Have not been in the writing mode due to heavy planting and shovelling, but thought I’d give a little update on goings-on at the farm. Things are shaping up for a lively subscription season this year, we’re shooting for 25 subscribers and have nearly gotten there. If you’d like to subscribe and haven’t yet, email and let me know. We’ve planted a great salad mix, radishes galore, snow peas and sugar peas, chard, basil, oregano, bak choi, tomatoes, ten different winter squashes, kale, collard greens, muskmelons, peppers - bell and habanero and scotch bonnet, watermelons, turnips, callaloo, string beans, corn and popcorn, cucumbers, and ... close to 500 pounds of potatoes! And a bunch of other stuff I can’t remember.
The weather has been a trip this spring, with wide swings alternating between 80-degree days and 40-degree nights. The heat led to many of the early crops - radishes and daikon - bolting, meaning rather than forming good eats they formed seed pods, which lead to bad eats. Then the downright cold nights meant that many of the warm season crops that were planted out - squashes and cucumbers and the like - got real stunted. But not to worry, we are nothing if not flexible farmers, which I think will be a benefit for the period of dramatic climate change we have no doubt already entered. The upside of all this is that with all the radishes - and we planted A LOT of radishes - flowering rather than ripening, the land is completely covered with beneficial bugs attracted by the flowers right now, especially ladybugs.
Other developments out our way include the first inklings of the tentatively named “Just Farming” group, a small farmers confederation of Southwest Michigan or lower Lake Michigan. We had a first meeting in March, and have begun to pool our resources in order to create a farmer-generated distribution network to benefit farmers and eaters, within a vision of food justice. Our solidarity work continues with God’s Gang, the fantastical group that got its start in the Robert Taylor Homes in the ‘80s and is still going strong and farming on the same land as us. We continue also with some form of relationship with the Puerto Rican Cultural Center’s Conuco Market, which serves the primarily low-income Humboldt Park area. As we work on the details of that relationship, one of the options that has come up is for our farm or the Just Farming confederation to have a stand at the Saturday market, selling organic for less than the price of conventional produce. As no final decision has been made on this project, the delivery day for your subscription is still a bit up in the air.
At any rate, deliveries will begin the last week of June, run for 15 weeks, and hopefully deepen ties between eaters and farmers! Likely deliveries will be Friday evenings again, but I’ll let you know as soon as we know, if there is a change to that.