Author: Amy

If you’ve been with Red Wagon for a while you know what I’m going to say…the biggest thing supporting Red Wagon is our CSA! It might not be obvious why it helps us so much more to have you as a CSA member than to buy our vegetables some other way—like through another farm stand or market, at a local restaurant, or even at our own farm store! Don’t get me wrong, all of these things help but it’s our CSA members that keep us going.

Our CSA gives us gives us predictability. You join early in the year then we can make a plan for the whole season based on our CSA membership numbers. We can’t change the number of tomatoes we have in August if we decided to start too many or too few plants back in March. Farming is all about the long game and we need to be able to plan in order to be successful.

Our CSA also helps us to cover many of the upfront costs each year. There are a lot of expenses at the beginning of the season. So far this year we’ve spent over $90,000—and it isn’t even April yet! Some of the biggest expenses are seeds, organic fertilizers, irrigation water, payroll, rent, insurance, accounting, and fuel. You probably think of some of these when you think of a farm, but others are just part of having a business.

Joining our CSA is about more than getting your weekly veggies. (Although, that’s a pretty fantastic part!) You’re supporting your values. It is difficult to farm anywhere but Boulder County has felt especially challenging the past few years. One reason is that it is expensive to do anything here whether you’re trying to run a business or just cover your living expenses. We are never going to win if you are just comparing prices at our farm versus the grocery store. That’s where putting money towards your values (in the form of a CSA membership) comes in. Instead of supporting large corporate farms you’re supporting a small family farm where we focus on sustainable practices and ecosystem health. You’re helping to keep money in our local economy. You’re preserving agriculture in our community and helping to strengthen our local food system (we all remember how important local farms were during COVID!). You’re supporting us while we try to navigate the challenges of our changing climate. The last handful of years have brought more frequent wildfires, hail, extreme heat, early snowstorms, and drought. We wouldn’t be able to try to adjust to these new challenges without our CSA members facing the risks with us. Do you think about all of these wonderful things you’re supporting when you sign up for your CSA share? You should!

Many of you go the extra mile and contribute to one of our funds: Farm Worker Support (extra money for our farm workers), Sharing the Harvest (reduced-rate CSA shares), and Red Wagon Supporter (helping our farm to keep going!). I don’t acknowledge these contributions as frequently as I would like to. But my heart is truly touched by the fact that so many of you give just because we asked.

I also want to give a shout out to Boulder County Parks & Open Space and the City of Lafayette Open Space Division. Did you know that we are tenant farmers? Red Wagon does not own any of the land we farm. Over time it has become more profitable to sell land to developers than to use land to produce food. That’s part of why farms have disappeared from so many parts of our country. But we are all lucky to live in a place where our local government saw this coming and had a vision of preserving our open spaces. The Boulder County Parks & Open Space department was created just over 50 years ago. One of the main things they did was purchase open space to preserve for recreation and agriculture. Our farm on N 63^rd St is on one of those Boulder County Open Space properties! The City of Lafayette has also done its part to preserve local agriculture. They purchased Thomas Open Space about 20 years ago when a developer was planning to build about 100 homes on the site. The City had the vision to keep the land in agriculture and we are fortunate to be the current tenants. It’s now where we have a large part of our farm operation, including our farm store and largest CSA pickup. I don’t think Red Wagon would exist if it weren’t for the visionary people working for Boulder County and the City of Lafayette.

Wow! It really takes a village to support a family farm like ours. You might ask why we put so much effort into our farm given the challenges. There are a lot of reasons, but the biggest one is simple. Wyatt and I and the rest of our team love growing food for our community. We are all connected through food and it feels good to be an important part of what keeps our community together. I ran into my good friend, Anne Cure (of Cure Organic Farm), the other day. We were commiserating about the many challenges our farms have faced recently. I told Anne I was determined to redouble my efforts to keep our farm strong and moving in the right direction. I said this is not the time to have small farms disappear from our communities. Anne agreed and added that our farms just make so many people happy. That feels pretty great. Well said, Anne!

With gratitude,
Amy

The windstorm on Friday, December 19th was the worst we’ve had at our farm on 63rd Street in the 16 years we’ve lived here! The wind tore the roof off of one of our greenhouses. Fortunately the metal structure is mostly intact but we will have to re-sheet the greenhouse.

During January we normally harvest greens for our winter CSA from inside our greenhouse. It’s usually so cold by then that our greens that are growing outdoors or in our unheated tunnels are mostly dead. Unfortunately, the strong winds a few weeks ago beat up the tender greens like lettuce and bok choi that were inside the greenhouse. They might recover a bit. Or we might be short on greens in January. Fortunately, we have a lot of other veggies in storage so you won’t go hungry!

However, another unusual weather pattern might mean we’ll have plenty of greens in January after all. It’s been so mild out that our field greens still look beautiful! As of today there aren’t any really cold temperatures in the forecast. This is only the sixth year we’ve had a winter CSA and each year seems to bring it’s own surprises. We’ll see what happens in the next few weeks!

On July 11 in Lafayette we had the worst hail storm that I think Wyatt and I have seen in our 20+ years of farming in Boulder County. It can be difficult to tell how bad the damage is right after a hail storm. Some plants have strong root systems and will eventually grow through the hail damage, though with lower yields. With other crops you don’t see the full extent of the damage for several weeks. The hardest hit crops from this hail storm were our melons and our U-pick tomatoes (among other crops) and we will feel the effects of the hail storm for the rest of the season.

On July 12 the tomato plants looked damaged but they were fairly well established and we thought they would eventually recover. However, in the few weeks after the hail storm the plants were in a weakened state and therefore more susceptible to disease. Now over 75% of the tomato plants in our U-pick area are dead and it is a sad sight! There are still some tomatoes out there are we are holding U-pick events on Saturday mornings. But you really have to hunt for the tomatoes and it is not the bounty we had planned for! The good news is that the tomatoes we have for our CSA members are in caterpillar tunnels and were protected from the hail. That’s why we are still able to bring beautiful tomatoes to you every week! We are now leaning towards putting our whole U-pick area into tunnels next season. It just feels too risky to plant tomatoes outside.

Our melon plants were also badly damaged and we could see that right away. Before the storm the foliage was thick and lush. After the hail most of the leaves were stripped off and the plants were mostly stems. This was our first melon succession of the season and by far the largest. Usually we would be harvesting hundreds of melons from those plants right now. But this year we’re just getting a trickle off of the plants. We always plant a second and third melon succession but those are much smaller plantings. So the short (and sad) story is that there will be a small melon harvest this year.

Other crops were damaged but not as badly. The tender zucchinis that were on the plants during the storm all had hail marks. You might remember the beat up looking zucchini the following week! But the plants mostly recovered. The beet leaves were shredded and the beets aren’t forming the way they should. The pepper plants had each put out their first pepper or two. Those peppers were damaged and had to be removed from the plants. We had to wait a few weeks for the plants to recover and put out the next peppers which is why we don’t have any red ripe peppers yet—like Carmens.

We’ve used row cover for years. For a long time we mostly used a lighter weight row cover and much of that was shredded in this hail storm. But it did provide some protection for the plants that were under the cover. In recent years Wyatt has started using a heavier and more durable row cover. That paid off and there were hardly any holes in the heavier cover!

It’s more expensive and requires more work to build caterpillar tunnels every year or to use what feels like acres of row cover. But when we’re facing challenges like hail or cucumber beetle infestations we really see the benefit. We will likely keep adding more tunnels to our farm in future years.

Just a few minutes of hail can greatly impact our whole growing season. It’s a constant source of stress that you just have to live with as a farmer. The good news is that we plant crops all throughout the growing season. We still have a lot of beautiful veggies in the field and will be able to feed you for the months to come!

We are delighted that you joined us for our Winter CSA! It makes us happy to be able to feed you for a few extra months each year. I hope it has warmed up your winter to have local veggies to take home. All of the roasted veggies and soups. And the fresh greens that you just can’t get anywhere else this time of year.

Things are quieter at the farm in February. Wyatt and I will be busy with indoor work like ordering seeds and doing repairs on equipment. The rest of our crew takes most of the month off. But we start things up in the greenhouse the first week of March. The first crops we start are things like onions, kale, and tomatoes. We also do our first outdoor planting of peas, radishes, and arugula in the middle of March. There aren’t many months of the year that we don’t have something growing even though we’re in Colorado!

The crops we start growing in March are what we feed you when our Summer CSA starts in late May. You can join now and look forward to warmer weather and fresh veggies. That always helps to get me though the final cold, dark months of winter.

Our CSA members are the foundation of our farm. We plan everything around our CSA and you’re the ones that keep us going year after year. It is beyond challenging to keep a vegetable farm running and we have so much gratitude for all of your support in this journey.

Amy

It doesn’t feel like another farm season is coming to a close! It always goes by so fast! Yesterday I was at our CSA pickup in North Boulder. I saw many people that have been CSA members for 15+ years. I also met a brand new CSA member who just joined a few days ago and wanted to try our CSA for the very last pickup of the season. We have so much gratitude for all of these CSA members and everyone in between!

Farming is very hard. Growing vegetables is always challenging–weather, water, pests, and diseases, but it is so much more than that and it feels like it has gotten a lot harder in the last handful of years. The economics of farming, the chronic labor shortages and high turn-over rates, the rising cost of expenses, the time it takes to comply with an increasing number of  regulations. Wyatt and I have had to work more and more each year and are stretched pretty thin.

The thing that keeps us going is you! Our CSA members! We count on the consistency and stability of our CSA. Our members show up week after week and year after year. We’ve distributed our vegetables many different ways over the years: farmers’ markets, our farm store, to local restaurants, and more. While we value these opportunities and connections, they also have a lot of challenges. Our CSA is by far the thing that works best for us at Red Wagon.

We’ve also been working hard on building a great team at the farm. It’s still not easy but it feels like we’re finally getting somewhere this year. Many of you have seen Mo, Kai, and Brie at our CSA pickups. Javier has been with us in the field for many years and even brought a handful of his family members from Mexico this year to help with our labor shortage. We are really hoping they will return to work with us again next year! It has been a huge relief to know they will show up to work every day and do a great job. We also started our Working CSA Member program in 2021. It started as a desperate attempt to fill holes in our staff. We now have about 20 workshare members and half of them have been with us for multiple years. They are such a valuable part of our team!

I feel like I can never adequately express why our CSA members are so valuable to us–you might just have to take my word for it. But you really are the thing that keeps our farm going. We hope to keep feeding you for many years to come!

With gratitude,
Amy