The Community Supported
Garden
at Genesis Farm

News and Views
from the Garden

Notes from webmaster:
All of the old newsletters have been compiled into the following archived files. (There were no newsletters in 2008.)

A Rough Fall  

Thanksgiving is almost upon us and with it the last for the summer share pickups.   Since communication about how the season is going has been sparse I feel it important to share at least a few things with all of you before the winter is upon us.  Suffice to say this fall has been very difficult from a farming standpoint.  Actually it is the worst I have ever experienced in 20 years of growing. 

If one is lucky the months of September and October are mostly dry.  We need a little bit of moisture to keep the fall stuff going but it is good if the soil is not too wet as we need to dig potatoes and sweet potatoes, sow cover crop and the like.  As we all know Irene dumped on us making it way too wet to do anything with the soil.  (Add to that the loss of power for six days and we’re all a bunch of happy campers!)  What was extraordinary was not the remnants of a hurricane but the incessant wet, cold and damp conditions that followed for weeks on end.   Most of our fall crops have really struggled though this bad spate of weather and have not grown anywhere close to what we normally expect.  Plants grew too slowly at the outset and then because of shorter day length never got a chance to catch up.  We can give out smaller lettuce or tatsoi but broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower have run out of time to head up. 

Soggy soil also caused a significant portion of the potato harvest to rot in the ground.  The same goes for the sweet potatoes but happily the losses there weren’t as bad as anticipated.  All in all it was a very tough season for growing.  The recent pre-Halloween snowstorm added insult to injury and another 6 days without power.  I feel that we have lost 2 weeks of the calendar and have been scrambling to catch up with the workload.  Being a little short handed hasn’t helped.  Special thanks to apprentices James Costello and Sam Bass for being there and staying positive.

We here at the CSG are obviously not alone.  All other farmers we’ve talked to have had a difficult time as well.  While misery may love company, this is not a silver lining.  There does indeed exist, however, a silver lining to what have been, literally, a lot of dark clouds and that is you!

You, the members of our CSA, by your commitment have shared with us these many hardships.  As a result of your continued support we don’t go into debt, we meet our payroll and we even make a significant capital purchase of a compost turner that will have a major roll in increasing fertility on the farm in the long run.  This is a great example of what Community Supported Agriculture is all about. 

Every fall we have a book study with the apprentices and this year it was a book called Farms of Tomorrow Revisited by Groh and McFadden.  The book explores what Community Supported Agriculture is and many of the first examples of these projects.   I have enjoyed reading this book as it has been a good reminder of some of the ideals present in the thinking behind the first CSA’s of which we were but one.  I would like to share a short paragraph that particularly struck me.  

     “As with many catchall names, the term community supported agriculture or CSA is slightly misleading.  It implies that the problem is special support for agriculture.  As important and necessary as that may be, it is secondary.  Although it may seem a fine point, the primary need is not for the farm to be supported by the community, but rather for the community to support itself through farming.  This is an essential of existence, not a matter of convenience.  We have no choice about whether to farm or not as we have a choice about whether to produce TV sets or not.  So we have to either farm or to support farmers, every one of us, at any cost.  We cannot give it up because it is inconvenient or unprofitable.”

Please  know that we are not giving up even though all this excessive precipitation, downed trees and power outages are all a bit “inconvenient”.  Surely society has no choice but to support farmers but we realize that people do have a choice of what farms and farmers they support.  We thank you for supporting our farming here at the CSG at Genesis Farm and appreciate your sticking with us through challenging times.  As usual we have much to be thankful for!  Have a great holiday.