Hello, Farm Friends.
What a winter it has been already. We’ve been rolling with all of it, learning so much this winter about timing, strategy, and the dances with sun, wind, temperature, and greens. In our first season of offering a CSA that ran from early November through the end of December (members, it’s your final week…more details on your shares are below), it has been a wild ride, harvesting weekly greens for our farmstore and members that, just a few years ago, are the quantities we would have cut for a busy summer market.
We just yesterday cut and washed our final “big” greens harvest—meaning three kinds of greens for the weekly member shares, plus all the options for the farmstore: winter salad mix, spinach, spicy mix, bunch greens, and baby boc choi. Right on schedule, this did finish out many of the plantings we had allocated for our deep fall and winter harvests, so the coming weeks will see a notable dip in the abundance and diversity of greens. We have one more batch of tatsoi and baby boc choi for next week, and some spinach regrowth on track for mid-January, but you’ll notice a lot less green on the shelves for a while, until regrowth starts to pick up in February.
We know how sad many of you will be to have fewer greens in the farmstore, but we have to admit we farmers are all ready for a little lightening up of the harvest load for a few weeks. Rest assured, there will still be plenty of farming happening: crop plans, seed and equipment orders, recruiting the 2021 field crew, preparing those harvested-out tunnels for seeding, starting the first early season seeds in the nursery. We’ll be getting space and systems set up for winter micro greens and mushroom growing. And of course the eager anticipation of the first pullet eggs, coming soon as the “new girls” get closer to laying age. But maybe, perhaps, we’ll each get one or occasionally even two full days off each week? And though there is less green, the farmstore will be far from empty; we grew enough beets and carrots to keep the shelves well stocked with tasty roots, potatoes, and winter squash through the greens dip. We also urge you to watch for local offerings at The O’Hara Commons online market to support other farmers like our friends at MGVC, rocking winter greens and much more, downriver in Stevensville.
This time of easing up on harvests is also important for our big winter project: the Foodshed. Many who have stopped by recently have asked what is going on in the leveled and gravelled space between our propagation house (currently doubling as a winter wash station), and the south-west growing beds. A new greenhouse, the most common guess, is not even the half of it. Literally—though a new plant nursery is included in the footprint of this build, and is very exciting, this building has a lot of jobs to do, and housing baby plants in the nursery on the south side will be just one of them. We’ve cringed to see this central complex denoted as “farm shop” on things like a cement slab quote, as it is so much more than that. It will house a more spacious and better designed farmstore (one that wasn’t originally designed to serve as a home kitchen), simultaneously store winter roots and fresh greens around 34 degrees, onions, garlic and potatoes at 45, and winter squash at 50….all without us needing to load wood stoves in the middle of the night or drive across town to rented cooler space. There can finally be space for growing the mushrooms Noah has been fascinated with for years. Water will flow through without a tangle of hoses, cooling and cleaning thousands of pounds of produce with farmers working out of the summer’s sun and dusty wind, protected from winter’s freezing wind and snow, in a cleanable and secure area where harvest bins and tools can store without blowing across the field or accidentally becoming bird roosts or mouse habitat (read: extra scrubbing and sanitizing). It’s about food safety, farm efficiency, and food security for the whole community.
Of course, with so many jobs, it’s not a simple build. It’s the first farm structure we haven’t basically muddled through building on our own, and that has been a daunting process. At any moment, it could all get shut down due to freezing or other weather shifts, or to glitches with crew and equipment far out of our control. We were lucky to get that sloppy wet December thaw that allowed excavation to happen. Now we cover the site every night, uncovering it again for any work, and trying to understand the sequence of events of a process new to us (and quite often feeling a little bit stupid about it all). We keep reminding ourselves that the foundation is the hardest, often most expensive, and yet so critically important, part of any build.
We recently passed, without fanfare or acknowledgment, the 7-year anniversary of our purchase of this place. By many measures, we’ve been building the foundations of this farm for all those years. What the farm has become, how all of you relate to it, has in many ways exceeded what we ever envisioned at the strange polished desk of the title company office in Hamilton. As we stumble our way forward through this building’s foundation, we know we have high hopes and dreams for what it will do for our farm and community. In difficult moments, I remind myself that it is likely to exceed and surprise us beyond those hopes as well, in large part because of what you all will bring.
So, as you continue to come out to the farm through the rest of the winter, watch for progress there, likely in fits and starts. Watch for the mix of excitement, trepidation, and exhaustion in the eyes of your farmers. There will be plenty happening on the farm this cold season, and we couldn’t do any of it without you.
Thank you so much for being along for the ride,
Mary, Noah, Sabrina, and all the rest of SweetRoot Farm
P.S.: Special section for members: It’s your final week of the winter CSA! We have been so thrilled this winter to offer a substantial weekly dose of veggies to our community, and we thank you all especially for pushing us to new heights in the volume, diversity, and consistency of winter food. Your final pick-up is this week with the usual hosted time Tuesday, 3:00-6:00, and shares available to pick up un-hosted all of Wednesday too. This week’s greens bags include spicy mix, spinach, and a baby boc choi or tatsoi bundle. Perfect for topping hot noodle soups, layering spinach into pasta dishes, or making a savory stir-fry. The roots are are a full dose again of beets, carrots, and potatoes…we’ve been reviving our traditional winter dinners of roasting chopped roots all tossed together with garlic, onion, and olive oil and topped with some of our farm dried herbs. Puree the leftovers with a good broth, top with cheese, and you have a great winter soup. If you have some purple cabbage still from last week, try a super-colorful winter salad of grated carrots grated cabbage, and a simple dressing of olive oil, red wine or apple cider vinegar, and salt and pepper. You’ll have your choice of winter squash or pie pumpkin again, and a dried herb or tea.
And regardless of winter harvests, winter builds, or whatever stresses you may have, Zukes wishes you the coziest and warmest bits of winter from his festive yurt loft.