By Farmer David Plescia of Green Valley Community Farm
Well, it’s official: The natural world has thrown off the covers and drank its morning cup of coffee!
With this week’s warm weather, the farmland is truly abuzz: A motley crew of native and honey bees and other pollinators jets and bumbles throughout the air, alighting on every flower (mustard, vetch, bell bean, tree, and wild flower) that can be found; willow catkin fluffs are floating everywhere on sweet, warm breezes; and the greenhouses, farmyard, and fields here at Green Valley Community Farm are abuzz with human activity, as we dust off, gear up, and sow the first seeds of Summer.
And we’re so happy to be penning to you, dear members, the first of many farm updates during the 2018 growing season!
CSA UPDATE:
Wash your totes and sharpen you flower cutting shears… this train is running on time!
It’s tricky — plant life and weather being what they are —trying to predict the exact date upon which our first plantings will fruit, flower, and fill out enough to cut the ribbon on CSA harvest pick-up. But we’ll always try! This year, everything is running on time for a first week of June start to harvest pick-up.
We have about 12 CSA memberships still open for the 2018 season. If you were a member last year, or have told us that you'll be joining this year, you have first priority! Please sign-up ASAP at www.gvcfarm.org to hold your spot.
FARMER’S LOG:
We farmers take our cue from the bees. It’s time to get busy.
Over the last couple weeks, the greenhouses have gone from ghost town to precocious nursery, brimming full of life and expectation: As we speak, all of 2018’s tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and onions are present for role call, bouncing off the walls of their seed trays, ready to get out into the fields. We’ll transplant the hoophouse tomatoes next week. Out in Highgarden, 2018’s first rainbow carrots have been seeded. Next door to the left, the garlic is waking up. And next door to the right, the raspberries are poking their velvety auburn green leaves out of the straw mulch, whispering promises of sweet things to come.
As infrastructure and beautification projects get done whenever we can sneak them in, some big moves are about to occur in the main fields. In late October of 2017, we planted our most important crop... and this week we’ll harvest it.
Over the last five months our beautiful cover crop mixture of grasses and legumes grew into a stately, lush, woven blanket that protected our soil from the battering storms of winter and enriched the microbial life below. In early February, the cover crop was visited by the lovely Jersey cows of Bramble Tail Homestead, where some of it became milk and cheese and cow life!
This week, we’ll mow this cover crop down and it will continue its magical life-giving journey as its thousands of pounds of carbonaceous organic tissue will be digested into the soil… feeding, enriching, and building life there this season and for many seasons to come.
Thank you cover crop!
With all the birdsong, the evening light, and the warm breezes lately, we can’t wait for the promises of summer the harvest season. We can’t wait to see you all again in the garden, and to meet our new members. We can’t wait to introduce you to our amazing new farmer, Anna Dozor, who’ll be helping us this season! We can’t wait to share the fruits of the land with you. And we can’t wait to share many more stories and farm updates with you in the months ahead.
See you on the farm soon,
Kayta & David