Where was the rain when we needed it?
First a few announcements then on to more comments about comments.
We are still taking orders for Winter FruitShare. In the last box we received honeycrisp apples, two kinds of pears, avocados, pomegranates and cranberries. Delish! We have two pick-up spots: near I-94 and Dale in St. Paul and here at the farm. Pick-up day is Wednesday. Order by Monday the 12th! Price is $560 for seven months (13 weeks).
We have winter squash and pumpkins for sale. Thanksgiving is coming. What’s Thanksgiving without winter squash or pumpkin pie? We even have giant Hubbard squash for those expecting a lot of company. Price is $1/pound (compared to $1.29 at local co-ops). Contact me if you’d like to purchase a few.
Eggs! We have eggs for sale. If you are interested in eggs during the winter please let me know and I will devise a plan on how to sell them. If we have a lot of interest I will have some type of rotating list. If only a few people want them we can schedule a weekly or bi-weekly pick-up time.
We have extended the Early Bird price until 12-22-2012 when the world will come to an end (didn’t seem to make any sense to extend it beyond then). Sign-up now and lock in this year’s price for next year’s produce. All it takes is $100 down — the rest is due March 31st 2013, pending the earth’s survival.
On to your comments!
Let’s start with one of my favorite types of comments, those related specifically to what we grow. Being a CSA farm our goal is to provide every member exactly what they want. It is an unachievable goal but a goal nonetheless. These comments are helpful since they give us insight into what we are doing right or wrong with the selection of vegetables we grow. Here are a few of your comments with my comments following each.
Missed the fall root vegetables – would like more, other than potatoes.
Being more specific would be helpful. This year we planned to have potatoes, carrots, rutabagas, radishes, daikons and beets for the fall. The potatoes and carrots did well. The fall beets came earlier than expected and were given out in September (we also planted fewer than the demand so next year we will increase the fall beet production). The daikons were hit and miss as were the regular radishes. The rutabagas did poorly mostly due to lack of water; they were in a location that had no other crops nearby so they didn’t get watered like they should have. We are modifying our plantings to ensure they don’t get left behind next year.
We would like to grow parsnips but have not had the best of luck in the past. They do not compete well with weeds and grow somewhat slowly over a long period of time. They are pretty time-consuming from a weed management standpoint. However, we have vastly improved our ability to grow carrots so next year we are considering adding back parsnips.
We’d also like to grow sweet potatoes but in speaking with other farmers it appears our success — or should I say lack of success — equals that of many other Minnesota farmers. I’ll do some more research this winter to see if we can find a way to be successful with sweet potatoes.
It’d be kind of neat to find a surprise in the box. Something we don’t usually see and would push us to try something new. Could be just a small crop that we see just once or twice during the season.
I’m not sure what you are looking for here. We trialed okra this year and gave it out once or twice. I didn’t hear many comments positive or negative regarding okra so I don’t know what we will do with it next year. We also gave out some less popular things like daikon radishes. It is always a trade-off between those members who like to experiment and try new things and those members who hate to throw out something because they don’t like it. At least our on-farm members can make a choice. I wish we could figure out a way to do that with drop-site members. In any case, we will look for a few more surprises for next year. Send us your requests!
Also, would not be interested in so many hot peppers, would have preferred sweet peppers instead
Hot peppers are one of those things we throw into shares as a free “add-on”. We don’t spend a lot of resources growing and harvesting them. If a harvest day is running behind the hot peppers won’t get picked. If the season is difficult, the hot-pepper plants are one of the first things we abandon. The best way to look at the hot peppers is as a freebie. If you like them: Great! If not, give them to friends or neighbors or the compost heap. But be aware that we are not sacrificing other produce for the production of hot peppers. On the last part of the comment re: sweet peppers: A FamilyShare this year received 57 sweet peppers starting August 8th through the end of the season — eleven weeks this season — for an average of five per week. Was that really not enough sweet peppers or am I missing something?
Would you consider doing grape tomatoes versus cherry tomatoes?
Absolutely. We’ve grown grape tomatoes in the past, just not this year. We’ll be sure to purchase seeds for next season.
On to comments about EggShare!
I think the egg share frequency could be expanded to a weekly pick up.
None! I’m very very happy with my membership! Oooh… wait… maybe get more chickens? 😉 I LOVE LOVE LOVE the eggs and would really like to be able to buy more
We would love to expand EggShare but it poses a number of problems. But first some history. We offered EggShare a couple years ago by reselling eggs from another supplier, similar to what we do with CoffeeShare or MeatShare. This worked quite well since the supplier had 100s of chickens and could supply us with 40+ dozen eggs a week. Unfortunately there were other difficulties we encountered working with this farmer that put us in a difficult position regarding supplying us eggs consistently. So instead of disappointing our members by shorting them the eggs we were shorted we decided to investigate doing this ourselves.
The difficulty we have is two-fold. The biggest issue is raising enough hens to supply the number of eggs we would need. If we equaled our 40 EggShares a week that we had before we would need at least 100 hens. This would require a new chicken coop at least 400 square feet in size. This of course would cost money. But a more important issue is that we really are not in the egg business and don’t have the infrastructure nor distribution required to handle 40 dozen eggs per week. Then we’d have to find a market for the eggs during the 33 weeks we are not distributing vegetables. Sometimes it is best to focus on what you do best and find partners to fill in where necessary. So I would prefer to find a reliable supplier of good, organic eggs from cage-free, pastured chickens. If anyone has ideas where I could get them please let me know!
Here are a couple more comments about pick-ups and shares:
Mondays are a really hard day for pickups at our house. Most of our cooking we do on the weekends, and by then the produce doesn’t feel as fresh. If pick up days could be planned for later in the week that would perfect!
We have on-farm pick-up Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 3:30 to 6:30 and Thursdays from 9:30 to 11:30 am. If you pick-up at the farm we have a solution for you! If you pick-up at one of our drop sites then there is far less flexibility. The delivery days are based on either the drop-site host’s schedule or our harvest schedule. Moving a drop site to another day would be problematic. And for everyone who cooks primarily on the weekends is another person who cooks only during the week. If we get more people to host drop sites we may be able to add more flexibility on pick-up days/times.
I was unaware there was a single share – is that possible? It was not advertised…
You are correct, we don’t advertise it. We have a small mention of it on our web site though I don’t remember where. Most of our SingleShares are grandfathered in from when we advertised and sold them. They are only available for on-farm pick-up. We discontinued advertising them when we realized a lot of families were buying a SingleShare “just to try it out” and getting discouraged that they were making a trip out to the farm to pick-up far too few vegetables for the size of their family. You’d be amazed how people can’t make the mental leap to just buy more shares! Instead they get less interested and eventually don’t return next season. Switching to only Couple and Family shares has dramatically improved year-to-year retention. Now our biggest issue is trying to get people to move from CoupleShares to FamilyShares — a problem that this past season exacerbated by providing so much produce!
Finally, for those who have plodded through all this boring explanation stuff here are a few comments that made me smile:
For the question asking for improvements:
No, if you change anything about the pick up I will have to learn a new method and I just got it down. Thank you for all your hard work.
It can take some people two or three years to get the hang of pick-up.
Each year is better. I look forward to next spring.
Already applying the pressure, eh?
Learn to control the weather for optimal farm production- don’t they teach you that?
I never went to school for farming so I wouldn’t know if they teach that or not.
disappointing because we just like regular veggies like more cucumbers and salad stuff
I realize many of our vegetables are irregular (especially the carrots and those darn fingerling potatoes) but what are regular veggies? I would have lumped tomatoes, peppers, beans, carrots, sweet corn, potatoes, cabbage, onions, and squash into the regular veggie category, but maybe that is just a farmer’s perspective. Cucumbers didn’t do well this year (last year they were out of control!). Lettuce was worse with the early, high heat.
Fresh produce once a week, with the dirt still on it, is just about the best thing I can imagine. 🙂
Um, sorry about the dirt. Could you please return it?
And finally:
Buy us a van so we can take more shares to Shoreview. 😉
Next week I will tackle all the comments about tomatoes! Who would have thought people have opinions about tomatoes?