Waltham Fields Community Farm |
CSA NEWSLETTER |
Preseason 2013   |
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Dear Shareholders,
Welcome to the CSA at Waltham Fields Community Farm! Whether it's your first season or your fifteenth, we are all so excited to see you on the farm in a couple of weeks! Spring has been good to us this year on the farm, and crops are looking beautiful as we head into our busiest planting weeks of the season.
Read on for more information about CSA pickups, our new partnership with Farmers To You, and other happenings on the farm this spring. |
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 CSA PICKUPS BEGIN!
Tuesday, June 11, 2:30-7:30 PM
Thursday, June 13, 2:30-7:30 PM
Saturday, June 15, 9 AM-1 PM
Remember, if you're a weekday-only shareholder, please pick up your share on Tuesday or Thursday only. In general, if you were a shareholder starting in 2010 or before, you have the flexibility to pick up any day of the week; shareholders who signed up in 2011 or later are weekday-pickup only. Not sure? Ask us!
All shareholders are welcome to pick-your-own anytime during daylight hours. Please check the PYO white board for a map and a list of crops and amounts to pick. Please be respectful of listed crops and amounts to ensure that there is enough for all!
If you are splitting a share, please remember that you need to pick up the whole share at once each week. You'll need to coordinate with your share partner to figure out how to divide the share up.
Remember that if you still owe money for your CSA share or membership, all balances are due June 1. Not sure what you owe? Ask us!
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MEET YOUR FARMERS AND TOUR THE FARM!
WHEN: Friday, May 31, 4-6 PM
WHERE: Waltham Fields Community Farm, 240 Beaver Street, Waltham. Meet at the barn.
WHO: Our farmers: Amanda, Erinn, Dan, Sutton, Zannah... and YOU!
WHAT: We'll answer any questions you have about WFCF and our CSA, and take a tour of the fields at the UMass Field Station with our farmers.
BRING: Friends, children, well-behaved pets on leashes, questions for your farmers, a picnic to eat afterwards if you want, and sturdy shoes to walk around the farm.
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FARMERS TO YOU
Waltham Fields Community Farm is excited to begin a partnership with Farmers To You, a unique company that works with Vermont farmers and artisan food producers to bring delicious regional products to Boston-area consumers. WFCF shareholders can pick up a weekly order of some of New England's finest cheeses, eggs, dairy products, and pantry goods and other goodies at the same time as you pick up your CSA vegetables. You'll go home with all the makings for your week's meals -- all regional, and all in one stop!
FTY pickups will begin as soon as 25 families have signed up.
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NOTES FROM THE FIELD: SPRING ON THE FARM
For many people in New England, spring is the most joyful time of the year. It's a time of rebirth, a spell of blooming, a return to verdant beauty after a season of stark simplicity. After winter, many of us are yearning to eat ice cream, have a picnic in the sunshine, or simply shed layers and appear in the world less muffled, laid bare.
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| Greenhouse seeding plan, mid-April |
For farmers, it's a little more complicated than that. Spring is a sea change in our sleepy winter state, the cozy time when our farm fields are perfect in our imaginations and our main tasks are selecting varieties from the multicolored, appetizing pages of seed catalogs, planning what new tools to buy and sprucing up our fleet of equipment for the upcoming season. Spring drags us kicking and screaming into the lengthening days, blinking like woodchucks on Ground Hog Day and cringing at the sight of our shadows, the meaning of which is clear: Get To Work.
Don't get me wrong. Growing food is work we love. It is work that we have chosen (or that chose us) and that we feel unendingly fortunate to choose again each spring. It's just that spring is so unpredictable, so up and down, and our moods, tasks, and physical bodies are yanked so abruptly from winter's comfortable tranquility into spring, that capricious trickster of a season. One day it's a balmy 70 degrees out, crops are growing, birds are singing, and you are feeling like you might finally have this spring thing down. Then you open up your tractor to change the hydraulic fluid and four large pieces of metal fall out into your hand. This is not a good thing. Your heart sinks. Your pulse rises. The beautiful day and all your long-term plans are forgotten in a new moment of shifting priorities, crisis management, and alternate arrangements. The amazing fact that the tractor turns out not to be destroying itself from the inside out does not take away from the emotional turmoil of the few days in which it seemed like it might be.
Or you spend two days making, fertilizing, and laying expensive biodegradable, corn-based 'plastic' mulch on beds destined to be planted with onions and leeks. The beds look beautiful. You feel on top of it. Then, for the next two weeks, cold, dry winds blow from the west, the eas
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| Fava bean |
t, the north and the south until all the soil that had been piled up on the edges of the plastic blows away and, bed by bed, the mulch begins to peel away. You get out the shovel. A few feet here, half a bed there, and suddenly you are spending four or five hours a week shoveling soil out of the pathways to try to keep the mulch down until you can plant the crops. After a few weeks of this, with no sign of any lessening of the wind, you finally decide that the constant shoveling is not time well spent and pull up all the mulch by hand, leaving the soil exposed and the weeds growing, and all the time in between lost.
Or you are finishing up a morning of disking a beautiful new field for eggplant and peppers when suddenly you notice a strong and distinct smell of sugar, and just as suddenly, the intense feeling of liquid spraying all over the back of the tractor and the disk from the broken valve stem of the loaded rear tractor tire. As the tractor sinks on one side, you scramble to drive it to a safe spot, check the damage, and figure out what the substance from inside the tire is that is now all over your tractor, your disk, your field and your self. Your relief at the discovery that the tractor tire was loaded with a biodegradable molasse
This is spring on the farm.
For all its beauty, spring is a turbulent season, and some of that natural turbulence inevitably rubs off on the farm and the farmers. No wonder we sometimes want to go back to sleep for another six weeks.
But we are fortunate farmers. We have irrigation at all three of our fields, thanks to the brand-new system we just installed at the Lyman Estate. We have tremendous agricultural soils. We have financial security for the season, thanks to the up-front payments that you have all made for your CSA shares. We have a good, solid crop plan to grow all that food, enough space to grow it on, and a dedicated, thoughtful team of people who farm with us and support us in every possible way.
We are windburned, sunburned, achy as we start using those farming muscles again, tired to the bone (try wat
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| Zannah kills some weeds |
ching a movie with us some evening and you'll see), brain-fatigued, never happy with the weather, and yes: grateful. The moments when we sit in the greenhouse on a warm, rainy spring day, planting seeds that will grow into food that will nourish folks we love, or look back on a straight row of onions that volunteers planted with us, or take weary pride in a cultivating job well done, are the moments when spring's intensity, like the never-ending wind, lets up for a moment and lets our gratitude shine through.
Spring is touch-and-go, stop-and-start, back and forth, hot and cold, but its ultimate, inevitable trajectory is summer, and the harvest. We'll get there if we can get our spring sea-legs to ride out the rough patches, and keep our eye on the distant horizon. And every once in a while, pause in our racing back and forth from field to greenhouse, tractor to truck, to admire a newly blooming tree, the song of the oriole, the persistent call of the killdeer, the return of nettles and other tasty wild treats in the edges and borders of the fields. This is spring on the farm too, and we are lucky to be here again to see it.
Warmly,
Amanda, for the farm staff
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Waltham Fields Community Farm Staff
Claire Kozower, Executive Director
Kim Hunter, Education and Volunteer Coordinator
Deb Guttormsen, Admin and Tech Coordinator
Marla Rhodes, Development Assistant
Amanda Cather, Farm Manager
Erinn Roberts, Greenhouse and Field Manager
Dan Roberts, Field Manager
Sutton Kiplinger, Assistant Grower
Zannah Porter, Assistant Grower
Andy Scherer, Farmer
Hector Cruz, Maricela Escobar, Amber Carmer Sandager and Lauren Trotogott, Field Crew
Lizzie Callaghan, Sage Dumont, Maggie Haaland, Jesse Santosuosso, Weed Crew
Mikaela Burns, Andrea Coughlan, Matthew Crawford, Farm Educators
http://www.communityfarms.org
240 Beaver Street
Waltham, MA 02452
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