Hello All! The season’s have finally changed it seems, and summer temps are just around the corner. It’s strange, but yesterday we were shivering cold harvesting in the rain, to the extent that we even turned on the nursery heater at lunch. And now today, we’re in short sleeves with the sun in our eyes and sweating! We’re on the alert because certainly warm weather after so much rain will mean the weeds are mounting an offense and will be battering the farm gate soon.
We look forward to seeing you all at pick up this week. This week’s tidbit of knowledge about your CSA program has to do with the nitty gritty of how it works…and perhaps more meaningful to you guys…’WHY do I sometimes see something at market that wasn’t available when I customized!!??$#!’ Lol, we haven’t actually gotten any anger over this circumstance, but it certainly does happen and we’d rather you guys understood the why than being frustrated over not getting say…snap peas. In order for our customizable boxes to work, we need to have an upfront estimate of what we’ll harvest the following week. That way, we can offer it up and you guys can customize your boxes as you like. Since it’s an estimate, we are very conservative because we want to avoid the situation where you load your boxes with produce that doesn’t materialize the following week. Estimating with a bit of safety involved invariably means that we actually will harvest MORE, and that’s what we bring to market. Also, the variability of the weather is a big factor here. The harvest window on some crops is quite small to get them at their peak. So while we may be planning on a bed of broccoli for our CSA harvest estimate two weeks out, warm temps and rain may mean that it’s ready to go in one week and wouldn’t hold in the field for two. That’s how we end up with a lot of something at market that maybe wasn’t as plentiful when we estimated for the boxes. A final circumstance is when we’re just beginning to harvest something like snap peas or cherry tomatoes. The very first harvest is hard to estimate, but soon we’ll be able to base our estimates on the previous week’s actual harvest. But that means that the very first of a new crop is often seen at market rather than in the boxes simply because we didn’t know that any would be ready yet. We hope that shines some light on some of the factors that go into our harvest estimates, we’ll dive into more later.
In the meantime, if you pick up at market, remember that one of the perks of being a CSA member is that you can just request something from the market side from Rudy when you pick up – no need to wait in line!
Cheers, Rudy & Bonnie
