Winter rye coming up on the field where we just harvested the sweet potatoes; nearly brings a tear to my eyes!
This week's offerings: Nothing new this week -- though we haven't seen scallions for a while -- unless you wanted some daikon radishes, which are available on a swap or purchase basis. Same Brussels sprouts as last week, and also both sweet potatoes and regular potatoes for this last delivery, along with celery, carrots, onions, leeks, garlic, spinach, arugula, red cabbage, and radishes. Plus plenty of extras of other items, including some shiitake mushrooms. As usual, what you receive depends in part on your size share, as well as your preferences, along with the amounts of each of the items available that we have entered. Sorry again for the late notice -- it takes literally hours to go through all the fields to come up with an accurate estimate of what will be available, and there is always something more pressing to attend to before I get to that. Like always, you can swap or purchase other items, as desired, and now about 60% of you take the time to do that.
Coming soon: THIS IS THE LAST DELIVERY OF THE REGULAR SEASON! For those who are planning to get the late fall shares, they will start in two weeks, and continue every two weeks for a total of three deliveries (ending on December 14th). You can sign up at the website, or at https://www.harvie.farm/farm/springdale-farm/signup. Deadline to sign up is November 8th. We also are planning to have the same home deliveries of assorted produce and processed items that we have had in the past winters, and we'll be starting that in early January. You will receive another notice about that in the future!
On the farm: It is truly miraculous how from tiny seeds plants emerge that are able to capture the energy of the sun, and give us the nice green colors of growing plants, and that help build and protect the soil while growing, and ultimately become food for other organisms, whether microorganisms in the soil, or furry creatures, or humans, or something in between (like worms, and nematodes, and the whole range of living organisms that we can discover when we go a forest or prairie or well-run farm and sneak a peak at seeing what living entities inhabit that terrain). So although I didn't actually start weeping (with joy and amazement) at seeing the rye coming up, (in the picture above) I was not far from it, and it's truly an incredible pleasure to be involved with attempting to bring forward truly nutritious food that ends up on our plates and in our bodies, while at the same time taking care of the precious resources of the living soil that we have at Springdale Farm (despite the huge amount of rocks and gravel that we also are 'blessed' with!) Some of our spinach, as you can see on the right, we are able to get a second cutting from, so we have fortunately been able to keep that coming to you with each of the fall deliveries, and will continue to be able to do so for the fall and winter shares, if you will be part of that. (Or if you find our veggies at a winter market, or at the Slo Food Market in Sheboygan, or at the Outpost stores in Milwaukee.) The greenhouses are filling up with spinach, and salad mix, and scallions, and carrots, etc., so we look forward to many more harvests the next 6 months. (As well as hauling out of our storage rooms the root crops, cabbages, Brussels sprouts, etc., along with some kimchi and sauerkraut that we are making.)
In the meantime, we continue to plant next year's garlic,
haul kids around the farm,
as well as get ready to cut down the remainder of the Brussels sprouts forest.
Looking ahead to the 2023 season: Barring some unforeseen calamitous event, we expect to be offering shares again in 2023! We probably will offer about the same number that we had this season. But we are probably not going to be using the Harvie platform to help us with the distribution of our produce into your shares -- we had some issues with the technical details, but it was more because they were so awfully expensive, and you also sent your money to them instead of to the farm, et al, and so we are ready for a change. Looks like CSAWare offers an alternative (and perhaps the only alternative out there) to the Harvie algorithm, and we have consulted with other growers who have switched over to them, and they are all very supportive of our decision, for the same reasons, and have had good experiences with CSAWare, and so we are likely to go with them. So you need not worry about getting 'automatically enrolled', like you possibly experienced with Harvie (another Harvie feature that we weren't particularly fond of). But we don't have the details ready now, so you'll be hearing from us again sometime in the next couple months about that offering. We like to keep our prices within reaching distance of the general population, (while always offering bartering arrangements for those who have harder times to come up with the share prices), and hopefully with not too many increases in our own purchased inputs (like fuel, vehicle maintenance, seeds, etc.) we should be able to keep our prices close to this year's prices, if not even keeping them the same, especially with some anticipated savings in the Harvie substitution.
2022 recap: So we have had 20 weeks in a row (or 10 biweekly weeks for those on the bi-weekly schedule), and from my perspective, we sent out mostly palatable items, some even quite good in quality, along with a fair amount of diversity and choices for you, and we certainly did our best! And by 'we', I speak also for the dozens of worker shares who assisted us, along with the couple dozen folks who were on our payroll this year, and I have nothing but praise and thanks for the hard work that our crew put in this season and to thank them, and to express our appreciation for their efforts, we did host a (touching) farewell dinner this past weekend. Without them we would probably just revert back to growing for four dozen shares, like we did in 1988, our first year! But we also really appreciate your support of Springdale this past season, and your trust in our delivery of the crops for the season, and though we won't be sending out a detailed questionnaire that we will be asking for you to fill out, we do welcome whatever feedback you might have for us, both positive and negative! Both are equally welcome! (Though admittedly one is more difficult to read than the other, but I'd rather get negative feedback than no feedback at all!) At least that gives us something specific to work on!
Adios for now!
(And if you would rather have us take your name off of our e-mail list, just simply respond and tell us that, and we will do that -- I personally intensely dislike receiving unwanted e-mails, so would like to make sure that you know that we will take the concerted efforts to do that if you so wish!)
Happy November,
Peter & Bernadette & Crew
