A Rant about Fake CSA's

I wrote this over a year ago but it still holds true

Every now and again I get in my in-box information about selling produce to subscription services. These are services that buy and resell produce to the public and often deliver door to door. Most advertise locally sourced food, though in reality much of it is not local even in parts of the year when they could do 95% local (things like coffee, bananas and pineapples don't grow around here and are usually offered). Most are franchises and not locally owned (though I know of three that are local in SW Ohio) and most, at least the first couple of years, if not longer, do not have enough contacts in the local agriculture scene so they cannot deliver consistent local supply and must depend on the national/international supply chain with locally sourced food generally not making up more than 50% of the offerings.

As a CSA farm I have a problem with these businesses because they obliquely present themselves as a CSA type business. After all, they sell subscriptions of whole foods, most of it is organic and some of it is even local. And to the average food buyer what they do is close enough for them to be confused and think they are buying into a real CSA.

By real Community Supported Agriculture I mean where there is an actual farm (or farms) directly associated, i.e you are buying direct from the farm (or farms) that grows the food and not buying resold product from a middleman. I have run into people who by from these food delivery services who believe they are in a CSA and are rather surprised when I say they are not and explain the difference. For example a real CSA that grows all the members' food will never include bananas or coffee in a share (unless in the tropics or has some sort of wicked great greenhouse system going) because than they are engaged in reselling non local items which does not contribute to supporting local agriculture and specifically a particular farm or group of farms which is pretty much the whole basis for real CSA.

So people buy subscriptions from these places thinking they have joined a real CSA. They are pleased because they get to order what they want. There is little seasonality so tomatoes and other items are available year round, just like what they are used to and it is delivered. Sweet. But it ain't a CSA with which they have contracted. A CSA will have seasonal seasonal food. The offerings each week are completely dependent on the time of year and the weather. This means in spring you eat a lot of leafy greens and asparagus and in summer loads of tomatoes, eggplant and basil and in fall squashes, carrots and onions. For most people this is a strange way to eat because the industrial food system we all grew up with got rid of seasonality decades ago. So most people are quite unaware that there are seasons for foods.

These places are effecting the real CSA's. I have noted that around the country CSA's that have for the past 10+ years filled up with hundreds of members and had waiting lists are not filling up are just barely filling up. I got an email from a local extremely well established CSA in my area that has always sold out by early spring that for the first time has opening in May! I also know that our CSA is way down in numbers this year and there does not seem to be the interest in it this year as there was last year. And I know there are many more of these produce delivery services popping up all the time (because I get in their mailing lists because I am a possible grower for them). And I believe that many people who have either been in a CSA a year ot two or have been thinking of joining on have done just that.

They are making it harder for us small farms to run as CSA as we cannot do what they do (or at least not as well in many respects). I have long thought while interesting and appealing, the CSA as a business model was not very good for Americans because it is so different from what we are used to - 24/7 any time of year food availability. incredible convenience. CSA give us incredible inconvenience-limit availability, shared risk, on farm pick-up, possible work days (and in the old days a member driven "core-group" that made most of the executive decisions and required weekly work efforts)

Our CSA is Featured on a Major Website

I answered an inquiry on the Local harvest forum about farmers interested in being interviewed last week. I said i was interested and within 24 hours questions were sent to me, I answered them, more questions were sent, I answered those and sent on clarification and this is the end product on Phil Lempert's Food, Nutrition & Science website

CSA Farmer

 

Lucy Goodman farms a variety of crops on four acres of farmland in Eaton, Ohio. Goodman grew up working on horse farms and racetracks, and began planting her own crops about 20 years ago. What started out as a part time farm has since become a full time farming operation. Goodman’s Boulder Belt Eco-Farm also has an active CSA (community supported agriculture).

How did you get into farming?
I always thought I would have a horse farm – and not a produce and chicken farm – until I started working in the kitchens of small fine dining restaurants back in the late 1980's. These restaurants bought from local farms, and the experience of working in these establishments turned me into a foodie and got me going to farmers markets. I had always wanted to have a farm of my own since the days of my horse farm and racetrack experiences, so when the foodie in me combined with the horse woman, a produce farm was formed.
In 1993, my now husband and I moved to a farm house with a lot of land and started a garden which had way too much food for us, so we decided to try and sell it at a local farmers market. The following year we started a "market" garden that was 25' x 75' and set up shop at the Richmond, Indiana farmers market. The Richmond market was a big market back then with over 50 vendors and 2,000 people coming through on any given Saturday. We started out very part time as we both had other jobs, but after four years of part time market farming we went full time. That’s when we started farming more than two acres and became certified organic.

Read the rest Here

Putting Together a Winter Share

Harvesting the produce is only half the battle putting it all together into a share is the other half. Once things are out of the field and cleaned up than the produce is ready to be bunched, boxed, etc.. and than put together into shares. The following pictures show how we put together the most recent winter share.

after weighing out and/or bunching or bagging finished items are put into 15 individual piles, one pile per winter share member. So far this pile has carrots, cilantro, leeks dried tomatoes and root parsley

Because our members get what would be a double regular share we had to make 2 piles per member and this is the beginning od th pile #2. We have shallots, garlic and wheat berries

Collard greens bunched and ready to add to the pile. these things are so sweet that the dog stole several leaves and ate them while we were harvesting

Eugene weighing Up potatoes

The piles grow and now we have added beets to this side..

...and spring mix, collards, kale, broccoli and parsley and a bag of lettuce. And there are 3 boxes of winter squash one has butternut, one has delicata and one has acorn. they got one of each kind in their shares

Pears and spinach have been added

Close up of 1/2 of a finished share with the potatoes added to the pile

and here is the other half, it's a lotta food

Eugene is doing a final check of the shares to make sure we got everything just right

.

We are in Acres Magazine!!

A couple of months ago a woman contacted me about doing an interview for Acres USA about storing food/winter CSA's. I said I would certainly be interested in being interviewed and a week or so later sent me a bunch of questions via email, I answered them. She sent some more a bit later, I answered those and below is the result.

I have long wanted to be in an Acres article and now it has happened. Life is good.

I did leave 1/2 the article out of this post as it does not concern Boulder Belt Eco-Farm and not important (and if you want to read the entire article you will have to buy a copy at a place like TSC).

I'm pleased with the article and I hope you are too. Enjoy

Printed in the Dec 2011 issue

A Winter Harvest

Harvesting some crops in the snow for our Winter share members.

A bed of spinach.

Freshly pulled rutabagas

Freshly pulled and very dirty beets

A beautiful head of red oakleaf lettuce in among some red beets

Meg and Eugene harvesting rutabagas. The white specks are snow flakes

Harvesting Broccoli in the snow. Note the row cover That Meg is lifting off the plants so we can harvest that bed. It is because of that row cover that we have any broccoli at all. it kept the environment just warm enough and wind free enough that the broccoli heads did not get a lot of damage. If the had a hoop house over them they probably would have had no damage but even with just 2 layers of row cover on hoops we had 2/3rds come through a lot of nights in the mid 20's A-OK.

Fresh broccoli with leaves. The leaves are very good to eat.

A panorama of the farm shot from the NW corner and looking South, southeast

Dirty Daikons

Clean daikons

and Leeks

We got a nice mention in the Organic in the Miami Valley blog about our carrots and the 2012 Farm Share Initiative. Take a look

Boulder Belt goes CSA!

after 15+ years of doing farmers markets 2011 will be the last year we do this as in 2012 Boulder Belt Eco-Farm will go over to doing CSA as its' main source of income. This will be a huge change for us but we have found over the years that farmers markets have made us less and less money for the past 3 years and we find we really don't like the "crap shoot" at market as far as marketing goes. By this I mean we have no way of knowing what will sell at a particular market so if is rare that we harvest just what the market demands and too often go home with a lot of produce, much of it that needs to be tossed onto the compost pile.

With a CSA that does not happen. The farmer knows exactly how much to harvest so there is little to no waste. And the farmer knows what to plant as well because the farmer knows how many share holders they will be growing for months before the season starts.

We have been doing a CSA on and off (we took off 2 years after we moved to this farm) for the past 14 years. We are one of the oldest CSA's in the state of Ohio and yet until very recently we really did not take the CSA part of our market strategy very seriously. We would tend to give more emphasis to the farmers market as we saw that as our cash cow and the CSA as a back-up. And until this year I feel this was the correct thing to do as we would usually struggle to get and maintain members. And we were making 75% of our income from the Oxford Farmers Market Uptown and only 25% from the CSA (or less).

But 3 years ago this started to change. We were finally able to get more than 10 members and we were retaining over 80% of our members from year to year and taking on new members each year. And we noticed this year that the CSA was taking in a lot more than 25% of our annual gross income. AND we were getting unsolicited requests to join our Farm Share Initiative towards the end of our season. Unfortunately due to a horrendous growing season this year we could not take on any new members to our FSI but we are able to take new members for our Winter Share Program and so far have picked up 5 brand new members.

The fact that we now have a waiting list was what pushed us into doing the CSA full bore for 2012. This is a brand new thing for us and we like it, a lot. In the past we have been slow to change. For years we did part time work at a horse barn (me giving lessons, grooming horses, training horses and catch riding for shows. Eugene was repairing fences & building, running tractors and other maintenance jobs). We did not think while we were working at that farm that it was keeping us from expanding the farm. But once we quit Boulder Belt started growing fast and we became full time farmers. Granted we were not getting rich from the farm and we still are not) but we went from netting, say, $4K a year to making a more livable wage (okay, for many it still would not be a livable wage but we live very, very cheaply so it works for us as long as we stay away from most luxuries like vacations.). We expect the same phenomena will happen now that we have made the decision to drop our last farmers market and concentrate on the CSA. Only time will tell.

If you are looking for a CSA home and are in the Greater Dayton (OH) region check us out at http://www.boulderbeltfarm.com and click on the Farm Share link in the side bar

Time to Join a CSA (and how to avoid the Dreaded Fake CSA)

Now is the time to buy a CSA share. If you wait much longer most farms will be sold out.

Here at Boulder Belt Eco-Farm in SW Ohio we have a farm Share Initiative or FSI. We call it that because around here and in all Southern States, CSA means Confederate States of America to all the non foodie locavore types (which sadly out number us local foodies about 20 to 1) but it is a CSA and it is our farm's 14th year for CSA (we were one of the first in Ohio, being the trailblazers that we are). And this year we will likely sell out of shares before mid April as we have been getting a super response to our CSA this season and have already sold almost half our shares for the year.

Last year we did not fill up at all and had fewer shares all season than we do at this point 2 months before the season starts. The year before we sold lots of shares but had no members from 2009 join for the 2010 season. This year over 75% of last years' members rejoined and we already have 4 new members and several others sitting on the fence over joining and we get emails and phone calls about our FSI program nearly every day.

If you want to learn more about our program simply click on the photo of the CSA share to the left of this post and you will be taken to our FSI page where you can learn all about our program and what we put into our shares ever week as well as costs and the membership options (we have several).

Unlike many "CSA's" around here we are the real thing. There are more and more fake CSA's out there. These are basically brokers posing as CSA's. They take money and deliver boxes of food like a CSA but unlike a real CSA, while there is usually local farms involved there is never a farmer that is involved weekly with the members as these places simply buy from farms around the region as does any health food store or grocery, the members do not take on the risk of farming with the growers. With these places if a crop fails they just find another source for the food and the members are none the wiser and have missed out on a great teachable moment.

Risk sounds scary but is it very important to the CSA deal and 9.9 times out of 10 the risk is minimal to non existent-you may get fewer veggies in your share but you will get something and it will be enough to make a meal. But know there are risks such a bad hail storms, tornadoes, flood, swarms of locusts that can take out a season's crop. And know that while the member may be out several hundred dollars the farmer may well be out of a job and a place to live. And this is something our industrial food system has completely removed through farm subsidies, shipping in food from around the globe and the commodities market. And it is something that Fake CSA remove as well, they generally get their food from the same system as any grocery store, while touting they have local food. But the local foods rarely make up more than 50% of the share (and that abundance local food is only there a few months a year and the rest of the year less than 15% of the food is local). If you see a CSA that offers bananas in Ohio that is a fake CSA. It is really just a food broker in green locavore clothing, don't drink their kool aid. Instead do some homework and go for the real thing, a CSA that is farmer driven, gets all their food locally (ideally from their farm but sometimes you need to buy from other local farms, we do for sweet corn as we do not have the room or desire to grow enough sweet corn for our members).

We have had our FSI impacted by these fake CSA here in the greater Miami Valley the past couple of years but it seems this year more people have a clue and are turning to real CSA's over the brokers and resellers.

And hey, if you are in the greater Dayton/Cincy area and are looking for a CSA send us an email as we still have some openings left in our 2011 season

CSA Article

Great article on how to find and join a CSA. Unfortunately most of the people who left comments seem to belong to fake CSA's. A real CSA will have a farmer (or several but usually it is just one farm), the members will share the risk of the harvest with the farmer, usually the members pay up front for the season (though here at Boulder belt we do have 4 week and 3 month subscriptions as we have a lot of potential members who travel a lot so cannot do the 6 month commitment. A Fake CSA will advertise that much of the food is from local sources but in reality it is usually less than 25%. the members do not get to know their farmer nor see the farms where their food is grown. these are food delivery services or Co-ops but they are not CSA's.

http://robbwolf.com/2011/02/09/community-supported-agriculture-how-to-find-join-a-csa/#comment-25693

And BTW Boulder Belt Farm Share Initiative is taking new members for our 2011 season right now. For more information click on the picture of the CSA share (artful pile of food) for all the information you should need to make a decision.

Decisions

Eugene  showing Doug Randolph, new manager of the MOON Co-op, spring mix in a hoophouse

On Thursday we had a visit from Doug Randolph the manager of the MOON Co-op which is set to open in early April. The MOON Co-op will be offering as much locally sourced food as it can find so Doug is visiting the farms from which they will be buying which is a great thing. He is both verifying his sources and developing a relationship with us farmers so that all parties have the best experience possible.

We have been patiently waiting for this co-op to open for at least 10 years, maybe 11. Long ago there was an OEFFA chapter called the Miami Whitewater chapter and that became the Miami Oxford Organic Network or MOON. in the beginning we were a group of OEFFA members, mainly farmers who got together once a month and shared food and talked about issues pertaining to Organic food and farming. It was a pretty loose group that over time became more coalesced and changed direction from a group that had monthly potluck dinner meetings with no real direction but the connection of Organic/sustainable food and farming to a group with a new direction-creating a cooperatively owned natural food store (this is quite different from a privately owned health food store though they may look very similar) that will provide the Oxford, OH area with an alternative to the other grocery stores around. Gone were the monthly dinners for us Boulder Beltians as the change in direction meant a big change in the potluck dinners-they were phased out quickly.  But now on the horizon was a potentially fantastic market for us. So when Harv Roehling asked us if we wanted to buy a share of the co-op we got out our checkbook, cut a check and bought a share. Than we waited and waited some more. For the entire story (and more) go to the MOON Website

So now we have to adjust our planting plans a bit. We were well aware that the co-op would open sometime this coming spring for sometime but had no real idea how much food they would need. It turns out they will likely need a lot. But they will not need a lot of everything we grow. They will need a lot of say, 15 things we grow (we generally grow 60 different crops). Looks like they want spring mix and garlic so far and I am sure they will come up with other needs. We seem to be enjoying success with the Farm Share Initiative as well this year. So far we are way ahead of where we were last year at this time with our membership. We have 8 paid members and many more interested in joining. This time last year we had 1 paid member and not a great deal of interest until March. I hope we are sold out by March this year.

What this means for us, being a small farm run by 2 people, is we have pretty finite resources-we can only grow so much and between the FSI and the Co-op we just might sell everything and that means we have a 3rd market that we may have a hard time filling-the farmers market. So we either have to make the hard decision to cut back on the farmers market in the future (probably not this year, though) or go the expansion route and figure how to grow and harvest more.

Harvesting a Winter Share

We here at Boulder Belt Eco-Farm have been doing the CSA (community Supported Agriculture) thing for over 12 years and for the past 4 years we have done a Winter Share. This year's winter group is quite small at 5 members. In past years we generally have 10 to 15 members and I was really hoping to do 20 this year. But due to the drought that hit us this past summer our winter storage crop harvest, especially the winter squash, was badly compromised. And it also made it very hard to do the late summer and early fall planting we must do in order to have crops to harvest in December and January.

We did a lot of hand watering this past fall and we ran the irrigation system a lot more than we were comfortable with (all water, including the water we use for household stuff comes from the same well-we do not want it run dry, ever). But it all paid off and we have been successful in growing enough food for our 5 Winter Share families (but not much more than that)

Eugene is harvesting Broccoli Raab (which taste nothing like broccoli, FYI) For the winter share. I picked most of it but since I own the camera I take the pictures. The purple leaves are rainbow kale. Normally the harvested leaves would be washed, than refrigerated before being bagged but our washing facilities are outside so in winter we generally skip washing and have no need to get the field heat off of the crops (if anything they need to be thawed) so they can go from field to bagging in one step.

Same broccoli Raab bed with the cover being put back on. We use row covers inside the hoop houses because it gives another layer of protection to the crops to keep them from freezing. Unfortunately the two row covers and being inside the hoop house was not enough for the broccoli raab and there was a lot of frost damaged leaves that had to be taken off the plants and tossed out. This is always the risk with winter growing-bad frost damage. We do try to avoid this by planting cold hardy crops, using row covers and hoop houses and putting heat sinks in the houses such as gallon milk jugs filled with water, 50 gallon containers filled with water, etc..

One of two beds of leeks. The leeks will survive out side of a hoop house but we have found the quality is a lot better (by orders of magnitude) and inside the hoop houses it is warm which means the soil is not frozen so we can get them out of ground. Even in the hoop house the leeks come out of the ground muddy and have to be cleaned up. I don't wash leeks as washing seems to bring down the quality. instead I cut off the roots (where most of the mud resides) and than I strip off the outer layers which are dieing off, et voila! Clean leeks. Our Winter Share members got 2 leeks each.

One of the two spring mix beds. This one has the mustard greens-arugula, mizuna, tat soi, etc..

The lettuce side of the spring mix. In winter due more to under 9 hours of day light rather than cold, the plants go almost dormant (if it is really cold and dry they will go completely dormant in Jan and Feb) which means very very slow growth. this means in order to harvest in order to sell the crops a couple of things must happen. One, the crops have to be planted at the optimal time so they are well established and at the size you need. With some things like spring mix the plants can be either too small or too big. With other things like broccoli raab and kale you want to avoid the plants being too small or there will not be much to harvest. Two you need to plant more than you would in spring/summer/fall because things are not growing much if at all so in order to get enough to harvest you plant more area.

Now this works very well in early to mid winter but in late winter we get our light back and the hoop houses get really warm, especially on sunny days so even though it may be a cold snowy March day outside the hoop houses, inside it is May and things are growing great guns and all that over planting so necessary in the depths of winter becomes too much of a good thing. So our solution is to simply move the hoop houses off of such crops and on to other things and that gives the over abundant crops a good dose of weather reality and they tend to slow way down.

In the end we were able to harvest enough spring mix for 6 big bags of salad (that would be almost 1/2 pound). 5 went to the winter share members and 1 went to us. We also harvested beets and chard from the 3rd hoop house but I took no pictures, even though the chard was very beautiful.

Winter Kale

As long time readers know we do season extension and one of our annual goals is to harvest all 12 months of the year.I don't know if this will be possible in the winter of 2011 but at this point in the season it is looking good. I present to you rainbow kale

Here we have a bed of kale that took two of us about 1/2 hour to clear the snow and ice from so we could take the row cover off of the bed

Freshly harvested winter kale for our CSA members

Here we have a row cover that is too narrow. This is because when we took it off the snow had collapsed the hoops that were supposed to be holding the covers off the ground and kale. But several inches of snow and ice flattened the hoops so when we got the covers off we reset the hoops and added more and found that the covers had frozen in such a way that they were too narrow to cover the hoops/bed. So we fiddled with the covers for a half hour and got most of the edges loose so that the covers would cover the area. One of the many differences between winter growing and farming the rest of the year

The Joys of Farming

I was going to post a bunch of pictures of the farm but have decided that I need to vent instead about various things having to do with my profession-market farming.

First off our season is pretty sucky. The weather has been either too wet or too dry and always too hot and humid so we can get less done in a day than is needed. This means getting weeds under control has been herculean task. Even the crops planted on mulch need to be weeded. Today i pulled about 200 pounds of crab grass and purslain from 2 beds of peppers. Still have another 7 or 8 to go. Eugene has been using the wheel hoe to weed the beds that are not cover with landscape fabric whenever it is dry enough to use a hoe but before the ground resembles concrete. I believe we have 4 days with those conditions in the past 6 weeks but, of course it was very hot and humid on those day with highs in the upper 90's.

Because of the hot humid conditions we have loads of Japanese beetles eating and copulating. I have become Ms Coitus Interruptus as I kill any mating JB's I come across and can get my hands (AKA deadly weapons, as far as the past bugs are concerned). We also are getting hit with various soil born diseases on the tomatoes. I did hit them with grapefruit seed extract a week ago and that really did a number on the various fungii attacking the maters but the rain early this morning made whatever was not destroyed by the GSE bloom abundantly so now there are many yellowing mater plants where yesterday there were 3. By many I mean around 50 to 75. At least most the plants have fruit on them so we should get a lot of maters in another 2 to 4 weeks. And I am not too worried about this as we get this blighty ick that is neither early or late blight but still kills the plants by September problem every year.

On top of that our tillage equipment is broken and Eugene so far cannot figure out what is wrong and the BCS manual is of little help other than the fascinating photos of various parts exploded so you can see the individual parts but absolutely no explanation of what they are, do or where they should actually go in order to make the machine run. I would say this is the polar opposite of a Chilton's Manual. Maybe this is Italy's revenge for losing WWII and any other complaints they have towards us Merkins.

So for the past month we have been using hand tools to keep beds weeded and prepped for planting. At some point Eugene will give up on trying to figure the problem(s) out himself and push the 450 pound 2 wheeled tractor up a hill and into the van and take it to the Arcanum Hardware store where they have a guy who works on BCS equipment. Hopefully that person can figure out what is wrong and order the parts needed and than we will wait 2 to 4 weeks for the parts to come in as they come from Italy and it always takes a while for them to send the parts to us.

Betty has been good for a dog her age which means she has not destroyed all the market garden but she is trying. She did in a lot of green beans killing a young raccoon who was doing a huge number on the Latham raspberries the past week. Since the bean patch was the first one of the year and old and we have 5 others just about ready to bear fruit this was not a big deal. And we would rather lose 20% of a green bean bed than 50% of our raspberry canes (and God knows what else) to a coon. But than again the raspberries have been a bit of a disappointment. various things are killing them and we have lost 100' this year to borers, fusarium and perhaps pythium. so that means the raspberry harvest is way down. but it turns out that is not such a bad thing because our sales, despite having the only raspberries in the region and dropping our price 33% are way down this over the past 5 to to years. I guess people just don't want poison free red raspberries anymore, I don't know. But I do know that in the past, the raspberries were one of our main revenue generators for this time of year.

And that bring me to our marketing. our sales are down across the board. we don't get a lot of people coming into the store and more and more the ones who do come buy nothing because the think the prices are too high (and generally are pretty damned rude about it too). If we lower them any more we will be back to making around $2 a hour and will no longer be able to pay the mortgage, gas and electric and will have to get rid of the farm. the CSA is beginning to get more members and it seems that most seem interested in doing it again next year but we have less than half the members we had at this point last year. I really think the fake CSA-companies that buy and resell food, claim to offer local food but rarely do and even when they do it is less than 15% of what the sell-have taken a large share of our market. And the sad thing is I personally know people who have joined them and have told me proudly the are CSA members. Sorry folks, but if you buy food from one of those fake CSA you are not participating in a CSA that grows all of it's food, and the members share in the risk and bounty of their CSA farm. It distresses me that people who should "get it" do not. Some of the people I know who use these services work closely with farmers markets and local farmers. Just makes me shake my head. Such disconnect. But I guess price and convenience always trumps the real deal of picking up food freshly harvested at the farm and getting to talk to the people that grow the food you will eat.

The positive thing about this season's CSA is our members. I really like all of them and I really enjoy puytting together the shares and news letter for them every week. Oh and despite issues with weather and the garden we have had some really great shares this year (pretty much all of them)

The farmers market in Oxford is taking a turn for the worst. Overall our sales are way down despite the fact we were able to harvest 1/2 of our asparagus full and the other half 30% this year meaning we had about double the asparagus we have ever had in the past. We also grew and sold a lot of lettuce which made May a good month for us. But June and July have not been so good. I think there are several factors going on. 1) there are 2x or 3x as many farmers and no increase in customers walking through the market, because 2) they banned dogs from market which has lead to a marked decrease in customer traffic the past 3 weeks (a lot of people were royally pissed off over this decision by the market board which I agreed with at the time, and I believe are boycotting the market.) 3) The market is getting too crafty/artsy and the farmers are losing importance. It seem that the Oxford Farmers Market Uptown is more of a social event than a place to buy locally raised foods. 4)There are more and more people selling prepared foods at market which is great for the customers but I do not believe many, if any, are sourcing the ingredients locally from us growers so that too is cutting into our bottom line. And finally, 5) we seem to be in an economic depression and people percieve farmers markets as places where food is very expensive. And This is true for some things (usually things you cannot get normally at Kroger's or Wal-Mart, like 45 different kinds of heirloom tomatoes, or other heirloom fruits and veggies that cannot take the handling to be sold at any chain. But for most things the prices are the same or even less for food that is a whole lot better.

These are just some of the joys of farming.

Betty's Emergency

On April 26th we did what both Bob Barker and Drew Carey ask us to do at the end of every episode of The Price is Right-Please spay and neuter your pets. Yes Betty went in to get her ovaries taken out of her body, otherwise known as being spayed.

She came through the surgery A-OK but things started going down hill. We were not issued an E-collar at the time and of course Betty being betty got obsessive about licking her stitches. than she got loose and ran about 1/16 of a mile about 3 days after the surgery and I believe the final straw was Saturday when we were away from home most of the day. She got out of control and destroyed a Johnny's Selected Seeds catalog (she does not know that we have an extra-Ha!), along with chewing on a calendar from 2 year ago and my camera bag (which she did very little damage too other than cosmetic). It was quite the display of anger and frustration. This activity (which I am sure involved running around and other banned activity) I believe popped all the interior stitches, holding the muscle walls together and a bright red wad of fatty tissue started to appear Sunday morning.

Oh no! This is not what you want to see along a suture line. this is something that needs to be dealt with ASAP. And since it was a Sunday we had to take her the Dayton Emergency Vet Clinic. that was an experience i do not want to repeat. that place is depressing as the only people who go there have a life of death situation and not everyone survives these situations. we were lucky, Betty got into surgery as soon as we got there and we got her back by 6pm in much better shape. And with an E-collar



But now we have to make sure she does not do this again which means keeping her quiet and still. She is still in bad enough shape that she does want to sleep a lot but she now feels a lot better and thinks she should be able to run where she wants and do other things that will pop out the stitches again, such as lick the sutures (which she cannot now that she is sporting the latest in E-collar fashion).

Now for the next 2 weeks we have to be with her to make sure she is not hurting herself. She does have separation anxiety which is made much worse by the strangeness and pain of the spay job and that translates into hyperactivity (i.e going ballistic) which can translate into popping out the sutures again. And that translate in a heap of trouble for her.

So this means I have to miss my Niece Carrie graduating from her Masters program at IU this coming Friday and probably I will have to skip market and make Eugene go alone so Betty has company and doesn't hurt herself again.

About the only half way good thing that happened through all this was the fact I had canceled a FSI pot lick dinner due to bad weather (which got really bad around 5pm through midnight-lots of rain and some wind-not conducive to an out door event). We were in no shape to hold a social event. hell, we weren't even home at 6pm when I told people to come over as we were in Dayton picking her up.

Hopefully things will get better from here on

Asparagus Sighting

This morning while doing the morning walk about the garden I found an asparagus spear poking above the mulch. Looking around I found a couple more spears above the mulch and many more just emerging from the soil. We don't have enough for tonight's dinner but I will bet by this time next week we should have enough to sell to justify opening the store for the 2010 season. And it looks like the Farm Share members will get asparagus in their very first share, which was totally unexpected. This is several weeks early. This also means we will have asparagus for the last winter farmers market (or is it the first spring farmers market?) April 24th in beautiful Uptown Oxford, OH

Crop Mob

Last Saturday we had a crop mob of sorts. 8 people from Earlham College who are joining the Farm Share Initiative for April and May (and maybe beyond) showed up at 2pm ready to work. And what work we did!

A crop mob is a group of people who get together to go and help out for a day or half day on a small farm. they work for no money but often the farmer will give the group food fresh from the field or cook dinner. This new movement is based on the old idea of the barn raising, get a lot of people together with tools and do a big project. Our crop mob arrived at 2pm and we planned to weed asparagus, mulch asparagus, raspberries and blackberries plus move the hay wagon. We got everything but the blackberries done and Eugene did those a bit after they all left.


We started out with weeding as many beds of asparagus as we could. Eugene and i figured that the northern most beds would be too wet to weed and we were right. But we still got 8 or 9 beds weeded out of 12.


Nate and betty helped with weeding. But soon enough Betty had to be tied up as her idea of weeding was either digging holes in the asparagus beds or lying in the middle of the bed. Nate, on the other hand was a good boy, stayed out of the beds and got the bulk of the attention.

weed, weed, weed

Eugene shows a crop mobster the intricacies of weed pulling

Many hands make for light work. We all had a good time enjoying the war and sunny day, talking about stuff ranging from politics to farming.

Once we got as much weeding done as we could it was time to put down the straw mulch

Betty helps mulch

About half way done here. It took less than a half hour to leisurely mulch 12 asparagus beds. Weeding and mulching these things would have taken the two of us about a day. But when you have 11 people the work goes much more quickly.

After we got the asparagus all done we moved the hay wagon that holds things like row cover hoops, irrigation pieces that are not in use (which right now is 90% of the system), hoop house parts, etc.. The wagon has not been moved in a couple of years and has become quite delicate. Now it lives about 50 feet to the east.

Taking the last of the straw which was loose in a big ole sheet of plastic over to the raspberries in order to mulch them.

Here Eugene and Tory are bringing back the plastic sheet used for loose straw and behind them are many mulched beds of raspberries.

Beautifully mulched beds of asparagus. In 4 hours with help we got 20 beds mulched and ready for the season. We ended the day with local cider made with hierloom apples that we bought at the farmers market last weekend. And they want to come back and bring even more people. How cool is that?