Amy and Wyatt our first season. Look at those baby faces!
We are entering our 20th season here at Red Wagon Farm! I don’t think I could have imagined that we’d be where we are now way back when we started our first season in 2004. I tell everybody that farming and gardening are all about trial and error. We’ve made a lot of errors! But Wyatt and I have always tried to learn from our farming mistakes so we can get better each season.
We started out by selling veggies at various farmers’ markets, having a farm stand in Lafayette, and selling our veggies to local restaurants. We waited a few years to start our CSA because Wyatt and I wanted to be confident that we could actually give our members a full season’s worth of veggies. So far we’ve never fallen short! Sometimes we’ve given out small shares for a few weeks due to challenges like hail storms or the flood in 2013. But we’ve always been able to make up for it with extra produce later in the season. We have a handful of CSA members who’ve been with us ever since our first year in 2007. We are so grateful to those members for their support all these years! It’s also been so nice to get to know them and see their families grow.
Red Wagon’s signature mix of cherry tomatoes.
We are always trying new varieties for each type of vegetable we grow–even things like zucchini and lettuce. Wyatt spends many days each winter pouring over the seed catalogs to pick out new varieties to grow the next season. He looks for varieties to try that might have great flavor, or better disease resistance, or different days to maturity. One of my proudest successes is our mix of cherry tomatoes. When people tell us our cherry tomatoes taste like candy, I tell them that’s two decades worth of us trying different varieties to find the best tasting ones!
Javier occasionally gets to bring his little helpers to the farm with him when they have a day off school.
Wyatt and I have had a lot of help to get Red Wagon this far. My best guess is that we’ve had about 800 employees over the years. A few of those people have stayed at Red Wagon for many years. I can’t even remember how long Javier as been at Red Wagon. It has to be 13 or 14 years! Javier grew up on his family farm in Mexico and I tell people that Javier can do anything! He does a lot of the large-scale work at the farm like plowing the fields in the spring, hilling the potatoes in the summer, or using the tractor to cultivate the winter squash. He also spends a lot of time fixing the farm equipment. There are a lot of pieces of machinery that need maintenance and repairs here!
Here’s Mo making our wedding dinner!
Mo has also been at Red Wagon for a long time. It has to be close to 15 years. The easiest way to describe Mo is that she loves to feed people! She started out by working in the fields at Red Wagon. She’s managed the CSA pickup at our farm on N 63rd Street ever since our first year of having a pickup here in 2012. She’s also been writing our recipe blog for 10 or 12 years. I love the meals that Mo creates for her blog posts. She makes approachable dishes with a “use what you have” attitude. Her recipes often give directions that say things like “use whatever greens you got this week in your CSA share”. Her photos give you a great idea of all the steps you’ll take to prepare your meal. (Although I confess that Wyatt is the one who actually cooks all those meals in our house. I just do the eating!) Plus the flavors practically pour out of her photos! When Wyatt and I got married I asked Mo if she would make our wedding dinner. I think that sums up how much I love Mo’s cooking!
Kai is able to keep smiling through almost whatever chaos the farm brings for the day!
Kai hasn’t been at Red Wagon quite as long–this is her fifth season. Many of you know her from being our CSA manager for three years. She started bringing her baby, Ash, to work with her last summer just a few weeks after he was born. It wasn’t practical to load him into the CSA truck with her every afternoon so she started orchestrating things at the farm from her post in the “barn” at our new location at Thomas Open Space in Lafayette. Her “we’ll make it happen!” attitude is what makes it so our veggies get out the door and to your CSA pickup each day.
We’re so happy to be starting another season at Red Wagon and we’re looking forward to feeding all of your families for another season!
With gratitude,
Amy
Red Wagon Farm 