CSA Farm

The Dead of Summer

Even the most established and experienced market and CSA farmers in the Austin and Central Texas areas are saying that this spring-summer season in our area has been the hardest that they have EVER seen. Jo, writes in the Angel Valley Farm Blog, “Like I’ve told countless customers at our two (farm) stands, this spring and summer have been the hardest two seasons (one extended season, really, when you get right down to it) we’ve experienced since we began farming 13 years ago. And Farmer Skip, at Green Gate Farms writes “After months of struggling to keep his vegetables alive, the farmer has cut the season short and plowed in most of his crops. The season has been as bad as 2009, maybe worse because he still hasn’t recovered from that ordeal…”

Back in January of this year, my husband and I decided this would be the year that I would retire from my high tech job (finally) and we would go ‘all in’ on our CSA farm business. I gave my two month notice and commenced planning for the transition to my new ‘job’. On the first of April we officially began our farm business. Ironically, it was in April that our current heat wave began. And our current drought had already started the previous fall and still continues. So it has been an extremely challenging and stressful beginning for us and our farming venture.

The good news is that we have been very successful with the production aspect of our business despite the unfavorable growing conditions. I am much more confident now in our ability to meet our production goals even when the weather does not cooperate. The bad news is that the cost in time, to keep the growing areas irrigated, and cash, to buy extra water for irrigation, has set us back substantially in our budget as well as our infrastructure expansion projects. However, there is no going back at this point. We can only move forward and have faith in ourselves and our business plan.

We are progressing with our planned projects, albeit at a slower pace than expected. We rented a tractor and tilled our expansion fields a couple of weeks ago and were pleased to see that we have an abundance of good, fertile soil in most of this area. Since we expect that heat and drought will continue to be the norm for us we are farming intensively in deep raised beds with super-enriched soil, covered with hoop houses. There is a great deal of up-front time and money investment in farming this way, but we have had such excellent success with our super-enriched, deep-dug, intensively planted beds for the past couple of months I am convinced we will see a sizable return on this investment in the future.

I have started loads of transplants; onions, leeks, pak choi, swiss chard, broccoli, collards, winter squash, pumpkins, and lettuce; which will be set out in these beds in next few weeks. I also started lots of tomatoes to grow in the greenhouse this fall and winter.

Meanwhile, the peppers, tomatoes, okras and basil that I put out early in July continue to do quite well considering the blistering heat that they have to endure every day.

There are even quite a number of blooms on the pepper plants, although I have not yet seen a pepper set on these plants yet. By fall we should be knee deep in ancho, sweet bell (red and green), jalapeno, and Anaheim peppers!

The okras and tomatoes are also doing pretty well.

I continue to be amazed by how well our summer crops continue to do. I wouldn’t say they are thriving, but they are producing steady, small harvests – enough that I have a couple of shares to sell or give away each week and still have plenty left over for us and the chickens.

The beans and shelling peas have responded splendidly to a light shade cover. In fact, the green beans are producing beans for the first time this summer! Finally!

Even the cucumbers continue to produce enough cukes that I put up several quarts of cucumber relish the other day and I still have enough cukes to put up several more quarts of bread and butter sweet pickles – yum.

I heard a rumor that we might get a cold front sometime next week….. I know, it is just a rumor, but I’ll take what I can get right now.

Oh yeah, our next door neighbor, a wonderful artist, completed our farm logo last week. I can’t wait to get it scanned and digitized so I took a picture of it so I could share it now.

Ciao for now.
Carol

© 2011 Lost Valley Gardens.