Closing Words from Todd and Julia

Dear csa members,                                                                                                                                                           

            Today is the last pickup of the year. Like every season we have experienced, this one was full of challenges and surprises both good and bad. On the good side we had crops to harvest every week (we skipped one week in July, that we are making up for this week.)  Julia, Our truck, and I survived without any major breakdowns, and we are still    passionate about organic vegetable production.

With five years behind us in this business I am still humbled by the prospect of providing veggies for you and ourselves for twenty weeks.  Long hours and low pay are an unfortunate reality for Julia and I, Nick and Nicky, our full time interns, Titus, part time intern and Tori, our part-time employee. We are able to get out of bed every morning because we believe good, clean food is important.

We appreciate your involvement in our farm whether you are a worker share  or paying member. We do our best to use your capital and labor to Improve our land, so that we can sustain and improve our vegetable production until we are six feet under.(Before that happens I hope to find a replacement to continue our work!)

Some of the bad surprises that occurred this season we have remedied. Our well was inadequate for the amount of irrigation that we needed in July and August. We had no measurable rain those two months. We now have a deeper well that can provide three times more water in addition to the old well. This improvement should make a significant improvement in our production next year. We also had some issues with our hoop houses. We only were able to utilize one of the three hoop houses we have due to the fact that there were only three of us working on the farm full time with more things to accomplish than was possible. The one hoop house we used this year helped tomato production a lot until a wind storm destroyed the plastic on Labor day. I look forward to using all three houses next year. We will hire more labor if necessary to make this happen.                                   

Thanks for your support this year. Hope to see you next season!                                                                                                Todd McDonald            

And then from Julia:

Thank you for giving me an excuse to write about vegetables every week. It has been a joy.  Everything about this farm is a proper ratio of joy to pain which makes it well worth it.  Except that Merle smells like manure right now.

This winter I will still be in Lincoln Square at Bloom Yoga Studio as a massage therapist.  Todd will be either woodworking or acting in a Hollywood blockbuster.  As long as we have turnips, beets and kale, you can still visit him on Tuesdays at the Lincoln Square Market through November.

At our deepest core in the most obscure corners of the chambers of our hearts, we will always have turnips, beets and kale.

Peasantly yours, 

Julia

Season Extension?

We have only two more veggie drops for our CSA members!  We want to give everyone one last batch of carrots and plenty of greens, among other things.  Our second frost last night finished off our tomatoes, but plenty of other crops are looking good as they are frost hardy.  Some are frost happy, like spinach and arugula and kale.
Although the Lincoln Square market technically ends a week from tomorrow, the alderman approved an extension into November.  We have some turnips and beets in the ground that we plan to bring for Thanksgiving customers.  We are also planning to install the plastic on our third hoophouse over a couple long beds of kale.  In the meantime, Todd and I transition into plots for winter income when the starring role is no longer the farm.  They predict a snowy year, which will help our ground water supply and help replenish the creek.
Here are some mobile uploads, an homage to the market this season:

 

Hi, Spring! 

And... a flowering stalk of broccoli with butterfly:

Until next week...lettuce savor the days!

All is WELL

After straining our one well pump to the point of collapse this droughtful summer, we realized that our next investment on the farm must be to drill another well, not a small feat as you can see by the size of this drilling rig.  250-foot deep.  We will be ready for next year.

Tori ends her internship with the same crop she began!  French D'Avignon radishes come full circle.