2025 CSA Farm Update: Week 1
Hello everyone and welcome to our first share of 2025! After a couple of delayed starts, we have finally made it. This year’s spring weather has been the coldest and rainiest I have seen in my farming career. For the crops this generally delays their readiness, unless other measures such as plastic mulch are used. Each season brings us a new puzzle to work with.
Our CSA sales administrator Stephanie gave me some good topics that people seemed curious about. One such topic is “how do you handle unpredictable weather patterns”. This particular one seems very pertinent to the past couple of months. As a farmer in the Northeast, the most devastating weather patterns are ones with an overabundance of precipitation. If I were farming somewhere that only received 10-15 inches of annual rainfall in a given year, I would have a very different answer. Here at Katchkie, over 40,000 ft of tile drainage was put under these fields to remove excess water. If soil is in an anaerobic state for more than 24 hours the aerobic soil life will start to perish, and plants will suffer.
Keeping excessive water out and enough air in the soil are crucial to growing a good vegetable crop. Excessive rains also keep us out of the fields for timely planting, cultivation, and harvests of some root crops.
There are proactive actions that we take on the farm and some that are more reactive. The most proactive solution is building deep soil aggregate. I focus management techniques on this by only ploughing slightly above the level of current aggregate, making sure there is a healthy rotation of crops and adding a diverse yearly cover crop to the mix.
A more slightly reactive solution is if I feel like there isa compaction layer deeper down than what I am ploughing, I will go through with a Yeoman’s plow, which does not invert soil layers, but gently lifts and aerates a compacted soil, giving it the ability to breathe. It has to be done every year or two as the soil settles back down.
A longer-term goal would be rotating tillage. There are some crops that do not need a very fine seed bed to be planted into, in which case tillage may be skipped that year and they could just be planted. By not tilling the soil yearly, that would give our bacterial and fungal populations a good opportunity to multiply in numbers and increase in depth in the soil.
A more reactive, but often time-consuming solution is a constantly changing work flow. Sometimes the schedule that I plan for the week is already out the window by Tuesday because of changes in prevailing weather forecasts. Unfortunately, this is more of a reality than I would like. I am not sure if the weather app is getting better, but in past years it may have had rain in the forecast, but one was never quite sure of it. Now it seems like even the slightest forecast of rain is sure to come down on our farm!
There is one practical note about this week’s share. All shares will be packaged in the same-sized bags this week. Full shares will be in green reusable totes, and half shares will be in blue reusable totes. Starting next week, half shares will be packed in a smaller bag in a different color.
Until next time,
Farmer Jon
Weekly Harvest Includes*
*We try our best to provide the most accurate CSA list in the newsletter! However, there’s always a chance of last minute substitutions in some bags if we don’t harvest enough of a vegetable. Half share items are indicated with bold; full shares receive all the items in the list.
Delicious Recipes to Try
This week’s bag is full of herbs and leafy greens. Here are some fun and delicious recipes to try:
In honor of our Food Festival: Strawberries at Great Performances, try this recipe for Strawberry Salsa Kale Crostini with Goat Cheese, which is a great party snack featuring the kale that you have in your bag.
We love the crunch of kohlrabi and it’s delightful in this Sugar Snap Pea and Kohlrabi Salad with Garlic Scape Yogurt Dressing (can’t find garlic scapes? Use your green garlic!)