Welcome to the first delivery of the 2022 Summer CSA season! On behalf of all of the farmers and food producers in the Bayfield Foods Cooperative, we're so excited to be growing for you, and really looking forward to the season ahead.
This spring has been full of challenges - lingering cold temps, wet soils, hoophouse storm damage, mechanical breakdowns and repairs - but we've overcome them all and are still on track with our production schedules. This ain't our first rodeo, friends.
And as farmers working together cooperatively, we can always count on the other farms in the cooperative for help when we need it. We're looking forward to some warmer weather (it was 39 degrees again last night here at Great Oak Farm), and ready for summer to take off. .JPG)
First, some introductions are in order for those of you who are new to the Bayfield Foods CSA. My name is Chris Duke, and I manage Great Oak Farm just outside of Ashland. We grow about 15 acres of certified organic veggies, as well as another 15 or so acres of cover crops for building soil health and crop rotation. Our crew this season consists of Farmers Alex, Ellen, and Connor (left to right in the picture above), as well as four-legged deer patrol (Scamp, Buster, Hobbes, and Quince, also L-R). It's hard to believe, but this is our 20th season farming here at Great Oak Farm! You'll hear from us each week in this newsletter, and I will give you the farmer perspective on what's happening here. Hopefully this newsletter will help you to better understand the how and why behind some of the delicious food in your boxes each week.
So come check out how things are growing. We'll start with hoophouse crops. The hoophouse full of cucumbers that lost it's cover is all trellised up and weeded nicely now. Again, huge thanks to this amazing crew for rallying in the rain and breeze last Friday to get this cover pulled over the house before the cold snap hit. It's sure looking nice in there.
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Thursday, since it was too wet to work in the fields, we spent the day trellising, pruning, and weeding our tomato hoophouses, a perfect rainy-day job. As you may recall, timing is everything when it comes to growing veggies. We've been right on time with our hoophouse management, and it shows. These crops are looking outstanding. The first green cherry tomatoes are already forming, and we hope to be picking the first ripe tomatoes in a few more weeks! .JPG)
Here's a shot of the cherry tomato house as we were doing our pruning and trellising. The vines are approaching 3' tall now, and the clusters of tomato blossoms are impressive. Typically the first clusters are small, as the plants are putting most of their energy into vegetative and root growth. First clusters this size are a great sign of a productive season ahead. The rows of beets down the centers of the tomato beds are starting to size up, and should also be ready for harvest in a few more weeks. All kinds of yumminess in there headed your way..JPG)
Meanwhile, the new seals for the field tractor hydraulic steering pump FINALLY arrived this week on Tuesday! Putting the new seals in the pump took only a few minutes, however reinstalling the pump turned out to be a 9 hour ordeal filled with stripped fittings, bad hydraulic lines, and topped off with a completely unrelated fuel filter issue - but the tractor is now fixed and ready to roll. What a relief!
We did borrow a tractor again this week from fellow Bayfield Foods Cooperative farmers Toby and Pam Griggs of the Griggs Cattle Co just a few miles down the road to keep transplanting onions, and I cannot express my appreciation enough. It's a blessing to have such great neighbors.
When I brought the tractor back, I learned that they had just discovered a busted axle on their cattle hauling trailer (of course it was the day before they were taking a long trip to bring some animals in to the processor). Thankfully, they were able to borrow a cattle trailer from another fellow Bayfield Foods farmer (David at Hidden Vue Farm) about 10 miles away while their trailer gets fixed. Again, the power of cooperative farming saves the day. What a wonderful farming community to be a part of..JPG)
Back to getting our tractor running, here's a trick I learned from yet another fellow Bayfield Foods farmer and long time friend and mentor Tom Cogger at Maple Hill Farm. A scrap of cardboard can be a great way to label and organize bolts as they come off of a piece of equipment. Often, we have to wait a week or more for parts to arrive (15 days for our new pump seals), and by then you might forget what goes where when reassembling the machine. Keeping everything organized with notes on a sheet of cardboard can really go a long way towards making sure everything is reassembled correctly. .JPG)
When repairing these older tractors, you never know what you are going to run into. Often times, parts are no longer available, so new solutions with existing components need to be found and adapted to the situation when obsolete parts have failed. You can see the new flexible hydraulic hose that replaced the old stripped out copper line hanging on the loader of the tractor.
Most of the time, older tractors are easier to work on than newer ones . There are fewer electrical components on older tractors, and for the most part the parts are attached in such a way as to make them more accessible for service by the tractor owners instead of a repair shop.
However, that doesn't mean that the engineers 50+ years ago got everything right. For instance, this connector bolting 2 hydraulic lines together to keep them from shifting was completely buried BEHIND all of the other systems and components in the background of the picture, with practically no access. Engineers of yesteryear, I have words for you. Without removing lots of additional parts (and dealing with all of their rusted bolts, stripped nuts, etc), it took nearly 30 minutes just to loosen the bolt on the top of that screw to free up the old hydraulic line, 1/30th of a turn at a time... Patience is indeed a virtue.
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Working on these machines can be a profoundly humbling experience, there's really no other way to put it (politely, anyway!) For someone like me who is used to covering a lot of ground in a day, getting hung up by busted bolts, obsolete parts, and such for 9 hours on a project that should take less than 30 minutes to complete is about enough to drive you nuts. Three trips to the parts store later, once the tractor was fixed and running again and all connections were checked for leaks, words could not express my sense of relief.
So, on Tuesday after dinner, with steady rain in the forecast all day on Wednesday (which would make our soil too wet to work for several days) I said good night to the kids and headed out to get that tractor back to work with my headlamp and 6 extra batteries. Hardly any older tractors have working lights any more, those electrical systems are usually the first to wear out. So, headlamp light it had to be.
To help us get caught back up on our planting schedule, I got as much field work done as I was able to before the rain started in the morning at about 6:30 am. I can't remember the last time I pulled an all nighter with no sleep for 24 hrs, but it's been quite some time I can assure you. Hopefully that's the last one for an equally long time. After getting the kids up for school when I came back inside in the morning, I hit the sack and got some well deserved rest. Fingers crossed that things are dry enough on Friday or Saturday to get back in the field and keep rolling.
As farmers, we need to do whatever we can to work around the weather and breakdowns to stay on schedule. Those transplants we started weeks ago will be ready to be planted outside soon, so our fields need to be prepped and ready to receive them. If we wait too long to get our field work done and cannot get our plants out on time, those transplants will wither and and die in the greenhouse. Some crops we really only get one shot at planting each year. Timing is everything!.JPG)
Finally, I'll leave you with this cute pic of the first fawn we found hiding in the grass here at the farm this week. We put the dogs in the house so mama could come back and lead this fresh fawn off to quieter pastures today. The fawn still had it's slippers on (the soft coverings over it's hooves), letting us know it hasn't really taken many steps yet and it's hooves haven't been out long enough to get hard yet. Definitely less than an hour old, and mighty cute.
Here's to a great growing season ahead!
In community,
Farmer Chris
Great Oak Farm
