Organic Vegetables, Fruit, Flowers & Wool
What’s the photo above of? It’s an extreme closeup of purple cauliflower, taken by CSA member and longtime CSA host Dave.
This week is National CSA Week – established in 2021 as a week for celebrating and promoting CSAs. The Full Belly Farm CSA has been operating since 1992, so in many ways, the past 1,600+ weeks have been CSA weeks. That feat alone is worth acknowledging!
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It’s the first farming week of the year! Welcome back to returning CSA members, and welcome to the many new folks joining our Community! We’re excited for you to get your first boxes.
After four weeks off, we’re ready to start picking, washing, packing, weeding, seeding, and all the other tasks that are needed to get our produce to your tables. The bright, sunny, dry days are quite a change from the rainy, grey, muddy conditions as we started our break. Cover crops have germinated and most fields are covered with some amount of green.
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Somehow it’s December and we find ourselves almost at the end of another year. Time flies when you’re having fun. And/or when you’re really busy farming. We’ve got this week, next week, and then a four-week break (until the week of January 13).
The weather and surroundings make it clear that seasons are changing. The sun is noticeably weaker, and it gets dark so early. The trees have been turning colors and losing their leaves. The hills haven’t yet turned green, and the fields of cover crops have yet to germinate, so things are looking a little brown. We know that things will look very different very soon, but it takes time.
Now that things are drying out, we can do more transplanting (lots of starts in the greenhouse!), planting (plenty of summer crop fields that need cover crop seed!), and taking down summer fields (mowing, pulling drip tape, etc.). There’s plenty to do when it comes to getting the farm ready to take a break, and last week was too short and too wet to get anything done. So it’s a good thing we had a few days off for Thanksgiving to rest up before the final sprint over the finish line.
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I wanted to share a letter we got a week ago from a CSA member:
[Read more…]On Wednesday, we picked up our CSA box. As my husband was prepping the corn, he found a little corn worm. Our kids (5 and almost 3) love caterpillar friends, so as we have done many times, we put the little guy in a mason jar with some food and placed him in our kitchen for the kids to enjoy. He was promptly named Caterpilly. We also got to talk about how other animals and insects we share our world with enjoy the same food we do and how great that is. We love our CSA box, and I wanted to share this story because it is so much more than food that comes in those green boxes.
Keep doing what you are doing.
Thanks, Meghan
This week’s Beet – a short video showing how the many bunches of beautiful, delicious chard last week got from the field to your CSA boxes. Those of you who didn’t get a box missed out!
Today’s Farm News covers two small ways you can get involved to help combat food insecurity. It’s a huge, complicated problem, but that means that any measures to chip away at it are important.
First, our CSA donation program. We’ve gotten a few inquiries recently, thus wanted to explain how it currently works! On a week that you don’t want a box, you have the option to donate or skip. Skipping means we move the box to the end of your schedule, or to a date you’ve specified. When you donate your box, the value of the box (or flowers, or whatever you’ve donated) goes into our Good Food Community Fund. When it comes time to set up donation boxes, we pull from the Fund. We don’t make the box and then donate it, thus why we need as much advance notice for skips and donations. We also have a few particularly generous CSA members who make separate donation payments just to the fund.
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It’s amazing what some rain can do. In the fall, a bit of rain washes off the layer of dirt and dust and rejuvenates everything. That kind of rain isn’t enough to refill our streams or turn the hills green – that’s what the winter rains are for. At this point, the hills around us are green again, a welcome site after months of brown. Most fields are also green – the cover crops have germinated and are chugging along, despite the cold and wet days, and relatively little sunlight.
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Dear CSA friends,
We are back and rested after a much-needed end-of-year break. After a good deal of greeting, handshaking and backslapping this morning at 8am our crew is in the fields, evaluating how we did in leaving our crops to rest over the past few weeks. As of now, things look good- lots of carrots, broccoli, greens, cabbage, potatoes, and roots to fill your boxes in the coming weeks. Oranges had a chance to ripen and sweeten as the milder December and early January largely avoided frost or freeze damage to the crops. So we are off to another annual race to a full year of farming.
All of our hopes for the coming year and past successes stem from being blessed by residing on this gracious and generous earth beneath our feet. Its abundance has been feeding us and our extended family of eaters for more than 40 years. A benign winter without damage from a deep cold spell or too much rain allows us to harvest and begin this new year with a continuation of a harvest suspended last December. We are happy to be your farm again as we start this new year and this morning we are excited to begin that work again. [Read more…]
Last week’s deep dive into our plastic CSA boxes and wax boxes (which you can read, or reread, here) got pretty detailed, but I realized during the rest of the week that we’d barely scratched the surface when it comes to boxes and packaging. The Beet could probably focus on some aspect of packaging and post-harvest handling every week! But that would get boring pretty quickly. [Read more…]
This week marks a CSA milestone: ten years ago, we stopped using waxed cardboard boxes for the CSA and started using the green plastic “Stop Waste” boxes*. We call them our “Stop Waste” boxes because the initial box purchase was aided by a grant from StopWaste. At the time of the switch, Judith wrote “this is a trial run” and since we’re still using them a decade later, it seems that the trial was a success. So this week, it’s a deep dive on boxes, accompanied by a smattering of vintage box photos from the past ten years. [Read more…]
It seems like just yesterday we were wrapping up the 2022 season. Yet almost a month has passed and here we are, back from our winter break. Everyone took some time off, an opportunity to shake up our normal routines and get off the farm. Hopefully we’re all well-rested and ready to dive into another year of farming and all the other tasks required to make the “magic” happen. [Read more…]
The CSA truly is a team effort, as is almost everything we do here. Everyone’s work has an impact on the many boxes we send out each week, whether they spend most of their time in the field, in the orchards, in the shop, with the animals, or on tractors. And (almost) everyone ends up packing CSA boxes at some point; even the farm kids have been helping out recently!
That being said, there are a few individuals that play a larger and more direct impact on our CSA members’ experience and we’ve had several big changes in the core CSA team this year. Judith and Becky both retired at the end of 2021, which has changed how the office operates, and not just regarding the CSA. And now we find ourselves rapidly approaching another change in the team – the departure of one of our delivery drivers, David, who will be moving to Boston for his wife’s job. [Read more…]
Carrots!
We’re closing in on the end the year! After this week, we’ve got two more weeks until our winter break, with a teaser this weekend when most of us have Thursday, Friday, and Saturday off –– the exceptions are the Saturday farmers market crew, our hard-working delivery drivers, and the folks who care for our animals, who will be working.
Last week was a big one for harvesting eggplants and melons, just like the week before. It’s been a great year so far for both, in terms of yield and taste, especially the melons, and you’ve probably tasted. If you missed it, here’s the scoop on how we harvest both. And it was a big week for the flower crew too, but it’s always a big week for the flower crew. The everyone in the field is almost exclusively focused on harvesting crops, with some weeding and tractor work mixed in, and the irrigation team has plenty to do, setting up and maintaining drip tape, and moving sprinklers. The winter squash are up and some are starting to set fruit. Before we know it, we’ll be focusing on getting other fall crops in the ground, whether by direct seed or transplant, but we aren’t to that point yet.
The first day of Spring is officially not until March 20, but there’s a feeling in the air that Spring is right around the corner. In a worrisome note, this has been one of the driest winters we’ve seen.
It’s Community Supported Agriculture Week!
Technically, it’s CSA Week at Full Belly Farm for all but four weeks of the year, but this is the week that many farms and farm support organizations across the country will be promoting CSAs and encouraging people to join. For CSAs that don’t operate year-round, this time of year is a popular time to sign up new members in advance of starting in the spring. We’re in a different situation – we do our CSA year-round and we bring on new members on a rolling basis (instead of requiring members to join for a whole year/season). We also currently are doing just fine on membership and have a waiting list for the first time since starting the CSA in 1992, but we still think CSAs are worth celebrating and talking about. [Read more…]
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