First Off: THANKYOU! Thanks for sticking with us this season! Can you believe this is the last week of the CSA season? It has been a terrific privilege to serve as your source for home-grown, organic, immune-boosting produce during this turbulent time.
Just to give you a picture of what went into the season, for the CSA we grew 6,199 bags of lettuce mix and 3,947 bunches of carrots. Astonishingly, we hand picked 83,823 cherry tomatoes, one by one!
We were also able to donate 4,225 pounds of produce to families in need which was 2x our goal for the entire year!!! All thanks to you.
Thanks to many of you who donated toward covering the cost of CSA members who had suffered financial hardship. It's amazing what Community Supported Agriculture can do in the midst of hard times.
We want you to know how much we value you. Thank you for supporting local. Thank you for supporting our family and allowing us to do the hard work of tending the soil for our community.
We hope this isn't the end of our farmer-eater relationship. For many of you the fun will continue with the winter CSA starting the following week. For others, we may not be seeing you until next spring when the 2021 Summer CSA starts again. If you want to make sure you are in next season, make sure your auto-renew setting is set to ON. Otherwise, we may fill up before you get around to signing up. Hopefully you've been seeing our emails about Auto-renewal (I think I accidentally sent you two on one day!!!) so I won't belabor the point here. Auto-renew will happen on October 27th which is also when signups will go live. Basic deal is that at signup you'll be charged for the first week of the CSA and then not charged again until your weekly payments start up week 2 of the CSA in May. If you are set to auto-renew, then you'll be guaranteed a share. If not, then your share might go to someone else. If you have a friend or loved one who wants to join the CSA next year, then you can tell them to go here on October 27th to sign up.
We had our first hard frost Thursday night which put an end to our spicy peppers and all of our outdoor bell peppers as, but for the most part, the the farm has transitioned to cold-season crops which were unscathed by the cold. We managed to get all the sweet potatoes harvested which should make our winter CSA members happy and which may even last through the winter CSA into next spring (if we don't eat them all first!). Big High tunnel number 5 is going up nicely. It's the biggest one we've ever built with a lot of cool bells and whistles. As soon as it's completed, we'll be planting in it for winter and it is destined to hold a thousand additional tomato plants for next summer's CSA to bolster our tomato production for y'all. Believe me, we'll stay busy between now and next season!
We do plan on resting a little. The winter schedule will be more relaxed with Saturdays off which means we'll have our normal Friday harvest and packing day off as well. And there will be a few weeks entirely off for holidays. Even without days off, the daylight hours are much shorter which forces quitting time earlier and earlier and the cold temps make starting time a little later as well. As a family, we enjoy this connection to this more natural rhythm of life--frenetic activity in summer and a slower trudge in winter. We hope you are able find some sort of rhythm to life especially as so many normal rhythms have been interrupted this year.
Thanks so much for being part of our extended farm-ily. We'll miss you in the off-season!
Your farmers,
Dave and Sheri
