NEW ON THE TEAM!
Kaci Norton, and Haley Marschke, pictured here, joined us this spring. They come with experience growing vegetables, having worked multiple years at Good Earth Farm CSA near Waupun. They are knowledgable and fun, and are a great addition to our crew! Thanks much! Kaci's husband, an accomplished carpenter and fabricator, also has helped us bring closer to completion several building projects, which we are very excited about!
NEW CROPS THIS WEEK!
This week we have sweet corn, and peppers, that are going into most of the boxes. We usually plant sweet corn 4-5 times per season, and although our neighborhood raccoon families decimated much of our first planting, (despite our having caught, and relocated, over 10 of them over the course of a couple days), more will be coming! We did install a 2-strand electric fence that surrounds our sweet corn patch that we hope will be more effective at keeping the critters out!
We are growing bell peppers, and the more pointy and elongated "frying" peppers, and a limited amount of hot peppers, for you this season. Some of the peppers we allow to ripen to their mature red or yellow or orange color, while others get picked at the 'less-mature' green stage.
TIPS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR THE POSSIBLE SWAPPING, AND ORDERING OF VEGGIES (which might be a review for some of you!)
The first thing to remember is that you need not do anything at all, and you will still get a customized list of vegetables that is based on your preferences. So no worries or stress about it!
If you do have the interest, and/or need, to modify your list some, (and you can do it within the day or two that are allotted for that), then you can first see if you would like to swap any of the items on your list for other items that are available. If the items that you are replacing are of the same value, then there would be no additional charge for that swap. If the items that you are adding are of a higher value than the original items on your list that you are deleting, then you will need to pay for that difference in value, and that should be clearly pointed out to you.
If you notice that there are other items that you might want in your box, and you are willing to purchase those items, then you can easily do so by clicking on the vegetable listed, and choosing the quantity that you would desire. For the next couple of months, we expect that we will often have 15 or so different vegetables available that could go in your box, and it would not work to try to include them all in your box every week, obviously. So for example this week we are making available red onions to go in your boxes, but not yellow onions, so if you wanted them, you would have to either wait till we give them out again next week, or you could buy them from the on-line store, and they will be included in your tote along with the rest of your regular order. (You may notice that sometime we may choose the unit 'bag' to identify the unit that is available; we may not actually put the items in a 'bag' into your tote; it is simply the best option of the ones given to us by Harvie.)
Hopefully all of this will get easier and clearer as the weeks go by. We also are continually needing to make decisions on the unit sizes, and amounts, that will get divided up into the shares, and are learning how to go about it best. For example, this week we will have some more cherry tomatoes than the previous week, and so we could either make our base unit a quart of cherry tomatoes, instead of a pint, or make available more pints than were available last week. If we choose the quart size, then some of you would not get any cherry tomatoes at all, especially the small shares, since with a higher value of the container of cherry tomatoes there would be corresponding less value to fit all the other crops in. So we decided to just list higher amounts of the pints available, so that many of you with the larger size shares will likely be getting 2, or more, of the pints. More packaging, but perhaps a more sure way to enable everyone to get some of the tomatoes.
As always give us feedback, and with technical questions about your pick-up location, changes to your shares, etc., head right away to support@harvie.farm, though you can always cc us as well to keep us in the loop. And if you want to hold your box, or skip it (if you have the skipper share), be sure to give us and Harvie at least 5 days notice before the delivery date. Otherwise we are already in the process of planning for the picking and filling of your box; thanks!
