The salad shares are under way and in about 3 weeks our regular season CSA shares will begin! We've been busy at the farm planting, weeding, building and getting new fields ready to be planted. With this warm and dry spring many of the crops are way ahead of schedule! This is good and bad- part of the challenge of crop planning is trying to estimate the days from planting to harvest. Usually the seed companies give you a pretty good time line, but your climate, latitude, and weather can change these estimates. Our lettuce crops (pictured above) are running a little behind - it will likely be at least another week before we have lettuce ready. But the arugula, mizuna, and other greens from the Brassica (cabbage, broccoli, mustard greens) family are winning the race! The warm weather has them ready and growing super quickly. With the heat, they also tend to "bolt" or go to seed more quickly. So your harvest window is reduced as well. Which isn't necessarily bad, we just have to harvest them quicker and then turn the beds over to get new crops planted in their place.
We try to stick with a low - tillage or no - till operation. This keeps our soil biology in tact and reduces carbon emissions. Large scale tillage around the globe is a huge factor in carbon emissions. Especially in the spring time as commercial farms till the land to prepare for the new season. In an effort to reduce our carbon footprint and to increase our soil health we are working to change to a no till model. While breaking up the new fields into a plant-able garden required us to initially till the soil due to time constraints, we will be transitioning these new plots to a low tillage from here on out. With the help of grants from the WA Tilth Alliance and National Young Farmers Coalition we are able to purchase required equipment, seeds, etc that will help us with the transition to Organic Certified and no till. More info on this to come.
To find out more about regenerative agriculture and the effects of tillage on the environment check out https://regenerationinternational.org/2018/06/24/no-till-farming/
A great documentary was release last year about regenerative agriculture: Kiss the Ground https://kissthegroundmovie.com/
For this week we have lots of the above mentioned greens available! From mustard greens to tatsoi and arugula greens. ***As a note for salad shares- please do not swap out the dressing/topping as they are a required item and are pre-paid and ordered ahead of time. If you would like to add on extra items you can do so by clicking the customization link or logging into your harvie profile.
Do you garden at home??? We also have plant starts available for order! You can also come to the farm on Saturday from noon to 4 pm for our first ever- plant sale!!! Keep an eye out at our online store https://www.harvie.farm/farm/flat-tack-farm/shop for available plant starts.
Thank you for supporting locally grown!
Your farmers,
Lyndsay, Kelly & Patrick
