Author: Amy

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.

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

I love our Winter CSA so much! I look forward to our pickups every week! It’s not the same crazy hectic pace as we have at the farm during the summer so I get to actually be at every pickup and have time to talk to all of you. It’s nice to get to know you a bit better and also give you the opportunity to ask us questions. I know that more than one of you has gotten an explanation of how our entire farm works from Wyatt–all in under 5 minutes! And we really feel the love during the winter! It’s hard to get great vegetables this time of year and it’s so gratifying to hear how much you look forward to them each week–especially the greens.

Kai, Jenny, and Mackenzie have done a great job of harvesting and packing everything for you each week. There aren’t many jobs where you stand outside in your winter coveralls in  freezing temperatures bunching chard and kale all day! They also did a great job of helping Wyatt get everything planted in the caterpillar tunnels and greenhouse last fall so that we would have fresh greens all the way through January.

Thank you so much for being a part of this and brightening my Thursday each week! It feels like a huge accomplishment to have vegetables for you this far into the winter. Wyatt is already ordering seeds and we’re planning what to have for your first shares in May. See you then!

~Amy

We are excited to welcome you all to our second Winter CSA! To be honest, we started our first Winter CSA in 2020 out of desperation because of the pandemic. It was such a strange year for all of us and it was certainly not a “normal” year on the farm so we had to come up with an additional source of income for the year. It was sort of a last-minute decision to try it and we weren’t able to put that much planning into it, but it turned out to be a huge success! Our Winter CSA was 7 weeks long last year and ended in mid December. This year we intentionally planned to do it again and increased the length to 13 weeks and we plan to feed you all until the end of January!

We’ve planned a lot of crops for our Winter CSA and in the last month we’ve been building caterpillar tunnels. They’re like an unheated mini greenhouse. They help give the crops a little more heat and also protect them from our winter winds! We also tuck the crops under a kind of blanket inside the tunnels to give them an extra bit of protection. We’re looking forward to feeding you with all of these cold-weather crops we’ve grown with care!

Amy

Here we are at the end of another CSA season! It feels like a real accomplishment that we were able to feed our CSA members for all 23 weeks of the season. I thought 2020 was a challenging year, but I think 2021 has been even harder. If you can remember all the way back to the spring, we had weeks and weeks of rain and we were really far behind in planting because it was just too muddy to get into the fields. Then we had to struggle with the labor shortage that so many other businesses had to navigate. We usually have a farm crew of about 20 people and this year we had just 15 people. I don’t know how they pulled off all the farm work each week and got food to all of our CSA members–thank you to everyone on the crew! I know everyone is exhausted from putting in such a hard season.

We are so thankful to you–all of our CSA members. Your commitment to our farm makes it possible for us to get through each season. It makes it possible for us to keep growing food for you year after year. Farming is challenging for anyone who does it for a living, but knowing we have a home for all of the food we grow takes one huge challenge out of keeping our farm going.

We can only hope that 2022 is a little less bumpy for all of us! Have a great winter and we will look forward to seeing you in the spring!

Amy

We are excited to announce our 2021/2022 Winter CSA! Click here to join.

Details:

• Pickups will be at Red Wagon Farm at 7694 N 63rd St, Niwot on Thursdays from 3-6 pm.
• Our winter Veggie Share is $39 per week.
• We are offering weekly and biweekly shares. (see biweekly schedule below)
• There will be a total of 13 weeks of pickups from 10/28/21 to 1/27/22.

Here are the possible crops we will have (depending on weather):

• Greens: kale, chard, collards, arugula, spinach, bok choi, lettuce
• Roots: carrots, beets, rutabagas, turnips, potatoes, winter radishes, parsnips, sunchokes
• Cabbage
• Winter squash
• Onions, garlic, leeks, scallions

Pickup dates:
Biweekly    Date
A                 10/28/21
B                 11/4/21
A                 11/11/21
B                 11/18/21
A                 11/23/21 (Tuesday pickup Thanksgiving week)
B                 12/2/21
A                 12/9/21
B                 12/16/21
A                 12/23/21 – no pickup
Biweekly A members will choose to pickup on 12/16 or 12/30 instead of 12/23.
B                 12/30/21
A                 1/6/22
B                 1/13/22
A                 1/20/22
B                 1/27/22

Click here to join now!
Email csa@redwagonfarmboulder.com with questions.

I thought 2020 was a tough year at the farm but so far 2021 has been much more difficult here! Between the very cold, wet spring and a nationwide labor shortage, we have had a hard time during our busy spring planting season. We are short staffed and only have about 75% of the crew that we need. And the farm crew has only been working 2-3 days per week because of all the rain.

Fortunately, Wyatt and the farm crew were able to get a lot of the cool season crops planted in March and early April. But many of those crops are several weeks behind because it’s been so cold and cloudy. They put in thousands of lettuce plants that should be ready now but won’t be ready for a few more weeks. The same is true for bok choi, napa cabbage, turnips, radishes, chard, kale, and collards. We have a lot of spinach planted, but spinach is sensitive to being over-watered and many of our spinach plants have turned yellow.

The very wet spring will have an impact in July and we might be low on crops to harvest then. We plant a lot of crops in late April and early May that are usually ready in July. It is too hot for greens like lettuce and spinach in July so we count on other crops that can take the summer heat. Wyatt says we had 2,000 cabbage plants and 3,000 broccoli and cauliflower plants in our greenhouse that we had to put in the compost pile. Our fields have to be dry enough to prepare the soil and plant the transplants. We couldn’t do that with all the rain and mud. By mid-May all the cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower starts in our greenhouse had gotten too big for their pots and were unusable. If we were to start new plants in our greenhouse now, they wouldn’t be ready until August.

There is some good news for the crops in our fields, though. We use greenhouses and caterpillar tunnels to get some summer crops started early. We have over 1,000 tomato plants that are already flowering and should give us tomatoes sometime in July. We also have 400 zucchini plants in the tunnels that are already flowering. And we were able to get in a planting of green beans and two plantings of sweet corn that will be ready mid-summer. 

On Monday I thought I might have to also report that our farm was flattened by a hail storm! Fortunately, we did not get any hail (only a ton of rain) at our farm on 63rd Street. We did get some hail at our farm on Valmont Road and the plants suffered some damage, but Wyatt thinks it’s not enough damage to kill the plants and that they will mostly recover.

Wow that feels like a lot! This is why we count so much on you, our CSA members! I know that we will almost certainly be able to pull out of this and have a good summer with plenty of crops to harvest. In 18 seasons of farming we’ve always made it through weather disasters–including the 2013 flood. Thank you so much and we look forward to seeing all of you in the next few weeks as our CSA pickups get started!

Amy