Hello Everyone! The weather continues to be good for growing, although it looks like a dreary week ahead. The forecast for Friday night to Saturday has been fluctuating in the mid-twenties, what we’d refer to as a hard freeze as opposed to just a frost. At that point we will be giving up on protecting the more tender crops and covering the hardier ones to protect them from damage. Even crops like kale and spinach, which are quite tough, can sustain damage that reduces their quality and marketability. We will have to cut any broccoli or cauliflower that is heading regardless of the size, because if the heads freeze they are ruined. Lettuce is amazingly resistant to the cold, but if the tender center of the plant freezes it will no longer continue to grow and size up. There are only a few weeks until the end of the CSA season, but the challenges never end! (more…)

Hi Folks! The weather continues to be reasonably good for the crops. We had almost two inches of rain and another ¾ inch on Friday. We had a light frost Sunday morning. We continue to cover the beans and a few other more delicate crops to protect them from cold nights. We are getting a good harvest from the beans now, so our efforts have paid off. (more…)

Hello Folks, the weather has been copacetic this past week – one cold night but no frost.  We are currently getting some rain, but it is not expected to be excessive.  We are still waiting for a large planting of string beans to size up.  They are growing very slowly but we should have enough for some groups this week and for the rest by next week.  This will be the gasp for the summer vegetables. (more…)

Hello everyone, so after three weeks without rain we received a little over three inches last week. We have gone from bone-dry to muddy conditions, but at least we have a respite from moving the sprinklers around. Nighttime temperatures have been dropping, but we have not had any more frosts. At this point we are covering anything tender and worth saving anytime the forecast calls for temps in the thirties. We have a large planting of beans which have been flowering profusely and are loaded with small pods. They are growing very slowly with the shorter days and cool nights, but we hope to have beans for next week. (more…)

Hi Everyone! Farming can be a very rewarding endeavor – producing high quality food in a sustainable and environmentally conscious manner is important and gratifying. It can also be tremendously heartbreaking. As last week went by, the extent of the damage from four successive night of frost became apparent. We tried to cover and protect as much of the more sensitive crops as we could, but it is not possible to cover ten or more acres of crops. I estimate the losses to be in the tens of thousands of dollars. Some of this loss is manifest as income loss on crops we would have sold at market – we loss most of our cut flowers for example. Some of the loss is reflected in both market sales losses and what we have available to put in the CSA shares, reducing the value of the shares. (more…)

Hello Folks, so the weather has turned on us again. It has been nearly 2 weeks with no rain and another week to go before any precipitation is predicted. Worse than that we have had frost on 3 consecutive nights with a fourth forecast for tonight. I say forecast but actually the predictions have been for 37-38 degrees and there were no frost warnings. We covered some of the more delicate crops on the first night and then, once we saw the effects, started covering as much as we could. (more…)