our first row yesterday, collecting a wheelbarrow-full in order to give them a couple weeks to settle.

Sufficed to say, hand-digging a 100’ row of sweet potatoes is hard work! We move down the row one foot at a time, popping up the soil with a fork and digging out the big roots, leaving the little ones for the worms.

When we got to the fifth or sixth foot of our march, we noticed a little fur ball snuggled tightly next to a bunch of roots. It was a nursing mother vole and her litter. We were able to move the family to a safer location within the cover crops.

It led us to consider what conventional sweet potato harvests must look like. We assume conventional Yam growers sow monoculture fields and reap with heavy machine harvesters. We found a vole family in our 400 square foot row. How many vole families have settled in the hectares of conventional farms and are inevitably caught up in the mass destruction of the harvest?

With our growing zone’s average frost date fast approaching next week, we’re preparing to officially put our summer garden to bed. We’re pulling pepper, tomato, and squash plants. We’re clearing the beds and replacing them with cover crops of wheat and rye.

We’re inching our mobile chicken coops slowly closer to littered beds. They’ll scratch and dig up these unkempt and overgrown crop remnants, leaving behind chopped mulch and organic nutrients. The more effort that we put toward appropriately concluding this growing season, the less effort we will need to put toward effectively implementing next year’s growing season. The production of nutritious organic produce has been narrowed down to ten 50-foot rows in our fall garden and a half-cultivated 40-foot hoop house.

Our winter squashes have officially been cleared from the field. We have Butternut, Spaghetti, and Pumpkin squashes varied in size, maturity, and preservation. This week, our plan is to distribute our first pumpkins, for culinary or ornamental purposes, to our home delivery customers. Our farm pick up and city pick up shareholders will have a pile of various squashes from which to choose for themselves. If folks have any specific requests ahead of time, please let us know and we will do our best to provide the gourds you’ve asked for.

We have some nice looking beets to pass out this week- traditional, candy-cane, and golden varieties. We’re taking a break from our abundant radish and turnip crop and next week we ought to have carrot bunches available. Rutabagas, Kohlrabi, and Broccoli are maturing and will hopefully be included when appropriate in these final few weeks. Bok Choy heads will be distributed this week. Some have had an easier time with the pests than others and we will be sure to pick our best, most uniform and intact heads this week for our shareholders. Be sure to wash your veggies and try not to be alarmed by the nibbles present. We think it is better to have visible signs of natural biology and wildlife than invisible synthetic or broadly destructive chemical residue.

Our egg production continues to slow as the sun sets earlier each night. We’ve learned a lot this summer about the balance between providing a free, natural existence for our birds while maintaining a consistent commercial approach to maximizing production. While we can only guarantee half dozens at this time, we will do our very best to distribute as much pasture raised protein as possible.

Last week, we foraged by the creek and were surprised to find a productive patch of “chicken of the woods” wild edible mushrooms. We couldn’t eat it all ourselves, so we offered a surplus to our Wednesday city pick up and farm pick up folks. We will continue checking on this flush and offer up whatever we can forage for those interested.

Only one month remains in our 2021 CSA season! For many established CSA programs, week 20 is the final week of the full season. Wisely or foolishly, we wanted to push it. We wanted to challenge ourselves to start early in the spring and extend late into fall- to motivate us and to necessitate challenges from which we can learn quickly. We wanted to get our first box out in mid-May and strive to deliver our final box in November.

It’s looking like we’ll pull it off! Thanks to your support, we’ve sustained through the season, we’ve learned many lessons along the way, and we’ll be able to provide produce well past this fall’s first frost.

This week, we’ll be continue to include the last of our summer garden’s fruits as well as more cool season salad ingredients. Our Spaghetti squashes have been slow to ripen, though we’ve cleared the field and are allowing them to cure in the hoophouse. At this point, the vines have died back, forcing us to reluctantly and disappointingly pull whatever is left regardless of maturity. We will be distributing our remaining winter squashes as they’re available. Depending on what is ready, this week, you may receive a Spaghetti or a Butternut.

In the root vegetable department, carrots are coming soon and another succession of beetroot is on its way. Our Turnips aren’t performing as well as our Radishes, but we’ll incorporate them as soon as is appropriate. Kohlrabi and Rutabagas are yet to form, but the greens look healthy and encouraging. We’re trying to stay patient and delay our Sweet Potato harvest as long as we can stand.

We have a 50-foot row of Broccoli which by now has outstretched a gorgeous deep green canopy. We should soon see heads and side shoots forming. Our Bok Choy chinese cabbage is persisting, hanging in there until the late summer pests are inevitably frosted out. These seemed to be a hit in the spring and we look forward to getting them back in the rotation.

We’ll soon be finished with all summer crops though there remain a few late bloomer peppers left to pick. They’re holding on tight, impressively, until the bitter end. Summer beds are flipped and cover crops are taking their place including mixes of oats, peas, vetch, wheat, and rye. Okra leaves have fallen like midwest maples leaving a skeleton stand of six-foot naked canes poking out of the mangled mess of weeds and vines. Even the humble woods surrounding the property has started to thin. The farm rests on a hill, enveloped and isolated by the surrounding tree lines during the summer. As the foliage falls, we’re able to see the distant rounded blue hills again.

The recent chilly weather is welcomed by our fall garden, full of cool season produce. As the sun starts to slowly lower in the mid day sky, these brassicas, greens, and root vegetables really thrive with the resulting cool air and damp soil.

Our warm season/summer crops are less appreciative and are signaling that they’re about ready to call it quits. We hate to see them go and are milking the harvest as long as we can, but the end is near.

We’ve begun collecting winter squashes and allowing them to cure in the hoophouse for long term storage. Butternuts are getting fewer and farther between and our remaining fruits are more “snack-sized.”

Spaghetti squashes are continuing to ripen but ought to be less prolific. Our first summer block has officially transitioned from a series of well-defined 100-foot rows of peppers and tomatoes to a wild tangle of pumpkin vine volunteers of various colors and sizes.

It’s hard to find a nice looking mature radish or beet out there right now. September gave us some variability and inconsistency that led to funky roots. Many of our radishes split and some beets developed some rot. We always try to get our best produce to our shareholders and save the misfits for ourselves and our livestock. It can be disappointing, but when we pull a mangled mess of a radish or beet root out of the soil, we’re trying to look on the bright side- more for us!

We checked on our sweet potatoes this week. There is good news and there is bad news. Good news is we have some fingerling tubers protected and developing deep in the soil, a few of which have passed our preliminary taste tests (with flying colors). Bad news is some really nice, big sweet potatoes emerged and exposed themselves-becoming an opportunistic treat for the critters. We’ve found some really nice tubers out there half-sampled by Bambi. We’re going to protect the patch and set up an electric fence perimeter in an effort to increase our odds this time. We want to give the crop as much time as we can to mature. The current plan is to keep them in the ground right up until it frosts in mid October, but we will see (we aren’t immune from impatience).

We’re not surprised to observe some molting going on within our bird population. Often when they sense the weather changing in the fall, the chickens will start shedding feathers to prepare for new growth. They can seem kind of depressed and vulnerable at this time with some breeds and individuals being more susceptible than others. Sometimes, they hold back on producing eggs when they molt.

As has always been the case, our goal is to provide each share with a dozen eggs, but we appreciate your patience if we have to make adjustments. As we’ve said before, we think you can be especially assured by the fact that the oldest eggs we could even have available are just 3 days old, with most being laid the day before, or day of your delivery/pick up. That’s pretty fresh!

The recent comfortable conditions out in the fields have been a pleasant reminder of how lucky we are to have been given this opportunity and responsibility. It’s a good time to be farmers.

We have another week upcoming of the freshest, naturally cultivated, homestead surplus veggies you can find! The diet is getting leafier around here, and ain’t upsetting. Root vegetables are back in the mix. This week, we’ll be incorporating beets and continued harvests of spicy, peppery radishes for your salads.

We have six weeks left in our inaugural CSA season, but the busiest summer of our lives will technically come to a close this week. We’ve accumulated a whole lot of data and experience on which to reflect. Thanks again, sincerely, to everybody for supporting this project. We are really looking forward to applying the lessons we’ve learned this year toward future production goals and sustainable stewardship.

We no longer have much of a tomato supply, but peppers are continuing to produce and ripen. We’ve remarked before that we aren’t oblivious to the fact that we have planted a few too many hot pepper plants and we realize it can be more than some folks can reasonably incorporate into their meal plans. We’ve started dicing our hot peppers into tiny bits and freezing them for winter. This is an easy way to get your surplus preserved without working too hard and it’ll give you peace of mind if you’re concerned about utilizing your supply.

We’ve got some tasty, flavorful leafy greens ready this week. We’ll harvest Spinach and Swiss Chard as they’re available and appropriately mature. A baby Kale salad mix, ideal for raw preparations, will also be included this week. Cooler temperatures are upcoming, which ought to be preferable for our established, broadleaf kale beds- preferable leaves for the skillet or the blender for smoothies.

Spaghetti squash is ripe out in the field, but we’ll continue to distribute our Butternuts this week. We’ve definitely pulled our biggest ones already but there are plenty more to be collected. We’ve seen a few watermelons out there, but they’re not quite ripe and disappointingly small- softball sized maybe (more lessons learned). We’ve unfortunately had to lower our expectations in this department. If we miraculously find enough of these babies, we’ll be sure to distribute them, but our hopes aren’t up.

Broccoli is established and growing in the fall garden, as well as Kohlrabi and Bok Choy. With temperatures cooling in the next couple weeks, we should see significant progress. There’s a healthy succession of beets planted out there, with our first being harvested this week. We even pulled a few carrots for a salad this week and while they’re still babies, it won’t be long until you’ll see some in your fall shares.

We’ll have an ongoing meat harvest through the fall as well. We appreciate everyone who has expressed interest in purchasing whole shares and those who have already claimed one. If you’re interested in a whole share for your freezer, let us know, as we’ll soon be opening up our availability publicly. Thus far, we’ve only been offering our harvests to CSA shareholders and family.

Have a great week, friends. It is officially the autumnal equinox. Thanks for making this a summer one we won’t soon forget, full of lessons and experiences we’ll never take for granted.

We’ve explained before that we expanded from one to three garden blocks this year- our original spring garden block, and two summer garden blocks. This time of year, we are harvesting, clearing, and cover-cropping our summer garden blocks and returning to our spring garden block for fall vegetables. While managing all three blocks is stretching and time consuming, it’s a relief to be returning to the garden where it all started. The sense that we’re nearing the finish line for this growing season is both comforting and motivating.

As we return to that first garden, we revisit many of the cool season crops we provided during the spring. While they’re technically both suited for these cool season vegetables, fall is trickier than spring. In early spring, you’re raising seedlings in cooler conditions that they like, while pest pressure is still dormant, giving those young plants a safe and comfortable environment to get off to a great start. As temperatures warm, the plants mature and the conditions are about as ideal as they can be. The pests wake up with the warm temperatures, but you’ve at least been able to avoid many of them early in the plant’s upbringing. You’re able to get a head start.

Now we must raise those same crops with the conditions being reversed. The seedlings are getting their start in hot late summer, they’re thirstier and dry out quickly. The pests are already there waiting. These crops require more care and attention. In the spring, as the garden wakes up slowly, there is more bandwidth to provide this attention while in the late summer/fall, as we mentioned before, we’re stretched out across multiple gardens and the attention can be more difficult to evenly distribute. As has not been uncommon this season, we’re faced with prioritization and compromise that, while necessary, sometimes feels uncomfortable. Nevertheless, we are still producing food though our harvests feel more like a forage amongst the tall weeds.

We’re finally reincorporating salad greens in the roster. This week, we will have Arugula, but you can soon expect harvests of Kale, Spinach, Swiss Chard, Lettuces, and micros. We haven’t been able to keep the pests away so while the Arugula will be well-washed and sorted-through, expect some bug bites and try not to be alarmed. They’re still as nutty, nutritious, and refreshing as we should expect, with some faulty aesthetics.

We’ll be sharing some big ol’ butternuts this week. They haven’t been formally cured for long term storage, so they’re considered fresh winter squash. But, they’ve spent a good while ripe on the vine and you should expect them to last- months if not through the whole winter. There are so many creative ways to prepare these vegetables and we’d love to hear about how you’re enjoying them. We’ll include Sage this week as a complementary herb. It’s a common companion in butternut recipes. We’ll likely have more to share in the coming weeks as well as spaghetti squash and pumpkins as they ripen.

We’ve talked before about our hybrid approach to raising chickens. We have mobile coops as well as free range birds using our barn as their home base. Keeping the birds cooped makes for a more predictable and convenient egg harvest. Letting birds range freely is fun and just feels right. But, it makes it much more of a challenge to predict our egg supply. While they have their dedicated nest boxes, those free-wheelin birds lay where they choose. Sometimes it requires a hunt to track them all down. This weekend, we heard what we thought was a “peep” outside, tucked into a corner of the house. Sure enough, a broody hen had been collecting a serious clutch of maybe a dozen eggs which were now hatching. We’ve now relocated the hen and her newborn chicks to their own pen to finish the job. Quite the surprise!

We started the season with a general crop plan. Six Months of gardens- an April garden, a May garden, a June garden, a July garden, an August garden, and a September/fall garden. Ideally, to keep harvests consistent, we hoped to plant biweekly within those monthly garden schedules. We kept up in many ways and fell behind badly in others. The plan was ambitious and busy and compromises had to be made. You all continued to support us and motivate us. We have been so grateful. Week by week, we evaluate how that plan has manifested. We determine what harvests are realistic and what produce ought to be available. Sometimes we keep up and sometimes we fall behind. Weather occasionally inhibits harvests. We run out of time. Despite our best intentions, sometimes we under-deliver. Last week, for example, we ran out of time to harvest cherry tomatoes for Wednesday and replaced them with butternut squashes. We failed to get to herbs. You all have continued to express gratitude and the feeling is mutual.

This is exactly what we needed in a community. We needed supporters and shareholders that would appreciate what we provide and be patient with the lessons we learn along the way. We needed folks to be intimately involved in the ups and downs and persevere with us. Thank you for your steadfastness throughout these four months.

Our sweet potato/yam patches look promising! We dug out a few to check on them and they’re about thumb-sized. It’s likely we will wait until the first frost (mid October) to harvest. It’s our first time growing these crops and we’re relieved to see they’re producing. In the September, fall garden, we have root vegetables established including carrots, beets, turnips, rutabagas, and radishes. With so much fluctuation in temperature and precipitation lately, our late summer radish row is funky, it matured earlier than expected and we’ll get some out this week. We have some greens that struggled through the late summer including some buggy arugula. We hope to get greens back in the rotation as soon as possible, but prepare for some buggy proof of our organic practices. We can expect Kale soon as well. We’ll be transplanting seedlings this week including Broccoli, Cauliflower, Kohlrabi, and Bok Choy starts.

As we near the conclusion of summer and its abundance, some items become rarer and rarer, less and less plentiful. Our supply is shifting but this week, we will continue to provide many of our summer regulars, with some hints at autumn. Last week, we spoke about the anxiety we feel as we move from summer to fall crop varieties. “Is our timing going to work?” “Will we have enough?” “Will there be a serious lull in production?” “Will our shareholders be disappointed?”

We’re new to farming at such a scale, but we understand that anxiety, uncertainty, risk, worry are certainly not uncommon emotions for farmers, conventional or otherwise. With so much traditionally out of your control, it takes acceptance and compromise and of course, faith. As CSA-based market gardeners, we have a significant advantage that many traditional or conventional farmers don’t have.

It’s not crop insurance, heavy machinery, or automated reaping and sowing technology. It’s not easily-applied pesticides, herbicides, or potent synthetic fertilizers. No doubt these tools make farmers’ lives easier, provide greater control, peace of mind for many, and a veneer of crop health. But we’ve chosen to approach our project the hard way with the significant advantage being the support of our generous and gracious shareholders.

Some folks joined the CSA to promote organic and sustainable practices. Some folks simply wanted to know their growers personally. For some, the closeness and transparency is essential to feeling confident about what they eat. Some joined to support friends. Some supported our project for all the reasons above. We try to be transparent. It’s easy when we get to celebrate a healthy crop like our spring beets, carrots, and broccoli or our summer sweet peppers. It’s uncomfortable to admit our failures when we lack supply, plan poorly, experience a hardship, or simply make mistakes.

Conventional farmers often have modern, sometimes destructive, technology to clean up these messes and realign their confidence. We have the grace and patience of our supportive community. It has been a special, emotional experience for us and we are so thankful for all of you. After the harvest moon, when our growing season truly concludes. We’ll be able to take a breath and reflect wholly on what went well and what went poorly. We’ll be able to evaluate our successes and failures and makes plans for ideal success in future seasons. We will be able to plan wisely based on some obvious lessons learned this season: don’t plant so many hot peppers, be wary of herbicide contamination, take irrigation and weed control more seriously, don’t underestimate sweet corn.