What’s the news of the past week?
Well… like all first weeks back, it was busy: lots of new CSA members, lots of excited customers placing orders, and lots to harvest and weed. And as you can imagine, after taking a few weeks off, it takes us a second to get back up to full speed. Plus there’s always some sort of technology issue to fix (printer problems, email issues, time clock tumult). All things considered, it was a pretty normal week and it was nice to see everyone again.
In terms of the weather, we’ve had cold nights and mornings (at or below freezing) and clear, sunny afternoons around 60. Plus lots of wind. While many people have decided on a “Dry January” for their New Years resolution (meaning no alcohol), we definitely don’t want a Dry January. We need more rain! In an ideal winter, we get enough irrigation from rain that we don’t need to use our sprinkler pipes. While the irrigation team started off the week helping out with vegetable harvests, by the end of the week, they’d started to run short irrigation bursts in some of our vegetable and flower fields. We’ve also got lots of baby plants going in the greenhouse, requiring close attention and frequent watering to avoid them drying out.
Speaking of flowers, if you look closely in some of the fields, you can see the very first spring flowers. In the bulb/corm field, you can find an anemone or two, plus lots of tulip leaves breaking the surface, meaning we’ll have tulips soon! In the spring field, there’s one or two confused plants, like the Sweet William (on the right).
Last summer’s strawflower are somehow still going; the bottom leaves have been singed by frost and cold, but the flowers are still stunning, providing a much appreciated burst of color. All fields will soon be awash in bright blooms though; Hannah and Rose spent some time adding compost to the transplanted flowers and started setting up the stakes and netting on the snapdragons to help them grow straight and tall. The start of our fresh flower season in April will be here before we know it!
Elaine Swiedler, CSA Manager
