Frost!
The first pickup date is mid June rather than early June this year because the spring weather has been pretty wild and I want to make sure the first share is good. There have been unseasonably cold nights punctuated by intense heat spikes, both of which cause problems for growing crops (but no matter what date the first pickup is, the summer farm share is always twenty weeks long, the end date just shifts accordingly)
On the night of Wednesday May 17th there was a hard frost in the mid/high 20s out here in western MA. It's not unheard of but very rare for it to be that cold that late in the spring, in my 15 years of farming I haven't seen it. On our farm it didn't cause any major catastrophes because we were able to delay planting sensitive crops like tomatoes and peppers, and row-cover the ones already out there like cucumbers and zucchini. The one minor casualty was an early seeding of nice looking green beans that got totally zapped. So our crops experienced minor setbacks, just a slowdown in growth, but unfortunately many farms out here had huge losses, especially orchards and fruit farms.
Our CSA signups are still low this year but there's plenty of time for more people to join over the next two weeks. My goal is to get up to 300 signups this summer, and we're around 260 right now. If you're up for it, please invite your friends and neighbors to participate in our farm share! Word of mouth is the way most people hear about us, whether in person or on social media (I've been trying to post more and have more of an online presence, not my strong suit but I think I'm slowly improving!) Street list-servs are a good place too, tag interested people in This post if you're in the Jamaica Plain Facebook group (and if there are any similar groups in other neighborhoods that I don't know about please let me know!) If you want any write-ups about the farm, let us know, we can provide them - or just put it in your own words, that's always best.
In other news, we reached our crowdfunding goal to receive a matching grant from the state of MA and buy a new tractor! As soon as all of that comes through I'm super excited to find the right tractor and put it to work. Thanks so much to everyone for donating and helping us out with that! And if you have a Stone Soup shirt or hat coming to you just let me know what size you want and I'll send it along with the first farm share distribution.
Thanks so much everyone, enjoy this beautiful late spring/early summer weather and we'll see you soon!