Category: CSA Newsletters

Holy cow! We’ve done it! We have (nearly) finished our first season of CSA together. I will take some time once the fields are cleaned up for the winter to make some notes about what I should do differently next year (more heirloom tomatoes, more tender Chinese broccoli, prune those pumpkins!). I will also crunch some numbers, but even without knowing the final yields, I am feeling very grateful for what the land produced and for all of you who took a chance on us, most of you having never belonged to a CSA before.

This week marks a big turning point on the farm: the first frost of the fall. Normally, I am pretty obsessively looking at the weather report all week to see whether we will have rain, but I was distracted the past few days with other chores and so was caught completely by surprise when I saw frost forecasted for the beginning of this week. I should have known it was coming. It is the end of September after all. This month has just flown by and so it doesn’t feel as if we could already be here, but here we are nonetheless. Many of our most beloved crops – tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, beans – will die once the frost hits, but the ones that survive will only taste better for it. Cabbages, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and root vegetables convert some of their starches to sugars when the mercury drops, making them all the more delicious. I’m glad that you’ll have a week or two of frost-kissed veggies in your boxes before our season ends.

Before I started farming, I worked at the Bloomberg School of Public Health (Johns Hopkins) doing public outreach with faith communities, schools, and other organizations in the greater Baltimore area about food security and sustainable agriculture. One of my favorite things about that job was teaching people about our food system and the ways in which they could do their own little part at making it more sustainable and fair for all involved – consumers, farmworkers, processors, food service workers, and farmers alike. (A CSA membership is a good way to help!)