This and That

So it's December and it is cold and dreary with a bit of snow. Not much going on in the market garden. Lots of things under double row cover we are hoping are not getting too damaged by low temps around 23F. We did have the kale in a hoop house bite the dust. No one put a row cover over top and it all got frosted. I doubt it's dead but it likely won't produce leaves until mid Feb. In the past the kale has done just fine with no row cover in a hoop house but in the past the kale was started outside and was toughened up by being exposed to the elements. This kale was started in a hoop house and was very delicate and could not take the cold. Learn something new, next time make sure the kale inside has lots of protection or do not start kale in a hoop house, start it outdoors and move a house over top in November.

We entertain ourselves with bad TV, cleaning popcorn, making beer, making cider, cleaning and cutting up the last of the peppers and freezing them. Pretty mundane stuff.

I have found myself spending more and more time on FaceBook. I love FaceBook. Through it I have found so many people I had lost contact with from as far back as high school. FYI I still see a lot of my high school friends as I still live in the same area where I grew up. But a lot of people got out of the great Oxford Metroplex. FB has been an incredible tool for connecting. It also is a great time waster. I have started a farm and have a super power, both take time. But time is something I have at the moment.

I have started working on a web page for our CSA/Farm Share Program. We don't like the term CSA as it either represents us as supporters of the Confederate States of America (which we are not, being born and bred Yankees) or it is simply a bad description of selling food shares. So we prefer "Farm Share". Any Hoo, I have started working on an informational page about the farm share program which will commence the first week of April. That outta keep me busy for a few days. So far, I have gotten the thing about 20% done and lost everything. That's okay, it was all replaced by better copy and design. If everything goes right, I should have it functional by the end of this week

39 items

I was just updating the Boulder Belt website's farm store page and noticed we are offering 39 different items at the store and farmers markets. Not bad considering we are winding down for the year

Killing the CSA

A few weeks ago the Free Will Astrology in the Sunday Dayton Daily news told me I would have a complete change of heart about something I really believed in. This being astrology outta the paper I thought to myself, yeah...right.

The next day I was reading a post on the marketing section of Garden Web about CSA and how ATTRA polled a lot of CSA farmers and CSA shareholders and found the two had wildly different ideas about CSA. farmers see CSA as a way to market, sure. But more importantly as a way to connect people with their food and a farm by getting them to interact with the farm. CSA members, on the other hand, see CSA as a way to support local farms by buying shares and picking them up at a drop point with little/no interaction the farm or farmer.

This has been my reality with CSA for the past 10 years (with the exception of year 3 when we had 5 members and all 5 were huge into participation and came out several times a week to help work and came to all the potlucks and other on farm events. Of course, every one of these folks moved out of the area that fall/winter so none rejoined the next season). I want a CSA that will connect the members with the soil and the members basically want a delivery service. For many years I tried to make this work in my mold and I was basically hitting my head against a wall. I would require some sort of on farm participation and would get fewer and fewer people rejoining each year because everyone wanted less interaction with the farm and more convenience. So around year 5 we started delivering the shares to remote drop points and farm interaction swiftly went away. By year 7 I could not get any members to even come to a farm dinner and this past season (year 10) I decided that if I was going to deliver I would charge dearly for that convenience because I really feel that CSA members need to see the farm where their food is grown.

So 3 weeks ago I had a talk with Eugene, who has never been very high on the CSA idea, about killing Boulder Belt CSA and he was into the idea. And after having only one member for 2006, who chose to pay a hefty price for delivery so he would not have to have any interaction with the farm, I decided it was time to put Boulder Belt CSA out of its' misery.

2 weeks ago I deleted the CSA from my Local Harvest Store and this afternoon I deleted the CSA page and all links to it on my website. It took all of 3 seconds to delete the page. It's kinda sad and kinda freeing. Yesterday I went around the web to various sites that allow free farm pages and deleted the CSA from several of those. But I am sure there are a few I have forgotten about and there is at least one I cannot update but in time Boulder Belt CSA will be gone from the net.

Bye bye CSA maybe I will visit you again some day. But until than, I will put the energy I was throwing at the CSA into the farm store and the farmers' markets

Website Woes

It's one of those cool rainy days when it is too wet to do much work in the market garden or around the yard so I decided today would be a good day to update the Boulder Belt website. The first thing I did was upgrade the site and lost the banner ads that had been there since I created the site 8 or so years ago and also gave me more bandwidth so more people can visit the site. In the past I did not care about bandwidth but since I got my own domain name (www.boulderbeltfarm.com) the traffic to the site has increased greatly. Used to be I would get maybe 1000 visitors per year and now I get that about every month and the traffic is growing as more and more people use the web to search for organic foods. That, and the fact I got a domain name and do not have to use the URL: www.angelfire.com/oh2/boulderbeltcsa... That domain was simply too long and too anonymous for the search engines to pick up on so the Boulder Belt Eco-Farm site was never high in the search rankings (unlike this blog that consistently shows up in the top ten if you do a search for sustainable ag topics or home made catsup, or hoophouses, etc..).

Okay so I paid angelfire to host my site and lose the ads. I probably could have done better but it was cheap and easy (don't have to ftp files to another host and all). After doing that I decided to upload several photos to put on the site and that is where troubles started. The damned photos would not upload. On the 3rd try I got 3 uploaded on I put them on the website. I updated the farm store page, than I noticed that the photo files were not in the correct directory (actually they were but copies had gone to the wrong place) so I clicked on one file to delete it. The page that asks if I really want to delete the file came up and I click yes. Than I noticed I made a rather costly mistake. I thought I had clicked on farmstore.jpg. But no! I had really clicked on farmstore.html and deleted the page I had just put new photos on and also updated the copy. AHGGGGGG!.

I did not have a copy of the html on the hard drive so I had to recreate the page from scratch. This was not overly hard. I used a template that angelfire provides and that I use on all the other pages of the site so all I had to do was cut, copy and paste a customized template from another page and than delete all the old copy (except the links) and put in what needed to be there. this would have been a lot easier if I could have remembered what I written for that page but I did not so I had to wing it. I think I came out with a better web page, more streamlined and easier to read

That was my afternoon.