TomatoCam - 7/1

Same plant and fruit cluster as before; note blush of primary fruit. Taken 7/1/09.

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2009 CSA Pickup Details

We're poised to start our 2009 CSA season on Tuesday, July 7th. For those keeping track, this is a week later than last year, which makes sense since some of our early transplants got set out a little later than last year and ... and ... oh yeah, let's not forget that it's been raining for three weeks straight with no end in sight! I'll be contacting all you shareholders to give you the low down, but for reference, the details are inside in the full post...

The following info should break down how you'll get your share. There are four sections: one for all shareholders and then one each for shareholders picking up in Belfast, Waterville and here at the farm. Please read this information carefully.

Share Types
Note that next week will mark the start of bread and veggie shares only. Egg shares will commence as soon as the hens start laying; probably late-July or early-August.

All Pickup Locations
All shares will be clearly labeled as full shares or half shares and there will be a clipboard with all of your names on it and the share size for which you signed up. Shares will be packed into tote bags. Please check off your name from the clipboard and take the appropriate bag. In subsequent weeks, please return the previous week's bag.

A note about tote bags. Last year we distributed the weekly shares in ratty old wax boxes and this year we're classin' it up a bit with custom printed farm tote bags. It's very important that you return the tote bags the following week so that we'll have enough to give out the subsequent week. If everyone plays nice, we should have enough to avoid printing more. Occasional mishaps are unavoidable, so don't sweat it if you forget to return your bag one week; just try to get it back to us the next week. Remember too that, at the end of the season, you're free to keep a tote bag.

About our pickup locations. Please remember that our pickup location hosts are being very generous in letting us use their space, but they have nothing else to do with the CSA. All questions, special arrangements and problems should be directed to us either by email or by phone at 342-2770.

Missing a week. If you will be unable to pick up your share, please make arrangements for someone else to pick it up for you. If that won't work, please let us know by the day before so that we don't pick your share and waste any food.


Belfast Pickup
We're very happy to announce that Åarhus Gallery, at 50 Main St right in downtown Belfast, will serve as our Belfast pickup location. We know several of the artists at the gallery, and they were very excited to help support local agriculture in this way. I stopped by today to finalize plans and was delighted to enter such an open and airy space filled with such interesting and beautiful artwork; we hope that you'll enjoy it too. Shares will be available in Belfast on Tuesdays from 3pm until 6pm at Åarhus Gallery. The gallery closes at 6 and any shares not picked up by then will be taken home by the gallery staff.

The shares will be in the back room of the gallery, tucked under a bench, somewhere conspicuous.


Waterville Pickup
Railroad Square Cinema will serve as our Waterville pickup location again this year. For a second year, this brings new meaning to the phrase "dinner and a movie". Shares will be available on Tuesdays from 3 pm until 9 pm at Railroad Square Cinema. The theater closes at 9 and any shares not picked up by then will be given to the cinema staff and will either be taken home by them or donated to local causes.

The shares will be tucked under a table, to the left of the door, just as you enter.


Pickup at the Farm
Shares will be available at the farm on Tuesdays from 3 pm until 7 pm. On the rare occasion you can't make it during those hours, please have someone else pickup for you or call to make arrangements.

The bags will be in our walk-in cooler, which is in our barn. (Please do not drive up the barn.) Signs will indicate full and half shares and there will be a clipboard on the outside of the cooler which will have all of your names on it and the share size for which you signed up. Please check off your name and take the appropriate bag. In subsequent weeks, please return the previous week's bag.

Directions to the Farm
Google Maps does a very good job finding us. You can easily ask them for directions. Once you follow those directions to Rt 220, though, here's a couple more details:

From the North: Keep your eyes peeled for a conspicuous white sign reading "Montville Gravel Pit" on the right side of the road. When you see that sign, our driveway (Berry Rd) is dead ahead. 220 will veer to the right and our driveway continues straight (off the left side of the road).
From the South: When you pass (or turn off of) Center Rd, we will be the second right, although we're about a mile down the road. If you see a big, white, square sign reading "Montville Gravel Pit", you've gone just a bit too far.

Note that there are two mailboxes at the end of our driveway and that the driveway eventually forks, at which point you should take the right fork to get to our house and to the barn.


Weekly Newsletters and Share Info...
... will be posted right here. Tune in for share box manifests, recipes and farm news.


I hope that this covers all of the details. If anything is still hazy for you, please do contact us.

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CSA Starts Next Week, July 7th

You heard it hear first. We probably could have kicked it off this week, but the share would have been a little lean and the extra week will give us a chance to hammer out a few of the remaining details. We'll call of you shareholders this week to make sure that you know what's up and we'll post some details here later in the week. No guarantees just yet, but the first share may contain Italian kale, pac choi, fresh garlic and -- maybe, just maybe -- some strawberries.

Farm pics inside full post...



Some young celery plants.

Parsley

Left to right: chard, broccoli, cauliflower ready to be covered with row cover.

Graham helping me to put on the row cover.

The hens on pasture! The henhouse is working out great and they're supposed to start laying sometime in July.

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TomatoCam, 6/22

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Rain and The Right Tool for the Job

It's been hard to escape the rain recently. Until this week, it hasn't really bothered me since our week-long rainy stretches seemed to be separated by week long sunny stretches; pretty much perfect veggie farming weather. On Friday, though, we got over 3 inches of rain and we've gotten another 1/2-1 inch since then with the clouds not supposed to break until Thursday or Friday. (UPDATE: Thursday and Friday are now forcast for rain.) June is prime time for weed growth (crop growth, too) and the only time we can do any effective weeding is when the soil surface is dry. You might expect that rain and clouds don't make for dry soil. On top of that, the rain and lack of sun have kept the soil really warming up, and this leads to a general lack of nutrients and slow growth for crops. (For the same reason that we keep food in the fridge: retarded bacteria growth. Organic farmers rely on soil bacteria to break down complex soil components into nutrients that plants can absorb; the cool soil keeps this bacteria from really getting going.)

Ever the optimist, though, I have to say that all of our spring crops are LOVING this weather. Kale, chard, broccoli, cauliflower and lettuce really love this cool, overcast weather. The ample moisture and lack of heat, too, helps our transplants get established and set out some new roots.

Perhaps most importantly, though is that weather like this helps us make decisions. Farm in Maine is all about crisis management; there's so much to do and so little time to do it that it's easy to sideline tasks and projects which aren't absolutely critical or pressing. Long rainy stretches make it impossible for us to weed and plant, and therefore free us up to tackle less critical tasks. The past few days have seen us catching up on things like our bookkeeping, transplanting, greenhouse tomato pruning and trellising.

There's a few farm pics inside the full post...

We're borrowing this '67 International Cub from some friends who aren't farming this year. As much as tractors can be maligned for being noisy, stinky and energy in-efficient, the amount of work they can do is amazing. This one is over 40 years old, has had about as many paint jobs and can do in 15 minutes what last year took 2 people over 3 hours to accomplish. (Hilling potatoes.) We're also using it to help weed between the pathways of our beds.

A new trowel would seem like such a small thing, but when you're transplanting thousands and thousands of plants (a quick estimate is that we're setting out 150,000 plants this year), it can make a huge difference. Our old transplant trowel was nice, but it had a few annoying design elements that made it less than satisfactory. This one is wicked rugged, long and has a profile which matches that of many of our transplant cells and blocks. Most people would probably never think about these things, but after transplanting a few hundred thousand plants over the years, it starts to bug you.

This is a simple tool that I built after seeing it on another farm website . It helps us make little holes in our seeding trays into which we can drop seeds. Normally we would have to do this with our fingers. Not difficult or especially time consuming, to be sure, but it was just one more small, annoying task that stood between us and what we wanted to get done. We call it a "dibbler".

Here's a tray all filled with soil and freshly dibbled.

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The Tomato Cam

In addition to helping out with some research and evaluation of innovative, European weed control equipment, we've been busy keeping up with planting and such around here. Our winter squash and pumpkins recently went out into the field (we're growing a mix of different kinds: butternuts and butter cups, some kabochas and -- our favorite -- delicata), and we've also set out some fennel, beets, zucchini, eggplant and cucumbers. Growth on some crops is really astounding (tomatoes), others are sort of disappointing (spinach and onions). It's still early in the season, though, and hopefully our soils will warm up and breath some new life into those struggling crops. A lot of our main season CSA crops are growing well and the brassicas (kale, kohlrabi, cabbage, cauliflower and such) are looking really nice. So far, we've been able to keep more or less ahead of weeds, too. And we're harvesting! For now, just limited quantities of salad, radish, turnips and garlic for farmers market, but we're hoping to reintroduce ourselves to our restaurant customers this weekend.

The start of harvest season is great because, of course, we start to see more money come in, but it's also a nice reminder that the CSA season will be starting soon. Still kind of early for us to pinpoint an exact start date, but keep your eyes on that first or second week of July. At the May cook out, a shareholder from last year mentioned that she liked how the CSA started a bit of later than other CSAs because that meant that it also ran later into the fall. Well, another benefit is that the shares will be able to start with some veggies that you can really sink your teeth into, not just bags and bags of greens.

Click through to the full post for some pictures of our tomatoes.

This is a "Glacier" tomato taken on May 25th.

The same tomato plant and fruit cluster taken on June 15th, three weeks to-the-day later.

These are "Black Brandywine" heirlooms.

An 18 month old for reference on how tall the plants are getting already. Camera left are "Sungold" cherry tomatoes, camera right are "Taxi" slicing tomatoes. All of that white row cover on the right of the photo is covering 3 more rows of tomatoes (heirlooms, cherries and paste, resp.) which aren't in the hoophouse. You can also see from the leaves on the ground that we have started to prune our tomatoes.

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June Update

Phew! Sorry for being out of touch recently, but we've been busy, busy, busy around here, as you might imagine. Crops are on track for the CSA to start in early July, pretty much like last year. I can't quite say that we're "caught up" with plantings and such, but I can say that we're not too far behind and that what's already out in the field is growing well and looking really great.

All of our potatoes are up, we've planted all of our tomatoes (and that's no small feat: there's a lot of 'em), we might start picking salad for farmers market and restaurants this week. Kale, broccoli, napa cabbage are all rockin' out and growing in that rapid, satisfying way that they tend to. Oh! And our first planting of tomatoes is doing really well, too: there are some pea to golf ball sized tomatoes out there and we're expecting some of them to start ripening in early-mid July. This is very exciting for us since we've never before had tomatoes before mid August.

I'm hoping to plant out some beets, fennel and calendula today, ahead of the rain that's coming later this week.

And there was a moose in the field yesterday afternoon! I was cultivating all morning and went in for lunch around 1. After running some errands, I went back out around 4:30 and there were all of these gigantic deer tracks around the field! No damage to anything, except for a few poor potatoes that got mushed.

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