The End of a Season

Our season has come to an end. Thank you again for your investment and support this season. We’re relieved and grateful to have concluded a second CSA season, having acquired new knowledge, friends, and experiences along the way. We genuinely feel lucky to have the opportunity to attempt such a project and could not do it without you. Your final produce box from Week 20 included the following fresh options…

Purple Daikon Radish &/or Purple Top Turnips, Sweet Peppers, available Romaine Lettuces, Brassica microgreens, available Herbs, eggs and an autumn bouquet.

Mother Nature will always be stubborn. She’ll be reluctant to cooperate. She’ll be unpredictable. She’ll present new challenges every season. We have to remind ourselves about this independent variable. We will be surprised by something every season. Maybe it’ll take a lifetime to accept, but we’ll never master the garden because we are not the masters of it, she is. We had a better garden in 2022 than we did in 2021, but things went wrong. Some problems could have been prevented, some should have been prevented, some couldn’t have been avoided. We can have experiences, learn from experience, anticipate based on experience, but ultimately we need to learn to be comfortable with what may be the only thing guaranteed on our farm any given season: failure.

We don’t control how late the frost lifts in the spring or how early it settles in the fall. We can’t control if, when, or how much it will rain. We can’t even really control how well we can stick to or keep up with a crop plan week to week. But we can get a better sense of our abilities and limitations year to year. We can determine what worked and what didn’t. We can adjust, shift, and pivot. Our CSA program will be different next year than it was this year. If you’re interested in participating again, be on the lookout for email updates about changes for next year. Around Thanksgiving, we’ll open the new 2023 program up for renewals and around the new year, we’ll open up publicly to fill any remaining vacancies.

The following sections include conclusions we’ve gathered about different crop families and projects we’ve worked with at Morckel Meadows in 2022…

Brassicas

Broccoli, Cauliflower, Cabbage, Bok Choy, Kohlrabi, Radish, Turnip, Arugula, Kale, Collards, Mustards

The Brassicacae family includes dozens of cold hardy, cool season vegetable varieties that we never hesitate to include in our crop plan, but often struggle to grow, harvest, and present nicely. They’re valuable crops. They’re valuable in our personal diets, to our shareholder community, to potential commercial markets, and they’re undeniably attractive to the diversity of organisms cohabitating our woods, pastures, and garden beds. We once read that if a garden’s plants aren’t being nibbled-on by wildlife, the garden is not part of the surrounding ecosystem. While we genuinely believe in the approach that this ideal inspires and the thoughts that it provokes, we hope to do a better job keeping problematic pests away from our precious produce, while we encourage a balanced and restorative population of beneficial insect and animal life. As we continue to learn and improve as gardeners, we hope for fewer worms to pick off of our cabbage and broccoli, fewer flea beetles punching holes in our arugula, and fewer aphids congregating on our fall kale stalks.

Lettuces

Salanova, Romaine, Butterheads, Leaf Lettuces, Spring Mixes

The concept of “succession planting” is pretty critical for a successful homestead garden, especially when considering lettuce and leafy green production, and it becomes significantly more critical the more a garden scales up in size. If a crop like a head lettuce or salad mix doesn’t easily store or ripen, it’s ideally available and fresh all of the time. If the availability and maturity of the harvest is to be regular and consistent, the regularity and consistency of the planting must be likewise. In the late winter and early spring, when all there is to do is plant, it’s less difficult to manage a succession planting schedule. As responsibilities accrue throughout the summer and chores include not only planting but cultivating and harvesting as well, keeping up with that disciplined succession becomes challenging. So it is at our farm at least.

At our farm, the struggle to keep up with succession plantings in late spring and summer means impressive, uniform, delicious lettuce cuts in the spring with lettuce availability deteriorating in the summer. While lettuce availability had rebounded in the late summer and fall, the lack of consistency is disappointing regardless.

After two years gardening at this greater scale, we can conclude that while we ought to be proud and confident in our spring lettuce production, we have to better manage our time and resources as we’d like regular successions of consistent production through the summer and fall. We’re also considering moving away from bagged, loose-leaf lettuces altogether and focusing only on head lettuces- less plastic, less labor, less fuss.

Leafy Greens & Micros

Mustard Greens, Arugula, Kale, Collards, Swiss Chard, Spinach, Microgreens

When we first decided to expand our garden and livestock operation, from a backyard farm to something that could provide for dozens of families, we began with a family-sized six-month seasonal crop plan and multiplied it, like a recipe. We’ve always approached the garden and our yield expectations this way- how would we grow this for ourselves and how well can we scale that approach to production? This has led naturally and inevitably to quantity being valued over quality. A commercial grower operates strictly valuing quality products to present at a market, but our CSA has supported us to continue to operate more like subsistence homesteaders and less like commercial gardeners. We have been able to focus more on growing, and learning how better to grow, diverse nourishing food rather than pristine culinary produce. While in some respects this is a backwards way to run a business, it’s a wonderful way to learn how to grow wide varieties of food in your local climate, how to do it more efficiently, and maybe ultimately and by default- how to present a quality culinary product. This is our hope as our operations continue to evolve.

This may be most obvious with our salad greens, leafy greens, and micro crops. There was not much difference in value to us as homesteaders if our arugula had flea beetle bites in it. We liked it all the same and the extra steps involved in protecting and monitoring a pest-free crop were hard to justify for our own personal use. But the more bags of arugula that we package for other families, the more we’d like to present a higher quality baby green. Feeling finally comfortable with our ability to produce quantity, we feel we have more bandwidth and motivation to pursue quality. Next season, we’re enthusiastic about more uniform and solid baby greens, regular micro green harvests, predictably flavorful and appetizing salad mixes.

Roots

Beets, Carrots, Brassica roots & tubers

This may be the season when we’ve lost the “fear” of our soil. That’s a good way to put it. When we first arrived at our property, we had a soil test return discouraging, eye-opening poor results. This really was our initial motivation to put so much effort into regenerating our small patch’s ecosystem. This is why so much effort and attention has been put into rotating our livestock and organically amending our gardens- broadcasting life and fertility to revive and regenerate our soil.

The results by now are obviously positive. Everything grows faster and more noticeably. The soil is darker and spongier. It’s inviting and we no longer reluctantly plant into it. When we transplant a seedling, we know we are placing it where it can thrive. With the uncertainty of our farm’s potential deteriorating, we plant confidently.

Root vegetables teach a lot about soil condition and nutrition availability. Put simply, big luscious greens on a root vegetable mean plenty of nitrogen, big proportionate roots mean good levels of other micronutrients, and the uniformity of the roots can tell a good story about soil texture and appropriate plant spacing.

Some of our Turnips told an interesting story this spring: In areas where we heavily grazed chickens, we grew noteworthy Turnips. Their leaf tops were nearly three feet tall and deep green. The roots were oddly proportionate to the monster greens, nearly softball sized. The presence of the flock unsurprisingly brought plenty of available nitrogen to this area of the garden, but the birds unexpectedly provided an appropriate ratio of micro nutrients as well.

While this is the type of closed-loop self-sufficient manuring that we are all about, it is not without its drawbacks. The chickens promote soil microbiology and it gets busy. This can be a problem for our root vegetables that live in the soil amongst and exposed to the microbiology from which its thriving foliage so benefits. The roots can be just as attractive to the critters below ground as they are to the farmer that tugs at them above the soil. Here, we have another balancing act on the farm. We need to continue pursuing that sweet spot between natural, local nutrients and quality control.

Potatoes

Red cobblers, Yukon Golds, Kennebecs, Blue Adirondacks, Yams

Traditional Irish potatoes are easy to grow on our farm. Easy means little intervention, little fuss. All we have to do is put potatoes in the ground, keep the weeds away and hill the potato mounds up a few times, dig them up when appropriate. If we have the space to grow potatoes, we can expect a decent yield. What’s most important on our farm regarding potato production is preparation. We need to have beds clean and ready to be planted when the unpredictable seed potato or sweet potato slip delivery arrives. We’ve lost seed potato and sweet potato slip inventory in the past simply because we weren’t ready to plant them, or had too much else to do, when they arrived. The seed potato industry has been stressed and unreliable in the past few years and we ought to take this into consideration for our future crop plans. As long as we are prepared when the seed potatoes or slips arrive, we can generate a good crop.

Sweet Corn

For many of the crops on our small farm, selecting a variety or strategy that allows for an extended or lenient harvest window is important. If a strategy for growing a crop or a specific variety of the crop provides some flexibility as to when, how, or how long we can harvest, it will benefit our modest operation. With sweet corn, we can extend the harvest window either by succession planting the same corn variety for a number of weeks, or by planting multiple varieties with different harvest times all at once. If we sow this way, we can enjoy an ongoing harvest of sweet corn at its peak maturity for multiple. If we plant one variety all at once, we’ll have to harvest that variety strictly all at once, which is a much more intimidating feat.

We will continue to sow multiple varieties to be harvested during an extended harvest window in the summer. We will continue to prioritize the sweetest varieties available. Next season, we will select for varieties whose days to maturity are a little more spread out, so that our sweet corn harvest can last as long as possible and we can provide fresh ears harvested when they’re ideally ripe.

Nightshades

Cherry Tomatoes, Heirloom & Hybrid Tomatoes, Sweet Peppers, Hot Peppers, Eggplant, Potatoes, Okra

Our problems regarding pepper production are good ones to have. We don’t have any issues bringing pepper plants to maturity and we seem to always have more than we need. Tomatoes, on the other hand, have presented difficulties as we have scaled up. Last season, as we’ve often lamented, we poisoned a great many tomato plants with herbicide-infested barn litter. We like to think this was a mistake that we won’t easily repeat, and we managed to avoid making it again this season.

While we’ve always been particularly fond of medium-sized, pink slicer tomatoes, big juicy beefsteaks certainly made a case for themselves this season. We’ll always grow pink brandywine types on the farm, but we’ll likely save more space in the crop plan for overgrown beefsteaks in the future. We’d like to include more varieties of cherries and grapes next year as well, though our sun golds will remain a no-brainer.

This was our first season really paying attention to an eggplant crop and will continue to produce both traditional and fingerling varieties in future seasons.

Summer Squash

Zucchini, Yellow Courgettes, Delicata

Home gardeners know that growing Zucchini ought not to be a challenge. Usually, it’s a simple as planting a few seeds, keeping an eye on the patch, and rushing to harvest the fruit before they become baseball bats. After about two months, just in time, when you’re starting to get sick of Zucchini, the squash bugs, borers, and mildews overtake your plants and conclude the season. But this was the first year when we would have liked greater production before the pests and diseases had their way. It seems we can no longer approach summer squash so passively. We’ll be considering varieties and strategies that better manage the squash bugs and extend our zucchini harvest window in future seasons.

Winter Squash & Melons

Butternuts, Spaghetti Squash, Pumpkins, Melons

We’ve been stubbornly determined to create a modern three-sisters garden for a few years now where Winter Squashes and Melons, the third sister, are interplanted into a field of established corn and pole beans. We romanticize about incorporating permacultural ideas like this into our landscape- using traditional practices to get the most out of our land and create a symbiotic environment above and below the soil surface. While we’ve done a great job working with the first two sisters, incorporating that third girl has been problematic. We’ve struggled to grow melons and winter squashes this way. Managing the weeds on such a crowded patch can be complicated and unmanageable. We’ll be rethinking our approach to crops like watermelons, cantaloupe, muskmelons, and pumpkins moving forward.

Alliums

Scallions, White Onions, Red Onions, Yellow Onions, Shallots, Garlic

We think of Alliums- onions, garlic, shallots, leeks, and scallions, in a similar way to how we think of potatoes. If we can get these plants in the ground with more than enough space, keep the weeds down, and harvest at an appropriate time, we can share wonderful crops. They require little fuss once planted. Next year, we hope to improve our planting schedule so that it provides a more continuous harvest throughout the season- green onions and green garlic in the spring, garlic and onion bulb varieties throughout the summer, leeks and more green alliums in the fall.

Legumes

Peas, Beans, Peanuts

Producing peas and beans at a scale any larger than a family garden is a matter of labor availability. It is marginally more intense to plant 2 rows of peas rather than a single row, but the labor required to harvest two rows rather than one is substantial. Legumes don’t need a farmer to grow well, but they ultimately rely heavily on a farmer to yield productively. We will always grow peas and beans and we will likely always struggle to keep up with them. So it goes.

Cucumbers

We had issues this season with our Cucumber tunnel that we did not anticipate. Cucumbers have always been and easy crop. They grow well from direct seed, they don’t require a lot of irrigation, they’ll grow fruit as long as you give them something to climb. This year’s cucumber story is about denial and taking your eye off the ball. We had critters in our greenhouse chewing at young cucumber fruits and eventually chewing off the flowers altogether- we refused to believe it. We thought it would resolve itself and focused on other crops. We were at first in denial, then looked away. The problem didn’t resolve itself, the cucumbers didn’t recover, and we missed the opportunity to plant again. Issues with pests were a recurring theme this year and our cucumber tunnel was not spared.

Flowers

As we consider the garden space we wish to dedicate to ornamentals, we’re often tempted to reexamine/reinterpret who we are and what we are doing on our farm. Are we homesteaders or are we commercial growers? Is our product practical local nutrition, culinary ingredients, organic art? It’s all of the above, right? Maybe the practical, the culinary, and the artistic are the three legs to our stool. We don’t grow herbs for nutrition, we don’t grow potatoes for art’s sake, and we don’t grow cosmos for protein. We produce products for mind, body, and soul because that’s the necessary balance for shareholders, customers, and farmers alike. We’ve always thought of our farm’s main output product being calories, but ought not to favor practical nutrition over flavor, or even flavor over beauty. These variables have value and should be equally considered. We feel like we have a lot of potential as flower farmers and want to continue to learn just how to maximize our land’s shareable practical and aesthetic output.

Eggs

Our story of egg production is a relatable one about a young couple struggling to locate where to live between the ideal and the pragmatic. It’s not unlike the decisions we face when structuring a family or a society. It’s not an unfamiliar dilemma. As individuals or as a community, we attempt to balance the ideal and the practical, the progressive and the conservative, chaos and order.

We want the best for our chickens, but we also want the most from our chickens. We don’t want them to sleep in cages, but we don’t want them to sleep in trees either. We want them to have shelter, but we don’t want to shelter them. We don’t want to confine them, but given the choice between a comfortable coop with dedicated nest boxes and the nearby treeline, we hope they’ll be make wise use of the privileges available.

It’s isn’t simple to maintain this balance with the flock. Access to the natural world means exposure to the natural world. Access to wild forage means exposure to wild predators. We think this is the way the chicken wants to live and work hard to give them an ideal environment, but we continue to struggle to manage the natural world outside of the pasture’s boundaries.

Sheep

It was a great year for sheep. Our strict rotational grazing practices, mob grazing to broadcast and recycle nutrients, have improved our pasture quality greatly over the years. We’ll be keeping about a dozen ewes over the winter, many of whom are pregnant with next year’s lamb crop. Newborn lambs will be bouncing off the barn walls sooner rather than later. Do keep in touch and continue to follow our social media for cute lamb videos and other winter livestock updates.

We have 2022 lamb shares still available for anyone looking for bulk meat cuts for the freezer. If interested, please reach out and expect an investment between $300-$400 for a whole lamb.

Again, we are extremely grateful for all who have participated in our shareholder program. It is only with your support that we can pursue this unique lifestyle with its many lessons and blessings. Have a great fall and holiday season!

Erin & David