The first of March is perhaps the key cornerstone date in our entire Featherstone Farm calendar. In addition to being “tax day” for farmers- and the start of our “crop/fiscal year”- it is the day that we fire up the heat in the greenhouse for the first time, and begin seeding new crops for the coming growing season. How exciting!!
This year early March also marks the final delivery of winter farm share CSA boxes. So this gives me a good opportunity to reflect a bit on the “crop year” just ending, and especially the winter program.
First of all, great thanks to all of you for being members of Featherstone's Farm Share CSA program! It has been our great pleasure to serve you and your family over the past 4 months! We sure hope that you found the program as satisfying as you expected when you signed up.
2019 saw two very significant changes in the Featherstone Farm Share program. The first was the expansion of the Harvie/ customization system to cover summer shares as well as winter (after 22 seasons of packing identical boxes for all members!). The second was the start of the winter “high tunnel” (HT) production era.
We are most interested to hear from you about how these initiatives worked for you; we will be sending out surveys soon. Please let us know what you think, particularly if you have suggestions about how we could improve the service!
There were enough different experimental bed setups and trial crops planted in the farm’s two new high tunnels this winter, that I will defer to Abby Benson- the field production coordinator who planned and managed these tunnels- to explain results to you. Abby will be writing soon with her perspective of what we learned this winter, and what it means for future seasons.
From my perspective, however, it was a delight to see so much crop do so well in unheated spaces all winter (we picked spinach 2 weeks ago, less than 72 hours after a night of -26 degrees!!). While spinach is and will remain the primary “winter hearty green” in HTs, we produced experimental crops (many of which you probably didn't see in your shares because they were experimental and in small amounts) of lettuce and escarole, bok choi, kale and chard as well. We identified several challenges, including soil drainage and aphid pressure, and experimented with organic control measures. As we continue to scale up “high tunnels” and lower, mobile “caterpillar tunnels” in the near future, I believe we are well positioned to rapidly add to our winter greens offerings in our future winter CSA boxes.
Finally, this box represents the final farm share delivery for some of you, who signed onto “3 year memberships” in the fall of 2016, when a combination of record wet weather and crop disease forced Featherstone Farm to the very brink of liquidation. In accordance with a pledge I made to the entire farm community at that time, I wrote an extensive update this month for our 3 and 5 year prepaid members on the progress of the farm’s recovery; we'll be sending that update out to all our 2019 members via email today, so please look out for it. There is no way to overstate the joy and satisfaction I feel- that I think we all feel at FF- in offering such an upbeat report on resilience and recovery. Once again, a heartfelt thanks to all of you who helped us out 3 years ago, when we really needed it!!
Even as we pack and deliver our final farm share boxes of the season- and launch into 3 months of focus on fieldwork- I hope we are able to stay in touch! Please let us know if the new format or crop offerings met your expectations this winter… write or message us, fill out surveys! How else are we to know how to change the program to better meet your needs in the future?
We’ll be thinking about you in the coming days and weeks, as we seed trays in the greenhouse, as we plow and prepare field beds for planting, as we break ground for asparagus… CSA farm share programs are truly a “community supported” and community oriented enterprise. We look forward to seeing you picking strawberries at the Social in June!
Gratefully,
Jack
p.s. If you haven't yet signed up for our summer farm share program, please don't delay, we do plan to sell out for a second year in a row! To join us today, simply log into your Harvie account here and click on the "place order" link on the right side of your profile page.
