CSA Spring Newsletter: May 2nd, 2022 (Week 1)

Howdy Friends,

Thank you so much for joining us for our first ever early spring CSA shares!  This is going to be a simple and refreshing prelude to the main season share.  It feels so good to our bodies to eat fresh food again, as I would think it will you as well.  It's like a reawakening!

We have a lot going on right now on the farm.  We have almost all of our field and pack house crew here now.  We have gotten a lot of our first spring plantings into the ground finally.  It's been a cool spring so far, so things have been growing a little slower than normal that we have planted out.

Everything in your spring shares is being grown in the ground organically of course, but it's all either been grown in an unheated hoop house or a heated tunnel.  We have one item this week that is an exception in your shares that is growing outside, the perennial Chives.  The head lettuce, cilantro and pea shoots are all grown in heated tunnels.  The spinach is coming from an unheated tunnel.  We love tunnels!  They are so wonderful to extend our growing season, and in the main growing season they also help to keep diseases on our tomatoes at bay.  Over our 13 years in production we have built 9 tunnels.  The very first one was our greenhouse dug and leveled by hand at just 20'x30', and our very last we hired help to erect this biggie at 500'x40'.  In between these two we have 7 that are all the more average 20' or 25' x 100'.  Four of the 9 tunnels are heated.  Some of the unheated houses have double layers of plastic to help insulate them more, and others just have one layer.  The greenhouse effect is amazing!  They warm up and stay warm.  The 500' tunnel does this in such an incredible way!  This winter we automated the venting on more of our tunnels as well.  This automation is also incredible.  When the seasons are shifting we are often running around opening and closing these tunnels as rain storms roll in or bursts of open sky with brilliant rays of sun can heat up a house pretty quickly, say making spinach quite uncomfortable.  Now we have sensors sensing these temperature shifts and gradually opening and closing vents.  Not all of the houses are automated, but enough to not make it feel like we are no longer a nurse on duty in a NICU.

Many more stories to come of what’s been happening here at the farm to come, as well as lots of more food!

Your Farmers,
Chris and Aeros