We are so happy to welcome all of you to our 2022 CSA! We have lots of returning members, some brand new members, and some members who go way back with us. These folks started with Red Wagon way back in 2007 when Wyatt and I still had a farm stand at 95th & Arapahoe in Lafayette. We closed that down in 2012 a moved everything to Boulder and Longmont. Now 10 years later we’re back in Lafayette at Thomas Open Space farm and I love the fact that some of our original members are moving back to Lafayette with us!

It feels like the last few seasons have been very challenging at the farm (and for everybody in general!) But first some good news…we were all biting our nails over the weekend while waiting to see what damage the snowstorm would bring. Even though we got a few inches of snow, almost everything survived and most crops only suffered mild damage.

The cucumbers look sort of ugly after being snowed on, but hopefully they’ll grow through it!

A few of the leaves on the potato plants died.

We have come to love our caterpillar tunnels more and more. These are temporary structures that protect our crops from bad weather and keep it really toasty inside to let us have some crops ready earlier in the season. In this photo Wyatt is checking on the zucchini plants in one of the tunnels. Look how huge the plants are! We should have zucchini ready for you in a few weeks.

We’ve been anxious about irrigation water for a while now. The snow pack looked good this winter but then we had one of the driest Aprils on record. Fortunately we have irrigation ponds at two of our locations so we were able to do some irrigation out of them. But Wyatt had to pump the water almost down to the level where our pumps could not pull anymore water out of the ponds. Fortunately, we do have irrigation water at Thomas Open Space farm in Lafayette so we planted a lot more there this spring than we had originally planned to. Our irrigation ditches have finally turned on and the moisture we received over the weekend will help. But the parched ground soaked up a lot of the water and all the reservoirs still need to fill. Hopefully we’ll continue to get some rain. (But no more snow please!)

We’re still desperately short staffed. I thought that surely things would be better than 2021…but not so far. Fortunately the small crew we have this year is fantastic and we’re getting a lot done even with so few people. I’m glad some of you got to meet them when you came out to our farm earlier in May.

Thank you all so much for trusting us to feed you this summer! We’re looking forward to seeing you every week.

With gratitude,
Amy