Happy Spring, and here's to the LAST box of the 2020-21 Winter CSA season!
This past Monday, farmers Alex, Ryan, and I officially started the seeding for the 2021 summer growing season. We filled the greenhouse with flats and flats of freshly seeded chard, beets, collards, tomatoes, peppers, scallions, and about 50 thousand (no exaggeration!) onion transplants. Most of these early seeded crops are destined for early planting in one of our hoophouses to give the plants a little protection from our sometimes unruly spring here in the Great Northwoods.
Seeding all of these flats used to take about a week back in the old days. This week, we got all of those seeds planted on a single day thanks to our vacuum plate seeder. It's a pretty simple device, but it has saved us countless hours (and cramped fingers) over the last 5 years. The unit attaches to a small shop vac (the black hose in the pic with Farmer Ryan above) to create suction. Aluminum plates with different sized holes and different spacing can be screwed onto the seeder, depending on the size of the seed being planted and the size of the flat you are seeding into. When seeds are rolled across the plate, the vacuum sucks a single seed (or multiples of seed for onion and scallion transplants) onto each hole in the plate. We turn the seeder upside down over the flat we are seeding (seeds held in place by the suction from the vacuum) and line up the sides of the seeder with the sides of the flat. When we turn off the vacuum, the seeds drop right down into the flat of soil - genius! Planting all of these seeds used to be pretty hard on our fingers, and we're glad to have added this little seeder to our toolbox.
In the picture above, you can see tiny silver onion seeds in the soil of the flat (covered in an organic silver-colored coating to make them more visible), along side of a few onions we still have in storage that were planted LAST YEAR this very same week. I always love seeing the full cycle of the seasons come all the way around. For onions, we try to get on average 2-3 seeds per cell, so we transplant them in a little group instead of each one singly.
But not every seed is started with the vacuum seeder. When we are planting just a few flats of something, it takes about as long to change the plate on the seeder and get it set up properly as it does to just seed them by hand. Also, some of our seeds are pretty pricey. These tomato seeds (750 of them this season) cost almost a dollar each, so we would rather hand seed to keep good track of them and not spill a single one! As organic farmers, we rely on good plant genetics to combat diseases. These tomatoes were specifically bred to perform well in a greenhouse environment and be resistant to most of the diseases that can plague tomatoes. As I seeded these tomatoes, I was listening to the vacuum start and stop as Farmer Alex was seeding onions. She was seeding an entire flat of 128 cells of onions with 2-3 seeds per cell as fast as I was hand seeding about 20 cells with tomato seeds!
On the microgreen front, we've got great news: our labels arrived last week!! We think they turned out pretty sharp. Farmer Ryan's family runs a printing business here in WI and helped us with the micro label design and printing. Navigating the world of bar codes and the organic label approval process took some time, but it was worth it in the end.
We have already been experimenting with more varieties of microgreens, including beautiful bright red amaranth (not available in your CSA boxes yet) and 4 varieties of spicy mustard micros, which will be ready for harvest for your CSA boxes this coming week. If you like spicy foods, be sure to give these a try and let us know what you think! We're offering a mix of all 4 varieties, and they each seem very different so far. "White Ice" has a big light colored seed, and has a slight anice-like smell, while "Red Lace" has a tiny black seed and gorgeous, delicate maroon tinted leaves. Farmer Ryan really likes spicy stuff, so we're hoping to make a spicy mustard micro mix a regular part of our production. If you are not as into that kind of spice, we've got you covered as well - cilantro micros pictured below are back (taco night!) and we've got lots of basil on the way (it's a slow grower though, and will be ready in another week or so for the first spring farmstand boxes.)
On a personal note, last week we said goodbye to the family of 9 puppies that we had been fostering since early January. It was a bittersweet moment - we had sure grown fond of those little rascals and their sweet mama dog - but boy those pups were sure a LOT of work! Thankfully, each pup was adopted to a new family, and mama dog Sheba will be going to live at Farmer Alex's house, so I bet we'll see her again soon enough. It feels strangely quite around the house these days - no shredded seed catalogs to sweep up off of the floor, no pups wrestling in the kitchen or barking at night (whew!) But I will sure miss seeing that pile of pups crashed out around the wood stove in the evening.
Finally - a few words from Farmer Brian:
FIRST DELIVERY OF SPRING BOXES WILL BE MARCH 31st.
A big thankyou to everyone for being with us for our winter CSA season. Spring boxes start with delivery on March 31st in time for the Easter Holiday and are being run through the Farmstand function on Harvie. These boxes will be available for pick up at the Chequamegon Food Co-op, Trinity Lutheran Church in Duluth or via home delivery. Like last year these boxes will be a la carte and contain everything we have available. Boxes are available for order Friday afternoon-Sunday evening. With Farmstand there is no weekly commitment so order whenever it suits you. Boxes start at $89. For more information check out the Farmstand feature on Harvie.
Keep your mud boots handy, and we'll see you next time. Thanks once again for your continued support of local farms and food producers. We're looking forward to another productive growing season ahead!
In community,
Farmer Chris
Great Oak Farm
