A bunch of farm updates right after these announcements.
First, we now take Zelle for payments. Zelle is a bank to bank fund transfer system that doesn’t cost anything — at least for most banks. If your bank has Zelle and you want to pay for your shares this way please feel free to do so. Use my email address or phone number as the payee. If your Zelle account name is different from the name you gave us, please send a follow-up email letting me know you sent the money and what name it is associated with (might be a good idea to let me know anyway just in case I don’t get the usual email notification). I think each bank runs Zelle differently but I believe some have the ability to setup reoccurring payments. So if you want to pay over time this would be a fine way to do so. Or of course having your bank send a check every month works too.
Speaking of payment options. Is anyone interested in us accepting Venmo? The reason I ask is that I tried to get Venmo for business to work and have so far been unsuccessful. If there is interest I will continue to pursue a solution. If there is no interest I’ll just drop it and maybe revisit it next winter.
Along the same lines, do any of you use PayPal to pay for your shares? I don’t mean use a credit card through PayPal but actually use cash in your PayPal account. I’m thinking of switching to a different credit card processor since PayPal now charges 3.5% (that’s also true if using cash in your PayPal account by the way). Most credit card processors charge 2.75-2.9%. Saving that 0.6%+ adds up. But if people use their PayPal cash account to pay for their shares I can leave it as an option.
We are still taking orders. Wish it weren’t so but it is. Feel free to order more shares or spread the word, whichever you prefer.
Here is a sign you can post in whatever locations you think would be helpful to sell shares. Of course you’ll have to print it but if you are so inclined to help find a place to drum up business we figured we’d provide you with this nifty sign!
Farm News
One of the difficult parts about running a CSA is giving each of the customers what they want. For every member who says “Too much fennel” we have another who says “Why so little fennel?” For every “What just one cucumber this week?” we have another “When will the cucumbers ever stop?” And for every “Glad to see some math in this week’s newsletter” there is always the “I was told there would be no math!” So this week we are moving away from math and taking about farming. Yes. We actually do some farming here on the farm and this week it is our main topic.
First of all, as I mentioned last week we are doing a lot of greenhouse seeding. We had the greenhouse pretty well filled up but then the weather turned warm so we moved many of our early, cold tolerant plants to our cold-frame. The cold-frame for you newer members is an unheated greenhouse structure that we move the plants to to slowly acclimate the plants to the harsher outdoor weather. It’s like a halfway house for plants. Once they’ve been in the cold-frame for a few to many days we will move them outdoors for a few to many days before we finally plant them in the ground. With the transfer of these plants to the cold frame we now have room in the greenhouse to plant more plants. Yippee!
Item two on the list of farm topics is our recent purchase of a used “multi-purpose” digger. We are planning on using the digger to dig potatoes but may try it with carrots and sweet potatoes (if the deer leave any behind) as well. I guess we’d have to call it a potato digger if we stick to just potatoes. I’m always a bit reluctant buying used equipment because farming is hard on equipment but a new potato digger would cost $5,500 plus around $1,000 for shipping. We couldn’t justify that amount of money for just digging potatoes. On the other hand, digging potatoes is one of our more time consuming jobs so it would eventually pay for itself over time. But the large upfront cost made buying new prohibitive. Buying used made it more reasonable — though of course more risky. So cross your fingers or whatever else you cross in hopes that it all turns out well!
Item three: Just this week our garlic has arisen from the dead. It may have come up on Easter but I didn’t check. (This is where I would make some joke about how maybe Jesus, much like our garlic, was just dormant and not really dead but I don’t want to offend anyone). In any case, it is a great sign of Spring!
Item four: I started grafting our tomato plants. We graft tomatoes because we found grafting tomatoes on more vigorous rootstock makes the plants more lush and productive. We tried it last year for the first time and were impressed with the results. This year the rootstock and scions (the top part of the graft that is the variety of tomato plant that produces the types of fruit we want) didn’t grow at a consistent rate. It could have been due to the power outage that resulted in the greenhouse dropping into the 30s for a couple of nights. So the plants are all different sizes resulting in the grafting process being much more cumbersome. It will take several days to probably a week to finish (not cumulative time, just an hour here and there for the next week). It adds to the complexity since after the graft is made there is a healing process they need to go through before they can be placed back into the greenhouse. With the varying grafting situation this multi-step, multi-day, multi-environment healing process has to be done for each iteration of the grafting. So we’ll have plants at various stages in various levels of light for the next several weeks. Not ideal to say the least!
I think that pretty much hits my word quota for the week. As you can imagine, for everyone who says, “Your newsletters seem so short” there is another who says, “Sorry farmer Chris. I have no time for all those words!”
As always, do not hesitate with your questions, comments, suggestions, ideas, share orders, sign downloads, or anything else you think would be interesting to send my way!