May 1, 2012
Preseason Newsletter #2
GH Tomatoes Spring 2012

Waltham Fields Community Farm

CSA Newsletter

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Welcome to the CSA at Waltham Fields Community Farm!
CSA Updates from WFCF
  • This month has been a busy and productive one in the farm fields.  Crops including beets, carrots, onions
    Dan and Sutton
    Dan and Sutton work on Big K 
    , peas, fava beans, cabbage and kale are already out in the fields, and the greenhouses are full of tomatoes, peppers, lettuce and spinach.  Despite weeks of very dry weather, our crops are growing well so far, thanks in no small part to our two new assistant growers, Sutton Kiplinger and Zannah Porter.  A native of Washington, DC, Sutton comes to WFCF from a season at Dandelion Spring Farm in Newcastle, Maine.  Her job included weekly stints at the Portland Farmer's market with some of the most beautiful veggies we've ever seen as well as trips out to Maine's legendary sheep islands to tend flocks of sheep that have lived on the islands for 200 years.  Originally from southwestern Virginia, Zannah has been our neighbor at Land's Sake in Weston for the past three years.  In 2011, she was their equipment and harvest
    Erinn and Zannah
    Erinn and Zannah in the greenhouse 
    manager, so she knows her way around a grease gun, an oil change and a pick list as well as anyone.  You'll meet Sutton and Zannah at our Tuesday night CSA distributions or weekday drop-in volunteer hours -- please welcome them both to WFCF!
  • We are thrilled to continue our partnership with Rockville Market Farm to offer delicious, antibiotic-free Vermont-grown Eric's Eggs again this season.  The eggs were so popular last year that Eric has added another option for 2012:  a 20-week egg-n-chorizo share!  We will have a limited quantity of eggs a la carte when they are available, but the best way to make sure you get your weekly egg fix is to buy an egg share now!  
  • The first CSA pickups of the season will be:
    •  Tuesday, June 12 2:30-7:30  
    •  Thursday, June 14 2:30-7:30
    • Saturday, June 16 9 AM-1 PM

Bring bags to carry home your veggies, scissors for pick-your-own herbs, and a big hello for your farmers!

 

If you are a weekday-only shareholder, please plan to pick up on Tuesday or Thursday.  We look forward to seeing you all at the farm in June! 

  • We'll be holding CSA orientations the week before pickups begin.  Please click on a link below to register for an orientation if you plan to attend.  
  • WFCF will not be providing plastic bags for CSA shareholders this season -- so start saving up those grocery produce bags now if you prefer to bag each item separately.  Cloth bags and sturdy boxes also work well for CSA pickups.    
  • We still have a few winter shares available!  Winter shares cost $200; pickups are November 3 and 17 and December 1 and 15, 2012.  Email Deb to add a winter share and continue your local veggie eating into the holiday season!   
 

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Quick Links

Events and Programs

 

Seedling Sales!

 

Can't get enough veggies?  Get your garden ready and grow your own!  Come to our seedling sales in May to buy vegetable and flower seedlings, with varieties are carefully selected by Farmer Erinn to grow well in our area.  All are organically grown right here at Waltham Fields.    

 

Seedling sales are Saturday, May 12 9-4 and

Saturday and Sunday, May 19-20, 9-4 here at the farm.

 

Children's Learning Garden Programs!

 

Registration is now open for our well-loved summer programs!  Sign up for Garden Explorers, Farmer for a Week and more by clicking on the link above.

 

Soil Testing Workshop! 

 
Saturday, May 12th, 10am-12pm.
Learn how to take a take a proper soil sample and understand your test results with Dr. John Spargo from UMASS.

Click on the link above to learn more about this and other adult practical skills workshops at WFCF.
 
Thank-yous and Help Wanted!
Ted's Hinge

Thank You, Mark, Ted and Jeff!

 

Mark Walter, Jeff Holmes and Ted Tucker have been helping make our new barn even more beautiful!  Mark, a teacher and carpenter, designed and built custom doors for the front and rear of the barn with lots of help from Jeff, while Ted, a carpenter and blacksmith, built new modular produce bins and crafted these beautiful strap and pintle hinges (at right) for the doors.  We can't wait for you to see the barn in June!  

 

Jeff Holmes also helped us build new doors for our big greenhouse this winter and early spring.   The efficiency and ease of use in the greenhouse has vastly improved now that we don't have to use our entire weight to open the door -- and it's more welcoming for volunteers, too.  Thanks, Jeff! 

 

Drop-in Volunteer Hours

 

If you have some time on your hands and would like to exchange it for some dirt, we have just the job for you!  Drop-in hours for high school and adult volunteers are Tuesday-Saturday beginning promptly at 9 AM; all-ages volunteer hours begin at 9 AM on Saturday, June 2.   Show up ready to work and dressed for the weather -- we might be in the greenhouse or out in the fields, depending on the day.  

 

Special Raspberry Team

 

We have a special weeding project for folks who can't make our drop-in hours and prefer to come work on the farm by themselves.  Our raspberry patch needs some attention this spring, including both gentle hand weeding and more vigorous pruning and renovation of beds.   We'll also teach volunteers how to monitor raspberry plantings for the spotted winged drosophilia.  Please email Amanda to set up a time to learn more!  

 

Seamsters Wanted

 

We are looking for a few good sewers to help us make additional "skirts" for our CSA produce bins.  Natasha Hawke made us two beautiful skirts with a bee pattern two years ago, and we need four additional complementary ones. We'll let you know dimensions and cover the costs if you help us choose material and sew the skirts!  Email Amanda for more information.   

 

 

Notes from the Field:  Spring Strawberries
Each week, our CSA newsletter includes a crop list and other important information for shareholders as well as our farmers' thoughts on the nature and process of organic vegetable farming in New England.  We hope you enjoy our field notes!
 
April is the cruelest month, wrote the poet TS Eliot, and it was too true for our strawberry plants this year.  Organic strawberries are notoriously hard to grow.  Weeds, pests and diseases all have their way with them; cold weather at flowering can lead to an impoverished crop; wet weather during harvest season leads to grey mold and berry collapse.  This 'berry roulette' is compounded by the fact that growing traditional perennial June-bearing strawberries means berries need to pay their way for the entire year during a brief harvest period of about two weeks to a month.  For the other eleven months, they are just a maintenance headache for vegetable farmers who are trying to keep up with other tasks.   Essentially, strawberries on an organic vegetable farm are a delicious, labor intensive gamble. 

Intellectualizing about strawberries, of course, is totally obliterated by the first bite of a sun-warmed strawbStrawberries!erry in June.  Financial considerations (are these berries really paying for their real estate?) are replaced by the considerations of a more complex economy of taste, smell, and satisfaction.  On a primitive level, the first taste of strawberries is a reassuring signal that summer really has arrived.  All of this made it even harder to decide to plow under our strawberry crop this spring.  

Planted in the fall of 2009, our berries were intended to be in the ground for one season only.  We had decided to grow fall-planted, June-bearing strawberries as annuals, turning them under in July to get another crop in following the berries.  In this way, we were trying to ensure that that little piece of ground paid for itself while still growing the berries that everyone (including us) loves so much.  The strawberry plants looked so good after that 2010 production season, however, that we decided to keep them around for another year to see if we could get another year out of them. We weeded them in the fall and mulched them with straw we bought from Kimball Farms, a fateful decision which would be the beginning of the end of this particular strawberry planting. 

In the spring of 2011, the strawberry plants emerged from their mulch of straw along with a lovely crop of quackgrass, a perennial weed that thrives alongside strawberries.  The seed must have come in with the straw, but once established the grass, like the berries, reproduces by means of rhizomes that spread through undisturbed soil.  Unlike the berries, however, quackgrass rhizomes can grow more than an inch a day -- the strawberry crop is no match for the ferocious energy of the weed.  Because we were committed to this berry patch, we weeded the quackgrass.  And weeded.  And weeded.  Farm staff and dedicated volunteers dug through the ground for hours to pull out the sharp, spiky rhizomes and try to inhibit the growth of the quackgrass.  The berry crop in 2011 was bountiful and delicious, but was abruptly cut short by heavy June rains that turned ripe berries to fermenting mush. 

Then the strawberry patch left our attention for a few months while we focused on the rest of the farm.  While the vegetative part of quackgrass grows more slowly during the heat of the summer, the rhizomes continue to grow, spreading through the strawberry beds under the soil in preparation for sprouting when the weather cools in the fall.  And sprout they did.  And we weeded again, all through the fall, digging out the pointed rhizomes again until it seemed as if we might have a shot at a clean patch in the spring.  Having learned our lesson about the straw, we mulched the berries with clean leaves chopped by our manure spreader, renovated the beds with the cultivator, and hoped that we might get a third year of production out of our one-year berry patch.  But it was not to be.

The warm, dry weather of March and April brought both strawberries and quackgrass out of dormancy.   While the strawberries grew slowly, the quackgrass sprouted immediately.  It was clear at once that our weeding efforts in the fall had only disturbed the rhizomes of the quackgrass, which then sent up even more vegetative growth to compensate.  Large patches of the strawberry beds were covered with lush stands of grass.  The strawberry plants that remained were patchy and stressed by the competition with the quackgrass for scarce water and nutrients.  Each day, the circles of grass grew taller, thicker, and wider. 

We realized that we were once again staring down the barrel of hundreds of person-hours of hard, painful handweeding in order to have a shot at a June berry crop.  Even then, the competition with the quackgrass was so intense that we were not sure we would have enough berries to go around.  The idea of a scant crop of berries to begin with, possibly made even worse by harvest-time rains or bloom-time freezes, (especially because the early spring made an early bloom, threatened by frost, seem inevitable) and the possibility that all of our hard work would be made useless by a resurgence of the new spotted-winged drosophilia fly (about which more later) was what finally made our decision easier. 

We knew that we had to act quickly to turn up the rhizomes with the moldboard plow so that they could be exposed to air and sun and dry them out to kill them, hopefully without chopping them up and encouraging them to reproduce.  The weed problem was getting worse by the day.  Late last week, the first strawberry plants flowered.   A day or two later, Dan put the two-bottom plow on the back of the tractor to open up a new piece of land.  On his way, he stopped by where I was re-fixing a reemay cover that had blown off our spring cabbages.  "Strawberries?" he asked.  "Do it,"  I said. 

So, in the end, we made this call for efficiency and to use our labor wisely, rather than for the quixotic quest for a June berry crop this year.  I believe that we chose well, but it does not make it easier to walk past the former berry patch, now turned up to expose those roots to the sun.  It will make our June poorer, but, we hope, the rest of the season richer.  The hundreds of person-hours of labor that would have gone to weed the patch will now be available for other tasks, other crops.  We will try to experiment with some annual everbearing strawberries this summer, if we can get our hands on some plants at this late date.  And we will not neglect those other economies of sensation and satisfaction that drive so many of our decisions on the farm. 

See you in June,

Amanda (for the farm staff) 

Waltham Fields Community Farm Year-Round Staff  

Claire Kozower, Executive Director

Kim Hunter, Education & Volunteer Coordinator (on maternity leave)

Fan Watkinson, Interim Education & Volunteer Coordinator 

Amanda Cather, Farm Manager

Andy Scherer, Gateways Field Manager

Dan Roberts, Field Manager

Erinn Roberts, Greenhouse & Field Manager

Marla Rhodes, Development Coordinator

Deb Guttormsen, Bookkeeper & Tech Coordinator

 

Assistant Growers

Sutton Kiplinger

Zannah Porter  

 

Learning Garden Educators

Rebecca Byrd

Alison Dagger   

Ian Howes

 

www.communityfarms.org          781-899-2403  
Waltham Fields Community Farm | 240 Beaver Street | Waltham | MA | 02452