Hello Everyone!

The newsletters you get every week accompanying your share have the businessy stuff first, like guides, news about events, or sales of extras in the headline, then we get the nitty gritty story of what’s happening at Who Cooks.

We are really excited to start off this season with a great crew.  We got many of our dedicated crew members back from Mexico and Peru and then also got some new folks from Mexico as well.  There are a couple returning locals as well as a new guy, Bruce who is our new driver.  We have a total of 10 migrant H2A visa workers,  3 locals from New Bethlehem, as well as 5 folks from Pittsburgh that help us sell at the farmers markets on the weekend.  Chris and I feel very fortunate to have a strong and positive crew!  It makes a world of difference working together with a crew that all want to be here kicking butt growing, cleaning, packing, delivering… you name it.

Over the winter we did start to build a new packshed.  We had seriously outgrown our original packshed built in 2009 when we started the farm.  This old one started out to be 12’ x 24’ with 12’ x12’ of it being a walkin cooler.  This one went through about 3 additions.  Now we finally just bit the bullet and started from scratch again.  This new footprint is 50’ x 100’.  This is now called the packhouse, maybe?  Facility seems to large and packshed too small.  So packhouse seems good.  So what happens in the packhouse?  This is where the dirty fresh produce comes in to get field heat taken out by cold water bath, or rinse.  Then they sit in the walkin until they are ready to be prepped for packing or packed.  We also will have an office in the packhouse, as well as 3 walkin coolers, of varying temperatures, and a load of supplies, like boxes, rubberbands, pints, quarts…. Yada yada supplies that we use to pack for CSA or markets.  We can’t wait to have you all out to the farm this summer to check it out.

So we are in the process of finalizing our last few jobs in order to complete the packshed as well as finalize the dates for some on farm events for our customers this year!  We really look forward to meeting you and have you see where your food is coming from.

We are sorry we didn’t get any more info to you after we wrote you last to give you a heads up that the season was starting this week.  But there is info coming your way in the newsletters and random emails ahead.  There is a pretty cliche saying “make hay when the sun shines”... well us farmers we just gotta follow this rule of thumb or we lose.  It’s a constant back and forth of priorities and often times our live plants take precedence even over communications.  Especially as CSA farmers, we take our responsibility of guaranteeing you awesome produce very seriously.  I hope you can forgive us.  Aeros is especially excited to be able to offer great customer service this season being that we have found a driver that we are quite confident can complete the season. (Unlike last season where Aeros was pulled off the farm to do deliveries for more than half the weeks of the year)

On that note Cheers to a great strong farm crew & our CSA members that keep us in the growing!

Your Farmers, 

Chris, Aeros and the Who Crew