Sometimes people ask us how the farm is doing. What they mean is, "You guys are in your 3rd or 4th season, and I was wondering, is your farm business where you would like it to be yet?" And over the course of this season, I have found myself giving this answer -- "The farm is great. Each of these last three seasons we have made huge leaps. But we still a couple more huge leaps to go until we get to the scale where we want to be." And the scale that we want to be at is to be big enough to be economically sustainable for our family, but not so big that we are sitting in an office all day checking our GPS and wondering how crew #5 is doing in field #7.

So this off season, we continue to expand.

New hoophouses going in. One frame is up (on left), one frame is all laid out ready to go up (on right).

Up in the field we are building two new hoophouses. These will be unheated greenhouse frames with one layer of plastic. What these structures will do is help us extend our season on both ends by about a month. We can grow both early and late stuff in these houses. Since these structures are up in the field, the trick will be venting them properly and irrigation. I have an idea for a gutter system to collect rainwater, send it into a tank in the hoophouse, and then use a solar livestock water pump to move the water into a low pressure drip irrigation system. It is one of those ideas that should totally work in theory, but will probably need to get hammered out a bit over a couple of seasons. As for venting, we are getting some of these solar powered greenhouse vent arms that will open vents at each end of the top ridge when it get too hot. We are hoping that the solar arms, plus roll up sides, will be enough. Boy, it is hard to believe that this is where we started a little over three years ago. We don't even use that little house anymore, lol!

New field plowed for 2007

We have also plowed down another 2 acre strip to bring into production next year. While that may seem like a lot for the scale we are on, we will also be trying to rotate out some older strips next year. The idea has been to do four years of veggie production on a strip, and then two years off in intensive cover cropping. Our first year, we had a 1/2 acre strip to work with, and next year we will be taking that out of production. So next year, we should have about 4.5 acres to work with altogether. Note: I wish I had gotten a cover crop down on this new strip for winter, but alas, we only finished discing it out the week before last week, and the ground will be frozen by next week. Oh well. It doesn't always all work out perfectly.

Holy Guacamole!

Welcome Times Argus and Rutland Herald readers!

UPDATE: So we went out and got a hard copy of the Times Argus paper (we are too far north for our local general store to have the Rutland Herald). The Times Argus article is D1 (the local/regional section), above the fold with the picture of us from the About Us page. There is also a teaser at the top of A1 that reads, "Farmers bring the Good Life to cyberspace D1". Pretty wild stuff. We knew this article was coming, but didn't know it would get prominent treatment on a Sunday. The clock is running on our 15 minutes of fame!

As this season winds down we are already thinking about next year. And we could use your help generating ideas for what to grow in 2007.

What we are trying to do here is all about organic, local, freshness, and taste, taste, taste. All those things go together in our minds. Our organic practices, which include compost, cover crops and rotations, result in building soil health, which leads to better taste. For example, spinach grown in a well balanced, rotated, fertile field tastes much better than spinach grown in the same field year after year with processed fertilizer. And most of our veggies get to market within 24 hours of harvesting, which means less loss of nutrients, and more taste.

Since we are so local to our markets, we also don't have to worry about shipping, and we are also able to pick the best varieties for taste, not for shelf life, or anything else.

So what we are looking for are great tasting things to grow. What we have tried to do over the past few years is develop some interesting crops for taste: salad turnips and new potatoes in the spring; sungolds, charentais melons, and brandywine tomatoes in the summer; delicata squash and fall frosted carrots in autumn.

But we need some new taste-based ideas for next year. So far we have gotten a bunch of great suggestions from CSAers, customers, friends, and neighbors. Those suggestions include northern hardy kiwis, an italian variety of summer squash, black Egyptian beets, long English cucumbers for the greenhouse, berries of every sort, and basil, basil, basil.

If you have any ideas, unique varieties, or favorite garden tastes, we would love to hear about them, either in the comments below or by email. Not evey suggestion is going to be something that would make sense on our scale, but consider this an open invitation to make suggestions over the course of this winter. After all, part of the fun of growing stuff is poring over seed catalogs in front of the woodstove, and imagining, "This year, the xyz will be perfect . . ."

Thanks!

Cornelia showing Waverly how to plant garlic

This week is our last week of CSA. And this Saturday will probably be our last farmer's market. It has been getting cold (some 20s at night), and our field inventory is starting to run down. We will still have carrots and broccoli and onions and maybe some spinach for a few more weeks, but we will mostly sell those to the coop, or through our stand, or to the school in Peacham.

But it is moving from early fall to mid-late fall. A lot of the leaves are already down, the bow hunters are out in the trees, and it is getting dark early. Time to wrap things up a bit. But only three more months until we start tomato seedlings for the greenhouses again!

Some photos from the second to last Danville market.