Well, we've finally made it; the last week of farm shares for 2019. This means one more milestone towards putting 2019 in the books and getting ready for 2020! We hope everyone enjoyed this season, every one seems to go by just a little faster. I still remember packing the boxes for the first week of our first CSA season, thinking that it seemed like a big feat but that somehow we had to repeat it for the next 17 weeks. Pretty crazy to think about what it's turned into!
Unfortunately, it looks like the weather's not going to give us any breaks for our final week. It sounds crazy, but our average high right now is in the upper 40's - doesn't that sound nice? With lows in the teens and a high of 21 for Tuesday, we're sure wishing we could find our way back to average. We don't often strive for average, but we'll take it in this regard!
We took the opportunity today to harvest all of the greens for the week. Usually we harvest them on Tuesday or Wednesday for Thursday deliveries, but with the forecast lows in the mid teens, we thought we'd play it safe. Even with our hoophouses and row cover, we can only reliably protect our crops down to around 22 degrees, so we'll be well outside that safe level. We may end up losing most of it, but the shoulder seasons are always a bit of a gamble and luckily we've already hit our sales target for 2019. If anything, it's reinforcing the need for us to add supplemental heat at least one hoophouse for insurance, which we'll likely tackle before spring. Fall has just been a bit too unpredictable the past couple years for us to have no way to handle the real curve ball days.
Fortunately, it looks like the weather may break a bit next week; we've still got a few big projects to tackle, so we'd definitely welcome a little warmer weather! In the meantime, we're focused on making a roadmap to tackling our 2020 planning. It's always difficult to not get bogged down in the millions of minute details of the planning process when we start looking at the bigger picture, so we're hoping to approach it a bit more strategically this year! The seasonality of farming sure is nice in that we get a bit of a timeout to step back, evaluate and make a new plan; it's nice to be able to wipe the slate clean and start fresh every year.
Just a quick note that we don't expect you to return the final box of the season; we'll start next season with new boxes. The brown boxes are recyclable, but the white ones are, unfortunately, not; they haven't yet started producing the non-wax version of that size box.
As we've mentioned, we'll be sending out a end of season survey in the next week or so; be sure to be on the lookout for that. Obviously, we can make a lot more progress in improving what we offer if we get everyone's input!
Thanks again for joining us and we look forward to seeing everyone again next year!
-Brendan & Greta
