Hello CSA members! This week we hope to bring you: Egyptian walking onions, Easter egg radishes, green garlic, spinach, sorrel, and arugula. The large share will also get rhubarb, chives, and double spinach.
I am always filled with gratitude as our CSA begins. Thank you so much for trusting us to grow your vegetables this season. It is a big responsibility and Wyatt and I do not take it lightly. We really appreciate all you do to support our farm and I don’t think it would be possible for Red Wagon to exist without your support.
This year is a perfect example of why our CSA means so much to us. April 2013 has brought the most snow I have seen in the 17 years I have lived in Boulder County. It’s been great for our snowpack and irrigation water. But it really threw off the start to our farming season. Your financial support helped us get through April because we didn’t have as much to sell as usual at the farmers’ market. I’m not sure what the first few weeks of our CSA pickup will look like. We are a bit light on food in our fields because the snow put us behind. I am hopeful that we will be able to bring you all full-sized shares. If not, the abundant snowpack in the mountains means that we should be able to make it up to you later in the season. It is so helpful to have that kind of flexibility. Thank you!
We have two wonderful resources on our web page and I hope you will use them. The first is our CSA blog, written by Mo. She is more passionate about food than anybody I have ever met in my life. This really comes across in the recipes she writes for our blog. The second resource is an archive of the recipes Mo wrote last year. You can find them in the Recipes section of our web page and they are organized by crop. Be sure to look at these recipes the next time you come across a new vegetable in your CSA share.
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2012 was very dry in Colorado and we used up a lot of the water that was stored in the state’s reservoirs. The 2013 farm season started out looking pretty dire in March. We hadn’t gotten much snow to replenish our water supply. At the end of March the South Platte snowpack (where we get some of our irrigation water) was at 71% of normal. But then we had record-setting snow in April. By the end of April the snowpack had increased to 94% of normal. The snowpack is even higher with the May 1 snowstorm.
Rhubarb plants peaking though the snow.
What does all this snow and cold weather mean for our farm? There are some good things, some bad things, and some uncertainties.
The April snow has been a huge boost to our snowpack. Things look very good in terms of irrigation water availability for the summer. It is hard to express what a big deal this is for farms all over Boulder County and beyond.
It got down to 9°F in mid-April. This is the coldest it has been during April in the 10 years that we have been farming. The leaves of our garlic got singed by the cold. Garlic is very hardy and we’ve never seen this before. Our rhubarb also got killed back in April. The leaves have started to grow again, but the rhubarb will be a little behind.
Our garlic is recovering from cold April temps.
The snow also helped to protect some of our crops. We had a lot of things like spinach, lettuce, peas, and fava beans that we planted in March. The snow made a nice blanket to protect these crops from that 9° night in April. The plants probably would have suffered significant damage without the snow blanket to protect them.
The snow (along with row cover) provides a nice blanket for spinach.
The downside is that the snow, cold weather, and moisture have delayed our growing season substantially. We have some crops planted, but they haven’t really been growing while buried under snow or sitting at temperatures in the 30s. On wet days we can’t do any work in our fields. Our plowing and planting have been delayed by weeks. We just can’t plant into snow or mud. We would normally have 4 successions of spring crops planted by this time of year. These are crops like lettuce, arugula, spinach, radishes, turnips, etc. This year we only have 2 successions planted as of the beginning of May. We had 10 acres planted by this time last year, but now we only have 3 acres planted.
This is my boot getting sucked into the mud in one of our fields. You just can’t plant seeds into ankle-deep mud.This spinach planted on March 15 is just putting out its first true leaves. We would normally harvest this May 1, but it will be ready closer to the end of May this year.
Our farm workers have had a lot of snow days and missed working for most of April. It’s nice to have a snow day here and there, but these people are counting on their paychecks and I know it has been difficult financially. And the days the did get to work in April weren’t fun. The back-to-back snow storms made working conditions cold, wet, and muddy.
Harvesting spinach through snow is a cold, wet, messy job.
All that work we didn’t get to do in April didn’t just go away. It still needs to happen, so now we have 2 months’ worth of work to do in May. I keep telling our crew that they are in for a crazy few weeks!
Our sales at the farmers’ market are down by about 30% so far this season because we don’t have much to sell. We would usually have all kinds of crops by the beginning of May: spinach, lettuce, arugula, kale, mustard greens, green garlic, walking onions, radishes, turnips, and lots more. But so far this year we’ve pretty much just had over-wintered spinach.
By the last full week in April we thought we were in the clear. But then we got almost a foot of snow on May 1! We were a bit worried about some of the more tender crops that we had already planted. I was very happy on May 2 when I went out to our hoop house and saw that the tomato plants in there survived.
We were lucky that our tomato plants in the hoop house didn’t freeze.
And I almost couldn’t believe it when I checked our walls o’ water on May 2. We put out several hundred tomato plants on April 26. I thought for sure that they would have frozen in the May 1 storm. But they were toasty and happy when I peeked inside!
We plant tomatoes in several hundred walls o’ water in April.I thought for sure our tomato plants would freeze during the May 1 storm in our walls o’ water!
We would normally have things like our kale and chard transplants in the ground. And they would be almost ready to harvest. But we are just finally getting them planted this week. We planted things like fava beans, peas, and beets a few months ago. Fortunately they germinated and started growing, but then they sort of went into hibernation in April and just sat there. They are growing again, but they are now about a month behind.
We are worried about having killing frosts later than usual. The average date of the last frost in Boulder is May 15. But, we have been setting record lows and we are worried this trend might continue. I don’t know if this fear is rational or not. But the cold weather in April has us worried about cold weather in May.
So far this week is off to a good start. We have several thousand transplants to get in the ground. Cool, cloudy weather is perfect for transplanting as it reduces transplant shock. If the weather cooperates and we can get back on schedule in May, we should catch up to a normal growing season in June. Keep your fingers crossed!
