Snowbirds in the newly ploughed earth.
After quite a hiatus from blogging it up, its time to take a look at what we've been up to.
With the end of our successful 20 member season, we have taken a month long breather and sat down to crunch some numbers. After some thought, we have decided to expand next year's CSA membership to 80 members, and possibly 100.
This is quite a leap in scale, but to be honest it doesn't seem anywhere near as intimidating as going from 5 to 20 was this last spring.
This means that the farm will be a full time, stand alone business, our long time dream. It also means we need to expand our gardens for future production.
So this last week the gardens went from 100 x 200 sized half acre pieces, to 100 x 300,100 x 350, 100 x 400, and 100 x 500 foot gardens. This has meant a lot of ploughing and working up new ground, along with its associated stump pulling, rock picking and boulder removal.
After our positive experiences with long (200 foot) rows with mulch and drip irrigation for some crops it makes labor and economic sense to lengthen them to 300 -500 feet. At the same time by keeping the gardens only 100 wide, we can still plant shorter (100') beds widthways for succession and fine seeded crops. Also keeping the sod access roads every 100 feet ensures that we never have to walk more than 50 feet to get our crops to the truck.
On the whole it's been an extremely good year, so much being learned, and our confidence has been built up enough that we feel ready to at last make the leap to full time farming this spring.
Thank you to all our members and supporters for sharing this path with us and seeing the benefits of CSA and supporting local farmers. Together we are actually making a positive difference in the way our daily world works.
