For the next couple of weeks, you’ll see a donation can at your CSA pickup. Just a dollar or two will make a difference!
Tapias de Santra Cruz is an impoverished agricultural town in the central Mexican state of Zacatecas with a population of 1,400. Red Wagon has had a long relationship with Tapias. If you’ve been with Red Wagon for a while, you’ve surely met Javier who has overseen growing operations here for the last 15 years. Tapias is Javier’s hometown. In the past few years Red Wagon has struggled with the shortage of qualified agricultural workers. Last year Javier came through for us and found a few friends and family members from Tapias who were willing to come to Colorado on work visas and work at Red Wagon. This year we have 6 people from Tapias working in our fields!
We are now trying to help with a fundraiser for the church in Tapias. The church is the center of this small community. Among many other things, it acts as a safety net and performs charitable work for residents in the community.
The Reina de Tapias de Santa Cruz is a young woman who spends a year acting as the ambassador for Tapias and is responsible for fundraising for the church and the community. Javier’s daughter, Andrea, is a contestant to be the next Reina of Tapias. We are trying to help Andrea raise money to provide for her family and community in Tapias. We hope you’ll join us!
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.
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.
Onion harvest
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!
We are very happy to be starting another CSA season! It has been a busy spring at our farm. The weather has been beautiful but that means things have been non-stop. No rain days for us! We’ve planted the first succession of the early season crops – radishes, peas, lettuce and all the other greens, and a whole bunch more. And most of the summer crops have been transplanted as well – tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, zucchini. We’re still working on things like melons and winter squash but those will be planted very soon. It’s an exciting time of year!
There are a few hundred lettuce heads that are almost ready!
So much of our farm is planned around our CSA members. Wyatt does his crop plan for the entire season based on making sure we have a good mix of veggies to give you each week. I love the CSA model partly because we know how much to plant and at harvest time we know exactly how much we need with no waste. And for many of the crops you take them home within hours of harvest so they are almost as fresh as picking them from your backyard garden.
Our CSA members are the backbone of our farm. You give us stability and shower us with your gratitude. Farming is hard. There’s no other way to put it. We appreciate every one of you for making Red Wagon possible!
Welcome Winter CSA members! We are happy to get started with our 4th year of our Winter CSA! I always say that our CSA members are the foundation of our farm. Red Wagon would simply not exist without our CSA. But our Winter CSA members take it to a whole other level! You are the ones who are truly committed to supporting small-scale agriculture and our local food system.
We try really hard to give you a good assortment of vegetables to feed you for a lot of the winter. I think we do a pretty good job with this! I want to try here to explain one of the many ways our Winter CSA members support our farm in return.
The main growing season in Colorado is about seven months. Eight months if you’re being generous. It is really hard to get through the other four or five months when you’re not producing and selling much. For a number of years we’ve been selling storage crops to restaurants over the winter (mostly roots and winter squash). That was just barely enough to pay our basic farm expenses and keep one or two people employed part time. That meant that we could only hope to keep our best crew members for a season or two–maybe three if we were really lucky. Not many people can make it for 4-5 months each year without income. And it gets old fast to spend your winters at a job that you’re not very excited about.
Like many things, our Winter CSA was born out of the pandemic and our need to reinvent ourselves during such crazy times. It turns out that it is a great fit for us! Our Winter CSA hasn’t completely fixed the many challenges of having a seasonal business. But it’s gone a long way towards giving a few people stable employment at Red Wagon! You are the ones who’ve made this happen!
The pace of things at our farm is less hectic this time of year and I’m able to spend more time at our CSA pickups. I’m looking forward to seeing you!
We are wrapping up our 20th season at Red Wagon. Wow! Every season has successes and failures. Our labor problems were very challenging again this year. The cucumber beetles got to our crop and ruined most of it. We had torrential rain storms that made it almost impossible to plant things in the spring. Wyatt planted carrots 2 or 3 times only to have a deluge within a day or two that washed out all the carrot seeds. We did learn one valuable trick with all the rain…the fields were way too wet to plant our winter squash seeds on June 1 and there wasn’t much prospect for the fields to dry out. So we started a few thousand winter squash plants in our greenhouse and transplanted them out at the end of June. This felt like a crazy thing to do but it worked really well! It was a lot easier to cultivate the plants and they had higher yields than normal. We’ll definitely try that again next year. The onion plants were damaged by snow in April and never really recovered. But the shallots and leeks did great! The list of successes and failures goes on and on. And no two seasons are ever the same!
Through it all it is our CSA members that make it possible for us to have a farm. You show up reliably week after week–and year after year for many of you! That stability is one of the reasons our CSA members provide so much support for us. I’m tired and my brain is foggy so I won’t try to write down all the many reasons our CSA members keep our farm going. But ask me next time you see me!
I hope you’re all staying cool with the return of the 90s (and whew–we’re looking at 100 soon).
Two of my personal favorites are in full swing right now: cantaloupe and fire roasted peppers. I thought I truly disliked melon (you know, the tasteless orange and green chunks in restaurant fruit salad??), until I tasted the Red Wagon cantaloupe! Now, I’m head over heels for it.
And on my late nights when I don’t have energy to make a fancy spread (like fried green tomatoes and an eggplant gratin), I like to smother roasted Anaheims in whatever cheese I have on hand and call it a meal. I’m always up for hearing your ideas, too. Aside from Mo’s phenomenal food blog, I’ve gotten some incredible recipes from some of you, too!
Here is what we hope to bring you during week 14:
Regular Share
1 – Roasted Peppers
2 – Bell Peppers
3 – Eggplant or Tomatillos
4 – Melons or Spicy Peppers
5 – Zucchini, Cucumbers, or Green Tomatoes
6 – Onions
7 – Kale or Collards
8 – Tomatoes
Large Share Additions
Cauliflower
Double Tomato Share
Choose 2 from Zone 4
So far it has been a cold, wet start to the growing season. Way too wet! The Daily Camera says that Longmont has received 14.26″ of rain through June 20 as opposed to the average of 7.56″. And there was a day about two weeks ago when we got 2″ of rain at our farm on 63rd St!
The weather has caused some of our crops to be behind and it has also caused a few crop failures. One of the biggest problems with too much rain is that we can’t get into our fields when they are muddy. The tractors compact the soil when it is too wet. We also can’t use our seeders because the wet soil sticks to the seeders. And the seeds would rot anyway in wet soil.
Speaking of rotting due to wet and cold…our sugar snap pea seeds rotted this year. We planted them on time in March but the soil conditions weren’t right for the seeds to germinate so they rotted. I’m pretty sure this is the first time we’ve lost our sugar snap peas in the 20 seasons we’ve been farming. I know it is a huge disappointment as they are one of the highlights of the early spring crops!
Fava Beans
We always plant the fava bean seeds in February and you’ll start seeing these at CSA pickups this week. The plants were established enough to make it through by the time all the rain started to hit.
We plant a lot of our crops on plastic agricultural mulch and that is what has saved us. The mulch keeps the soil from turning into mud when it’s this wet. It also heats up the soil and helps protect against the cold weather. There are many other virtues of using mulch. We would not be able to grow the wide variety of crops that we have without using mulch!
One of the challenges with agricultural mulch is that you have to have the right soil moisture to be able to lay the mulch with the tractor. Fortunately we had a few days here and there when we were able to lay a lot of mulch. (Thanks for working so hard to make it happen, Javier!)
We had a few dry gaps during all that rain and were able to put in a lot of our spring transplants: kale, chard, collards, broccoli, cauliflower, bok choi, celeriac, celery, leeks, and onions. We lost a lot of our onions due to very cold weather around April 15. We will still have some onions but the rest of these crops are a little bit behind but are looking pretty good.
We were also able to get our summer crops transplanted: tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, tomatillos, zucchini, cucumbers, and melons. They’re a little bit behind but they’re all doing well and we should start seeing them before too long.
Tomatoes in Caterpillar Tunnels
A few years ago we decided to start growing the majority of our tomatoes in caterpillar tunnels. They really save us in challenging weather years like this one! Regardless of the weather, we get higher yields and nicer quality tomatoes out of the tunnels. And they protect against hail. We are able to do a good job of pruning the tomatoes and using the overhead supports to trellis the plants. Each year I tell our crew that if they do a good job trellising the tomatoes they’ll actually have a crop that they can harvest while standing up!
We currently have 6 caterpillar tunnels in the field–each about 100 feet long. I’d love to see us using more because they help many of the crops do better. Easy for me to say! I’m not the one who has to spend all the time and energy to build them each year! They are portable which has advantages in terms of crop rotation. So we move them to a new location each year and spend a lot of time putting them up and taking them down.
Caterpillar tunnels at sunset
We are really struggling with beets and carrots due to the rain and cold. It is especially hard to get carrot seeds to germinate even in the best weather. They have to be planted close to the soil surface, they need consistent soil moisture. and they take about 14 days to put out roots that keep them alive anchor them in to the soil. Wyatt has planted carrot seeds a few times already this year only to have a huge rain storms wash away all the seeds a few days later. We’ll keep trying!
One of the crazy things we’re doing is starting our winter squash seeds in our greenhouse. Wyatt would normally plant the seeds in the field around June 1 but we were still getting a ton of rain then. Planting the seeds in the greenhouse buys us a few weeks as we let the seeds get started in a protected environment. We’re hoping to start transplanting thousands of winter squash plants into our fields later this week.
Winter squash seedlings in the greenhouse
Every year on a farm has good and bad. Last year the spring was really hot and dry. This year we’ve been dealing with cold and wet. We have our failures every year, but so far we’ve always had lots of successes as well! Thanks for sticking with us on this crazy journey of farming on Colorado’s Front Range!
For the next couple of weeks, you’ll see a donation can at your CSA pickup. Just a dollar or two will make a difference!
