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June 1, 2012
| Preseason Newsletter #3
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Waltham Fields Community Farm
CSA Newsletter
 
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Welcome to the CSA at Waltham Fields Community Farm!
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CSA Updates from WFCF- 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! Look for your first regular season CSA newsletter in your email box Monday, June 11. In the newsletter, you'll find a list of crops we hope to harvest and have available for pick-your-own that week, along with recipes, veggie storage tips and more stories from the field. If you are a weekday-only shareholder, please plan to pick up on Tuesday or Thursday. Take a look at our CSA FAQs if you have any questions about CSA pickups. If you are splitting a share, please remember that your entire share needs to be picked up at once every week. We look forward to seeing you all at the farm in June! - Remember, if you have a balance to pay on your summer CSA share, it's due today! Not sure if you have a balance? Email Deb!
- 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.
- This is your last chance to purchase a 20-week share of delicious, antibiotic-free Vermont-grown Eric's Eggs. 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!
- 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
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Events and Programs
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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.
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Notes from the Field: The Kind of Work for Spring
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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!
The fields are filling up with the bounty of summer and fall. Rows of tomato plants, Swiss chard, kale, cabbage, onions, leeks, shallots, and garlic are interspersed with successions of lettuces, carrots, beets, radishes, salad turnips, scallions, fennel and escarole. Robust spring peas and kohlrabi share the fields with t
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Amanda and Andy mark beds for squash at Gateways.
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he tiniest seedlings of fall's parsnips and celeriac. Fall onions, leeks, shallots, and garlic are taking off. At our new Gateways field in Weston, a heavy-duty deer fence protects tender cucumber and squash transplants. Our day-neutral strawberries, an experimental replacement for the crop we had to turn under because of a quackgrass infestation last month, are looking beautiful and trying to flower already (we'll discourage them by picking off the flowers until the plants get a little bigger).
This spring's early warm temperatures brought pests out in large numbers, and they seem to be sticking around. Our first seeding of salad turnips was decimated by flea beetles almost before it had a chance to break through the soil, but fortunately this fast-growing crop is easy to re-seed and cover with a protective "blanket" that hides the turnips from the beetles. Our Swiss chard was set back by leaf miner, but seems to be growing out of it now and putting on size at last. We fed it with a combination of fish emulsion, compost tea and vitamin-rich kelp meal this week, and it looks happier already. Our peas were hit very hard by seedcorn maggot early in the month; we had to turn in about two-thirds of what we had planted because of extremely poor germination. The remaining beds are looking healthy and growing fast, and we took advantage of the extra space in our pick-your-own field to seed more green beans and give our plum and cherry tomatoes a little more room to grow, which plants and people alike will appreciate in August. With a healthy balance of sun and rain, the warmer temperatures of the last two weeks, and the skill and diligence of our farmers Dan, Zannah, and Sutton in controlling weeds, it sometimes seems like the crops grow overnight!
The eight weeks between May 15 and July 15 are the busiest of the entire year on the farm. We are making beds, turning in cover crop, doing our best to stay on top of weeds with tractor cultivation and hand techniques, seeding in the
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greenhouse, transplanting thousands of seedlings into the fields, staking and tying tomatoes, monitoring crops for pests and diseases -- oh, and we start harvesting somewhere in there, too.
We work in April and May almost without thought of the eventual harvest. There is so much satisfaction in the work itself -- each task, although it may seem to have little connection to the food that we grow, is a skill to be mastered and a joy to practice. Each step in our process builds on the one before, so one job, done well, leads to the next being easier and getting done better (the opposite, of course, is also true). Growing a strong, healthy transplant in the greenhouse is one example; the stocky, deep green plants are easy to pull out of their black plastic trays and root quickly in warm late spring soil. So is chisel plowing a bed in order to seed it with carrots that germinate, find those chisel furrows,
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Zannah flame weeding those carrots
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and sink their roots deep down into the soil. Flame weeding that same bed of carrots, using a propane torch mounted on a backpack frame to kill weeds almost before they sprout, then watching the carrots pop out of the ground the very next day in clean soil. Spreading compost. Turning in cover crop, lush stands of bell beans, barley, rye and hairy vetch disappearing under the plow to help provide nourishment for the vegetable crop to follow. Spraying fish emulsion and kelp meal on garlic that responds with the deep blue-green of good health. Cultivating a bed with a tractor to kill weeds, and then following behind with hoes and hands until the crop is clean as a whistle -- for a moment. These are the tasks that we love, and the ones that lead to the bountiful harvests we hope to share with you.
May turning to June is a big transition in the life of the farm. The harvest season that begins next week is the visible result of our work, a tangible (and delicious) accomplishment that we are grateful to share with all of you. The first time we open the farm to you is a celebration of the beginning of summer, and a chance for you to begin your participation in the farm season -- picking peas, harvesting bunches of herbs, bringing home scallions and bok choy for the freshest, tastiest stir-fries imaginable, using the farm roads as a kind of walking meditation (with tractors), picnicking on the grass -- these are some of the ways that we hope you can engage with your community farm with your whole being. It all begins with that first harvest.
We'll see you on the farm.
Amanda (for the farm staff)
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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
Field Crew
Weed Crew
Learning Garden Educators
Rebecca Byrd
Alison Dagger
Ian Howes
www.communityfarms.org 781-899-2403
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