The official first day of spring happens this week along with St Patrick's day and things are greening up quickly outside. We planted around 1,000 cherry tomatoes into the ground in one of our high tunnels and we seeded the first cucumbers this week, which is surely a sign of spring for us.
Another sign of spring is destructive storms. Unfortunately we got hit pretty hard with the hail this past week. Golf-ball sized hail is enough to puncture the greenhouse skins, so now all of our greenhouses and high tunnels have a hint of Swiss cheese look to them. The damage could have been far worse, and the holes aren't large but the plastic is weakened and no longer rain tight or air tight to protect the crops underneath. We are trying to decide what to do. Not really sure if insurance will cover this. Considering if we should laboriously patch all the holes or even more laboriously remove and replace the covers on eight high tunnels. The storm got me a little discouraged because the spring rush of prepping and planting is hard enough without having to deal with this as well. But as a friend reminded me, we serve a God who holds everything in his hand. He has numbered the hairs on my (Dave's) head (an ever-increasingly easy task) and he directs the location of the strike of every ice chunk from the heavens. So those pock marks and holes in the greenhouses were put there by the finger of my awesome Creator and Redeemer. Now I need to figure out what to do with them.
Spinach bonanza
The spinach is growing like crazy! The spinach outside took a beating from the hail, so if your larger cooking spinach has some torn leaves, you'll know why (finger of God on your salad). Lettuce is finally starting to grow quickly as well so we have quite a lot of salad mix available and we will be harvesting the very first of the spring carrots this week (This week we'll be conservative on the amount of carrots we put on the list since we aren't sure of the harvest potential, but as the weeks progress and the carrots grow and our confidence grows as well about how much there is under the ground, we hope to increase the quantities week on week).
CSA Week Signups
Drumroll please!!!! We had 36 signups during the CSA Week promotion timeframe, so thanks for helping get the word out! We're still short of our goals (about 60 members short of where we were at this time last year with signups) but we are still almost 8 weeks out from the start of the summer season so there's lots of time to catch up. Please keep telling your friends about us. The goal is to maintain the membership levels from last year. We built another high tunnel this year not to expand the CSA but to enhance the experience for our members, putting more of the tomatoes under cover (hopefully without holes in the plastic) to keep the rain off and prevent diseases, so we can have lots of your favorite items available and have more reliable production for longer throughout the summer season.
Thanks again for your devoted membership to local food grown by real people. We're so glad to be able to serve you the best of the fruits of our labor.
Bread and Cheese
Farm to Market French Farm Artisan Loaf
Hemme Brother's Pizza Cheese
Blessings,
Dave and Sheri
