First things first, Kaden and I would like to extend our deepest gratitude for your support over the course of this season! The farm shares are our main revenue stream, and this Spring/Summer season is the longest season we have ever offered. We began 4 weeks earlier than in 2022, and extended this season into August for the first time ever. We also had an amazing sign up period, and hit our record for most farm shares sent out in one week.
Kaden and I began preparing for this season on January 1st, in the midst of our Winter share season. Each of the crops we offered over this season were meticulously planned and tended. We really hope that you had the opportunity to select a lot of your favorite vegetables each week, plus maybe try some new things!
Fall Season Update
The weather has been too extreme to get an early start on Fall plantings. We are waiting until the latter end of the month to begin transplanting. Therefore, I do not have an exact date as to when the next season will begin. I am hoping for a mid-September start. As soon as I can more accurately predict our harvest dates, I will open the season for sign ups. Most of you are signed up for auto-renew. If this is your first farm share season, I hope that you had a positive experience and will join us for our next season! It's always the biggest compliment when farm share members return for another season!
Farm Share Statistics
Over the past 20 weeks, we offered more than 70 varieties of vegetables + herbs, as well as a large number of value added items like pickles and jams. Just this season, our farm share members sourced $4,000 of products from other local farms. This is a big deal! We are so fortunate to have a great community of local growers in NELA. A really big shout out to 3 Board Farm for supplying eggs every single week! *We do not mark up products from other farms. 100% of that revenue went directly to those farmers.
Our best selling crops this season were:
1. Carrots
2. Lettuce Mix
3. Braising Greens
4. Free range eggs
5. Beets
6. Squash (varieties combined)
Successes of the Season
I think we had an excellent snap pea and spinach crop to start off the season. In fact, all of our leafy greens performed well until the end of May. This was our first large scale planting of sugar snap peas. It was awesome to hear all of the positive feedback from our members on this crop, especially folks with children! The purple peas were one of my favorite crops to harvest of the entire season!
We hit on the carrots this season! I hope you enjoyed the colorful bunches! They grew beautifully. We grew more carrots this season than ever before, at the lowest price we have ever offered. It was a good season for early roots. The beets were an excellent crop too, and now I have the perfect planting dates, plus we learned so much about how to harvest them.
This season we put a lot of crop planning emphasis on the middle-end weeks of the season. The yellow squash, patty pans, zucchini, and cucumbers are all crops we hadn't put a lot of focus on in the past. This season though, we wanted to try our best to have those be staples, especially after so many weeks when shares were heavy on leafy greens.
There were a lot of crops with fantastic harvests like green beans, microgreens, chanterelle mushrooms, and cantaloupes. As a farmer, I was most impressed with our escarole crop from the beginning of this season. We had never grown it, but I wanted to give it a try to see if we could grow radicchio in the future, since they are part of the same family (and I already had escarole seeds). I don't think there was a more beautiful crop this season, or one that I enjoyed cooking either!
Failures this Season
The biggest disappointment has to be the failed fruit crops. I mentioned it several times, but the late freeze in March wiped out the blooms of mayhaws, peaches, plums, apples, and pears. It was honestly a nightmare situation for a lot of local farmers. I still feel rotten that I had advertised all of the fresh fruits that would be in the shares this season, only to not live up to what was advertised. For the past two years, peaches were such a big deal to our farm share members. I hope that next Spring the weather is more in our favor.
Lettuce is such a big crop for us, not only for our farm shares, but also for our retail customers. June was stupid hot this year. This was not anticipated in our crop plan. The heat caused a lot of our leafy greens to bolt prematurely. Instead of harvesting each row of lettuce three times via cut and come again, we could only get one harvest. We ran out three weeks earlier than was planned. Then, we faced brutal conditions trying to transplant replacement lettuce.
Kaden and I had big plans for tomatoes and eggplants. However, we think we have Southern bacterial wilt that has infected our soil. This put a huge strain on the tomatoes, bell peppers, and eggplants (planted next to each other). Tomatoes are a crop that everyone wants, but dadgum it's like we run into a disaster every time we plant them.
Farm Update
Starting on Monday, Kaden will have a total of 7 days off, while I keep the farm running. Then we will switch! Tuna is taking off with his buddy on a brewery tour of Louisiana. Then, in two weeks, Emi and I are finally having our wedding ceremony! I will be spending my week off in Puerto Rico with my wife!! It's gonna be wild. The island has a very active local food scene, featuring some farmers and chefs who are fired up about local food. We have a visit planned to an agroecology farm school, and a ton of locally sourced restaurants we can't wait to try. I love single origin coffee, so I'm hoping to add a coffee plantation to our sight seeing list.
Our first round of Fall transplants go in the ground on August 18. Right now, we are focused on preparing our field blocks, harvesting, and you wouldn't believe how many hours a week I spend on a dang lawnmower and weedeater! Every day we are working hard to make the Fall season filled with more amazing harvests!
Thank you again for all of your support this season. It is the honor of our lifetimes to grow food for you and your family. We so greatly appreciate the opportunity to do so.
