One of the big pushes this week, which went well into headlamp territory, was bringing in all 9 remaining beds of potatoes. This was still the easiest potato harvest we have ever had, thanks to purchasing a potato digging implant from our friend Lindsay—one of the best investments we made this year! These French Fingerling potatoes will be washed up and available soon at market and the farmstore.
I know, I know, the old saying is the other way around, “calm before the storm.” We aren’t talking about literal weather here though, but the storm of farm work that we are currently swept up in, holding on to the hope of calm on the other side. And we have promised ourselves some serious rest and calm this winter.
After 8 years of farming in this place (hard for us to believe, but that’s the math), all these years of building and growing and learning and pushing ourselves ridiculously hard, we are long overdue for some real rest. But in order to get to that calm, the final few weeks of this growing season are a huge push, a true perfect storm of work and effort. Last week, even with one team member out for a family emergency, and two part-time team members having moved on to their next seasonal gigs, we managed a huge amount: three more caterpillar tunnels moved, all five covered with plastic in their winter positions, all of the regularly scheduled harvests plus many bulk harvests, a snowy farmers market, and weathering morning lows that were consistently 8-10 degrees cooler than the forecast due to our valley-bottom position and the air stagnation (aka inversion). .
A huge part of our plan for bringing more calm to the farm is our winter farm membership. We have been promising to open the sign-ups for that for weeks, and though we are late opening the gates, we are delighted that many of you have renewed, and we are already 40% full. With just 75 total membership available for winter, we encourage you to sign up soon to save your space.
The winter chard planting, hardening off during some cold nights out in the open (above), and now safely covered by a moveable caterpillar tunnel (right), will provide tasty leaves through winter!
It may seem counterintuitive that winter farming helps notch down the intensity, but it’s a key piece of the plan. Winter farming, and especially the pre-committed winter membership payments, is the way we can offer year-round employment to some of our crew. As we have grown past the scale that the two of us can manage on our own (or with helped begged in from friends and family), our team of employees has become one of the most important parts of our farm, so building and maintaining a good team has become as important as crafting our crop plan—and to ask people to work only 6-8 months of the year, and expect them to be able to fill in the rest of the year on their own….it isn’t really fair. Plus, we have found that retaining even some crew through the winter means a much smoother start to spring (three cheers for Sabrina entering third year here!!). Winter growing is helping us build farming into a more viable job for the longer term, not just something people do for one summer as they finish college, and that is good for everyone, including you, dear eaters. Because without people willing and able to do the work of farming, we can’t feed you all.
Winter members sample 6-8 different varieties of winter squash.
By signing up for a winter membership, you help us know that we have cash flow to pay our team members through the months of the year that are traditionally very slim for a farm. This year, in that dedication to secure some days of for ourselves, we have hired a larger winter team (not hard to enlarge given that the entire winter team the last few seasons has been the two of us plus Sabrina). Since we want the team to also get some good rest over the winter, we’ll be working out reasonable, maybe less-than-full-time schedules for everyone and ensuring some vacation time for each team member. Having 3-4 people on the payroll for winter is both exciting (maybe we have a day to cross-country ski while daily farm chores can get done without us?) and terrifying (is there really enough work for everyone? will winter sales fully support a crew that size? can we handle the management and training load?), but the winter membership payments, if we hit our goal of 75 members, let us know that we can cover those wages through the bulk of the winter.
The winter membership commitments also helps progress continue on the building that will make this winter farming (and summer too, for that matter) so much easier for us. If you come to the farm this week you’ll notice that the builders, Dave and Will, have been back at it, helping finish that west side of the new packshed, while Noah has been puzzling through electrical layout and pulling endless amounts of wire. We still have produce stashed at in four different places on the farm, plus two places off-site, and we can’t wait for the time when it can be literally all under one roof.
The details on winter membership are here but a quick summary is that winter members get 8 weeks of produce in weekly pick-ups at the farm, November and December. The weekly veggie dose includes both storage crops (winter squash, onions, garlic, potatoes, beets, carrots, turnips, radishes, cabbage, etc.), and freshly harvested cold-hardy greens from our unheated high tunnels. This year those include head lettuces and radicchio for deep fall, plus salad mixes, spicy mixes, spinach, baby boy choi, tatsoi, kale, chard, and our favorite “mild winter salad mix” to keep you eating fresh greens all winter.
Zukes is excellent at balancing his hard work with deep rest.
As we keep pushing our way through this storm, and as we strive for a full-on Zukes-style nap soon, we thank you all for the amazing support and love of local veggies this year so far. It has been a record year, and though we are exhausted, we are also so grateful, for this work and for the community if feeds.
Members, there is still one more week in your feedbag fill-ups, so load on up through next Tuesday! For everyone else, we will be at that very last Saturday of the Hamilton Farmers Market this weekend, and the farmstore will be open and loaded with goodness right on through the winter.
Grattitude and greens,
Mary and Noah