First, a definition:
High Tunnel: a steel and clear plastic structure similar to a greenhouse but taller, built in the field, and lacking heat, benches and other greenhouse-like amenities. Whereas the 3 existing greenhouses at Featherstone Farm are for producing vegetable transplants in the spring (to be re-planted in an open field during the season), high tunnels are all about growing crops to maturity in the ground in a protected environment, 12 months of the year.
As you may know, we have spent a good deal of our time this past year working on planning, development and construction of a series of new high tunnels at Featherstone Farm. Whether its January spinach or June tomatoes, high tunnels are about to transform our CSA farm share program in ways we can only begin to imagine. Starting this fall, we are entering a new era here at Featherstone Farm, one that I hope will make much of we do here more stable, more predictable, more sustainable.
High tunnels will allow us to accomplish two distinct and equally important goals, starting immediately:
1. Extend our fresh market leafy greens production “season” to nearly 12 months a year …even without supplemental heat and/or light Spinach in particular is extremely cold hearty, and will be planted in roughly 80% of our high tunnel beds this fall. We will also be experimenting with lettuces, kales, chards and escarole this first “winter season” These crops will be available exclusively through our winter CSA share program, along with storage crops like carrots, cabbage and squash.
2. Manage risk and boost productivity (200-500%?) in warm season crops like tomatoes. Starting in April 2020, we will begin moving a portion of our filed plantings of disease prone crops like tomatoes, basil and peppers into high tunnels, where they will be much, much healthier, and produce more dependable yields. Over time- as our acreage under high tunnel plastic increases- we may well abandon traditional field plantings of these crops altogether. In high tunnels they will still be grown in the same top quality topsoil they always have been in. They will just be healthier and more productive, by orders of magnitude. And earlier; we hope to have ripe tomatoes in CSA boxes by mid July 2020. And things like beans and peas more available and earlier in our first June boxes.
As many of you have heard me say repeatedly in recent years, it’s all about the rain. Commercial vegetable crops are almost universally grown in the arid west, where they virtually never see a drop of rain over the course of their seasonal lives. When it rains here in Minnesota during the growing season (as it has with increasing persistence and intensity in recent years), our crops almost always suffer at one level or another (particularly with yield crippling foliar disease). We’ve experimented with many ways of keeping crops dry in recent years here at Featherstone Farm. High tunnels are another major step in this direction.
There's a lot more to say on this new era of the high tunnel at Featherstone, which you may read on our blog here (just scroll down over first few paragraphs, which you've just read here for further reading).
And if you are a fan of fresh, local greens in the dead of winter, please consider joining us for our upcoming winter CSA farm share program, which starts the first week of November! Hearty storage crops + tender fresh greens make for the perfect winter cooking and we're looking forward to keeping warm with you in the kitchen! Sign up today (we do plan to sell out!) in your Harvie account here. Or for more details click here.
Thank you for being a part of our farm, we could not do it without you!
Gratefully,
Jack
