I want you all to know that our farm crew has been working very hard, and happily, as well, in spite of our most unusual wet, muddy growing season.  Fields have been accessible for tractor and equipment only for short windows of time, and then rain comes again. This means much more hoeing and weed pulling.  Plantings have gone in late, plantings—especially peas and beans, have been stressed and terminated by all the excess moisture.  This season has for sure been our wettest in my memory!  And for years I have been saying the dryer the season the better our production!  So will we ever get your CSA boxes filled to capacity?  I’m hopeful.  Our guys are so determined to ensure our later crops will come through.  A lot of straw mulch is being spread around our melons, squash and cukes to stop the weeds.  Weeds pulled from around every pepper, onion, sweet potato plant. Plants taken to the fields and planted by hand (since it’s too wet to use the tractor and planting equipment).  So you, too, can be hopeful that good things are coming.  But we acknowledge that the boxes currently are not what we had hoped.   And we appreciate so much your understanding and patience.  That’s part of what the CSA model espouses – keeping community in the lean times and the abundant.  Thank you!

      To update you on the Food Shed, we had a group of educators to the farm this week and served our first meal from the new kitchen.  It’s almost finished, though we still need to have final inspections and approval.  We also have a fair amount of landscape work to do.  We are so eager to have it all completed over a year after we broke ground. Plans for open house will been made after final approval, and we hope you will be able to enjoy the benefits of this facility in the years to come.  We will also still be having our annual June festival – normally a Strawberry Fest, now just a Summer Fest, this Saturday and invite you all to visit. 

I woke up at 3:30 this morning to a terrible cacophony outside.  High-pitched, howling winds, buckets of rain hitting the side of the window, and thunder and lightning - strangely, very little thunder, but lightning pulsing and flaring every fifteen or thirty seconds, as if some enormous strobe light was parked over my head.  The wind and rain blasted the house for at least a half hour as I tried to go back to sleep, but it was no use - the constantly blinking blaze of light in my room, bright enough to read by when it hit, would not allow me to fall asleep. 

When I finally did, I slept fitfully, full of strange dreams, and awoke to a calm morning and a blinking, useless alarm clock.  Dan, Brosi, and I made our way downstairs and discovered that we had not overslept - it was about a quarter to seven - and that we'd all watched and listened, fascinated and a little horrified, to the fantastic weather three hours earlier.  We ate breakfast and nervously ventured outside, curious to see whether the plastic had been ripped off the greenhouses, the chicken coops (and their inhabitants) had been blown across the fields, or maybe the Rapture had happened overnight.

Miraculously, none of these things seemed to have come to pass.  The greenhouses were intact, the chickens were safe, and the farm crew, with their widely varying degrees of faith, all showed up for work.  It did make a farm full of worry about the wet spring start to wonder just how much we were going to have to put up with before we could get farming this year.  Rain is one thing, but weather that the National Weather Service described as "tornadic" is another (there's your word of the day!).  Raining frogs or lava floods seemed within the realm of possibility. 

But, weather-related chatter can only last so long, and getting to work there were plenty of signs of hope for the year.  We've already harvested about three hundred pounds of asparagus this week - a hundredfold increase over last week - and the rhubarb is sizing up nicely too.  We've been getting plants into the ground every way we can lately - making beds by hand, reusing greenhouse space, tilling up dry corners of well-drained fields - and the strawberries are starting to flower.  We farmers always say we like working outside and being out in the weather, so I guess we can't complain when it puts on a show.