Category: Farm

This growing season has been a difficult one for Front Range farmers. We are still feeling the effects of the 6 weeks of rain from mid-April through May when we couldn’t get into our fields to plant. Thankfully we have been able to eek out enough food for our CSA shares each week. But we will see the effects of the difficult spring for the rest of this growing season.

I think the growing season has been even more difficult for fruit growers on the Western Slope of Colorado. I just finished reading this update from Ela Family Farms. In it they explain the particulars of why the weather was so hard on their fruit trees. There was an exceptionally cold night in April that killed almost all of the blossoms on their fruit trees. Then the rainy weeks that followed meant that the pollinating insects couldn’t get out to do their work on the small number of blossoms that remained. For those of you that don’t know the cycle of fruit production, the spring blossoms on the trees are pollinated and those pollinated blossoms later turn into fruit. One night of temperatures in the 20s at just the wrong time in the spring can kill all the blossoms and wipe out the fruit for an entire season.

As Steve Ela explains in his update, he still does not know what to expect in terms of fruit production for the season. Their harvests will be intermittent, so he can’t plan for labor to pick the fruit. Steve told us that he might have one variety of peaches that is productive, but then the next variety that should be ready has been lost for the season. Unfortunately, you can’t have skilled fruit pickers magically appear and then disappear as you need them. As with the rest of us, they need reliable work and can’t just work for a few days here and there. So the fruit growers might be faced with the sad circumstance of having a crop ready one week, but nobody available to harvest it.

We have worked with First Fruits Organic Farms (Paonia, CO) and Ela Family Farms (Hotchkiss, CO) since 2002. They have the highest quality organic fruit we can find in Colorado. We work with two fruit growers as a sort of hedge. If one has a crop failure for a particular fruit, the other will often have better luck. Unfortunately this year, both farms suffered from that very cold night in April. They have both told us that they will have fruit intermittently and will try hard to get it to us.

Last week were lucky enough to get some cherries from First Fruits–an unexpected surprise! They said they thought they would be able to get cherries to us again this week. But sadly, once they started picking for this weekend, they realized there weren’t enough cherries and many of them were damaged, so they don’t have anything to delivery to us. And if we had ordered enough cherries last week to get us through this week, they would all be moldy mush by now. They pick their fruit when it is ripe, which is what gives it that unbeatable flavor. The only downside is that the ripe fruit is more perishable, so we can’t order enough to get us through two weeks at a time. We will just have to take things week by week. That will be the sad theme for this season – unpredictable.

Wyatt and I have been thinking a lot about what to do with our Fruit Share this season. When there is a shortage of fruit, like this year, we can’t simply go to another farm to buy fruit because they are also short on fruit and need to supply their regular customers. We also don’t want to get low-quality fruit that may be under-ripe, bruised, or otherwise damaged. This has been our experience with many other fruit growers we have tried over the years.

We will do our best to fill our Fruit Share this season and hope for some happy surprises. In the meantime, Wyatt and I will evaluate the options if we fall short on fruit. And we will be thinking a lot about the families at First Fruits and Ela Farms. Steve Ela told us that he will likely get by this year, but they will need a good year next year in order to survive. Farming is risky work and we wish our friends on the Western Slope well as they endure this difficult season.

We try to communicate what we do on the farm to grow your food. In some ways it is simple in that we plant, water, weed, and harvest it. The complicated part is the planning and then the execution of the plan with constant changes to the plan due to ever changing conditions. The last six weeks have been the most challenging that we have ever experienced. It has been too wet to work in the fields with tractors for much of the spring planting season.

Normally we use May 15 as the frost-free date for spring and September 15 for the first frost in the fall. Many of the crops we grow cannot tolerate frost and need to be grown in between these two dates. We normally plant half the farm in the May 15 to June 15 time period. Around here it is usually dry for most of that time. The constant rain has made it so we could not plant very much during this critical time period. I managed to plant a little if it was even close to dry enough to plant. This week we got the tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and melons planted as well as winter squash. Both tractors ran all day for the last few days. We also hand-transplanted the Brussels sprouts, cabbage and cauliflower (we normally use our water-wheel transplanter for this job). We did not get the next planting of beets, carrots, or beans planted. There is only so much we can do in a day. Normally most of these crops would have been planted weeks ago and we would only have the winter squash left to plant and then successions of other crops (like carrots, beets, beans, and greens) to plant throughout the summer. It is supposed to start raining again tonight and the next few days so we will see what we can plant.

The effect of the rain has been to slow down the growth of many crops. The beets leaves turned red and they almost died from too much water. I planted the beets in March and they were doing great until the rain and cold started in mid-April. For comparison, last year we had beets by the 3^rd week of CSA. The transplanted kale, cauliflower, collards, and chard are also weeks behind normal. The Fava beans don’t normally like our climate, but they are happy this spring I am hoping for an impressive harvest on Fava beans. The peas are also cool-weather crops that are doing very well and should be ready next week.

I always plant some “insurance crops” that are easy to produce, hold well in the field, and are crops people like. Zucchini, potatoes, chard, kale, beets, and carrots are some of my normal “insurance crops”. This spring many of these are struggling. There are some early potatoes, but our main planting rotted in a field with standing water. Fortunately I only planted half of my seed potatoes (and still have the rest unplanted), but we had over 1,000 pounds of seed potatoes rot. We had to plant the zucchini and cucumber seeds 3 times because they kept rotting in the wet ground. Now these plants are many weeks behind where they should be in early June. The kale is almost ready, but still growing slowly and not loving how saturated the soil is.

This season we have a crew of 17 and last year we had 23 people working in early June. This is about 300 less hours worked per week than last season. Our crew missed work one day per week for 4 of the last 6 weeks because it was too wet to work. I was worried about our crew having to quit to find more reliable employment. Fortunately, the crew we have is great and we are accomplishing a significant amount every week.

I am hoping it will not be a terrible farm season. We do actually have a good amount of food growing right now. We could use some luck and warm weather. We are working to give our CSA great quality food and to improve on the variety from week to week. We have to choose between giving you food that you have had enough of for a while, or not giving you anything. I know the turnips have become a bit much, but I had another farm buy Red Wagon turnips for their CSA because they did not have hardly anything ready. We want our CSA members to be happy and are doing our best but we cannot control weather. Wish us luck for better weather for the rest of the growing season!