Welcome!
Thank you so much for joining us during this growing season! Kaden and I have been growing vegetables through the Winter season since 2021, and we really believe this is going to be a fantastic growing season. The forecast for the Winter is expected to be filled with extreme weather events, but we are ready for whatever Nature has up her sleeve.
For all our returning farm share members, thank you, thank you, thank you much for your continued support of Current Farms. Auto-renewing your membership is the biggest compliment Kaden and I could possibly receive. Some of you joined last season for the first time, or in 2022, 2021, and a few of you have been customers since our very first farm subscription in the Spring of 2017. Y'all are the only reason Kaden and I are still farming, and it is the honor of a lifetime for us to be trusted in providing you and your family with healthy and delicious fresh produce.
New Farm Share Members
If this is your first farm share season, then welcome to our farm family! Our subscription based business model has it's foundation built upon the mutual trust between us as farmers, who want to grow high quality food for our community, and you as a farm share member, who want to eat the high quality food we grow. Together, we will both share in the joys of a good harvest, and the disappointment of crop failure. Together, we are at the forefront of our region's budding locally-grown food movement. Kaden and I were the first farm in north Louisiana to offer "CSAs" in a subscription model back in 2017. It is our mission to reconnect families with the people who grow their food, like they were in our not so distant past. In our area, 99% of farms are "family owned", but only 4% of farms sell directly to the public. This means we have family farms who aren't feeding other families in their community. Together, we can educate others on the importance of eating seasonally, the health benefits of eating fresh and nutrient-dense food, and we can improve our region's biodiversity through organic land stewardship.
*** 1) If your share size, or frequency needs to be adjusted, please reach out to us before you consider canceling your farm share. Harvie is pretty flexible, and there's a lot of easy adjusting that can improve your farm share experience if you are getting too many or too few veggies.
2) Each week on either Monday or Tuesday afternoon, you will receive an email letting you know the customization window is open. Follow the link in that email to view your share and to customize your share. The customization window will be open until Thursday morning at 10 AM. During that time you can add produce, swap produce, or make any other necessary changes. Week to week, some crops might have different inventories. If a particular crop has more than than 10 available units, then that crop will not be automatically built into your share. Low inventory crops will be available as add-ons or swaps on a first come, first served basis. It is best to customize as soon as you receive that email.
3) Harvie uses your preferences to create a share each week filled with produce it believes you will enjoy the most. Setting your preferences is the best way to have an accurate share each week. You can also customize by swapping/removing produce from your share, but if you go over the $20/$30/$50 share cost, then Harvie will charge for any extra produce. On your Harvie profile, you can also view every delivery scheduled for you during the season. If you know you will be out of town during a certain time, then you can check the box next to that corresponding delivery to skip.
4) Most pick ups/deliveries take place on Fridays, but some of you like El Dorado Home Delivery, or the Three Board Farm pick up will be on Saturday. Please do your best to pick up within the allotted time frame for our pick up locations. Each one of our pick up locations is operated by other small business owners, who are gracious enough to allow our farm to host a pick up location. Please respect mine and Kaden's hard work, and these other small businesses by picking up on the assigned day. We message each farm share member when the shares are delivered. If you know you cannot make it (life happens), then please let Kaden or myself know so we can inform our pick up hosts. Not every pick up location has cold storage, so this can affect the quality of your produce if it's not picked up on the same day. We are more than willing to go the extra mile to coordinate an alternative.
5) My cell phone number is 318-789-9894. If you ever have any questions, concerns, or issues please do not hesitate to give me a call.
Farm Update + Season Expectations
We have spent years honing our winter growing skills. Last Winter we learned a lot, and kept our farm shares deliveries going, even when we experienced temperatures below 10 degrees at the farm towards the end of December 2022. Utilizing select winter varieties of crops, floating row cover, and our covered tunnels are all ways we protect tender plants from freezing weather. Last year, we invested in frost cover that protects down to 8 degrees, so as long as we don't encounter any sub-zero conditions, we should be fine! Let me tell you about some of the crops we are growing!
This is a time of year when our offerings are more limited than in other seasons, but we have worked on a plan to make it as diverse as possible. We have a variety of cool season herbs, like cilantro, dill, and the leaf fennel. Some of our Spring season money was invested in creating an indoor microgreen operation. One of the main microgreens we plan on growing this season will be the basil microgreens! Our early trials have gone well, and they can be stored in the fridge for 7-10 days, with a much longer shelf life than basil leaves, with a potent basil flavor. Every week we will offer a microgreen mix of sunflower shoots, pea shoots, red radish, arugula, and perhaps several members of the mustard family like broccoli and cabbage. The individual microgreens will be available as well.
This season we planted more carrots than we ever have! We will have 4-6 different varieties from baby carrots, to storage carrots, to yellow carrots. This is the time of year for everyone's favorite "candy carrots"! Candy carrots are what we call carrots that reach maturity, but that are left in the ground for storage. Each time there is a frost, the carrot plants convert starch to sugar to survive. The more this happens, the sweeter the carrots become. Carrots will be available hopefully for Thanksgiving. Because of the high temperatures and drought during the late summer, we were late in getting in the Fall carrot crop.
Root crops are always popular during this season, and we will again offer the colorful bunches of daikon radishes, French breakfast radishes, rainbow bunches, salad turnips, and for the first time ever, Winter beets!
For leafy greens, we focused a lot on spinach this season, which will become available after Thanksgiving, appearing first in salad mixes. We will not offer a "Spring Mix" during this season, but we will have the Salad & Shoots, mesclun mix, lettuce mix, and the microgreen mix. As always, there will be a braising greens mix, and we will also continue the stir fry mix once carrots and scallions are both harvestable. Of course we will offer bok choy, collard greens, mustard greens, and kale bundles too.
Other crops currently growing include Napa cabbages, broccoli, scallions, eggplant and peppers (until the first frost).
*One of the biggest changes in this farm share season concerns our packaging. Instead of paper sacks, farm shares are now packed in cardboard boxes. This costs around 4-6x more than a paper sack, but we think it results in a better farm share experience for both you and us. A small percentage of your farm share is allocated for all of the labels, packaging, office supplies, and our labor. For instance, these costs add up to be $2.25 out of the $30 farm share total.
Farm Share Add-ons
We would like to extend a big shout-out to 3 Board Farm! They have been providing eggs for our farm shares for over a year. I sure do love their eggs, and think they are some of the highest quality eggs in our area. We do not mark up their eggs, so 100% of the money spent on their products goes back to those farmers. I spoke with Farmer Taylor and he said they can allocate 10 dozen eggs per week based on the hen's current production. Chickens always produce fewer eggs in the cooler season. For the first few weeks of the farm share season, eggs will be available only as an add-on.
- I set aside the last of our pickles of the year for this farm share season. We have spicy dill, dill, sweet dill, bread & butter, and the daikon radish + carrot pickles available. There are just a few dozen jars left in stock, and once they are gone-they gone!
- We are in the middle of our holiday market season, so we have a lot of jam in stock! I will add selections of jams, jellies, and fruit syrups as add on items each week. We have almost 30 flavors in stock right now, each made with fruit we grew, or that we sourced from our farmer friends!
- Chanterelle mushroom season was huge this year, and we still have plenty of mushrooms in stock. We will offer small and regular sized jars plus chanterelle mushroom flour that can be used like a seasoning. With extra mushrooms we couldn't dehydrate, we made chanterelle mushroom stock. We vacuum sealed and froze that mushroom stock, and we are excited about offering that product this season!
Help Us Grow!
Keep in mind we have an awesome referral benefit! If you share the referral link in your Harvie profile with a friend or loved one, and they join for the farm share season, each of you will receive a $35 credit towards your next farm share! After last season, I have found I can not longer say NELA in our farm happenings. Our recent expansion to offer farm shares in Shreveport/Bossier City and El Dorado, AR have been really successful! We are keeping those locations this season, but we could always use your help in signing up more farm share members.
At the end of these emails, I have to go back and count the number of times I've used "thank you". I feel such gratitude for your farm share membership, that I get carried away sometimes. I say all the time that the farm share membership is the number one way to support our farm. Without the farm shares, there is no way Kaden and I would be farming right now. When we were farming part time before 2020, it seemed like an impossible task to make transition to farming full time. Even though I am immensely passionate about growing food, there was an enormous gap between where we were, and where we needed to be. Enough so that I had a hard time considering the possibility of making a living off the land. My lack of experience growing certain crops, or my limited business knowledge weren't even the greatest barriers to overcome. One of the biggest hurdles was not having a customer base outside of the farmers market. For more than a year, Kaden and I each only made $200 or less each week. If we had a bad farmers market, we didn't get paid at all. All of that changed when we began offering farm share subscriptions with Harvie. Your support has given us the inspiration (money) to keep growing and has allowed me to achieve my dream of farming for a living. Besides playing clawhammer banjo in a bluegrass band, there is no job in the world that I would rather have. As a farm share member, you have brought so much meaning to my life though the work I do every day. I can sincerely say "it is the greatest honor of my life to grow food for you and your family". Thank you so much for that opportunity.
Your Farmer,
Conrad Cable
