Tag: woodbridge

Several of the CSA Core members — those of us who help to organize the CSA — were able to meet with Farmer Julia earlier this month to go over our survey responses and to start making plans for 2011.

Farmers Heather and Julia from Woodbridge Farm.

Farmer Heather also joined us — she’s been working at Woodbridge Farm for two years and will be taking on a greater role next year growing the vegetables while Julia hopes to spend more time overseeing the general health of the farm and problem solving specific issues.

They’ll be working with a program this year called the Real Food Campaign which will provide scientific analysis of their soil and veggies to help the farmers produce high vitamin and mineral content food. The analysis will tell them what nutrients they need to add to the soil, with the goal of improving the quality of their crops.

Last year’s irrigation problem put on a strain on their entire crop. Julia and Dave rented a field from a nearby farmer, who told them that when he used to farm those fields, he used the pond on his land for irrigation. Unknown to all, the pond had filled in with sediment quite a lot since then, so they found themselves to be basically pumping mud at some point, and had already done quite a lot of damage to the crop by the time the problem was discovered. They tried to salvage what they could, but as we know, results were poor. The difficulty of managing this second farm impacted their ability to keep their own land maintained, and the overall crop suffered greatly.

The solution for 2011 is quite simple: they will not be renting the extra field this year. In addition to the water problem, it stretched their labor resources too far to have to go off site on a regular basis. Their own land has a very deep well with which they have had no problems, and they are adding a drip tape irrigation system to their fields. Overall, their hope is that refocusing on less land will bring a better yield overall and bigger and more nutritious vegetables.

The other major problem from 2010 that we were able to discuss was the many late deliveries. Julia acknowledged that some staffing issues on the farm made for their Tuesdays inefficient, and expressed confidence that this year’s hires would be better at simply getting the truck packed in time for Dave to make the long trip to New York. We made it clear that we are very reluctant to start distribution any later than 5:00 since there are several CSA members for whom even 5:00 is already too late.

We did agree to create a better system for informing all members when traffic unavoidably delays Dave’s arrival, including a way to get shares to members who are unable to come back to distribution. And Julia agreed that she could get someone at the farm to email us the share breakdown before Dave shows up so that the whiteboard and labels for the veg bins can be setup in advance, allowing distribution to start much faster once Dave does arrive.

Finally, we agreed that there needs to be a better effort all around to communicate farm issues to the CSA members. Julia’s emails are often very informative, but we get too few of them during the season. But also, when Julia sent the core an email last summer about their irrigation problem, the Core members did not do a good enough job getting that information out to our members. We’ll be using the website more, sending more emails to members, and the farm will get more information to us (possibly with their own Facebook page).

We’ll have an update from Julia in January about what crops they plan on growing in 2011 — they are already planting in the greenhouse.

Finally, a bit of cheese news: cheese will continue to be a similar (small) number of varieties, that’s just all they’re set up for right now. We’ll make sure to get better descriptions of those cheeses, though, so everyone knows exactly what they’re eating.

David and Julia just sent us this update:

Dear CSA Members,

Thank you so much for your support and patience and your words of encouragement throughout the past weeks of slim harvests. It is time to give you an update on how things developed since our last e-mail in which we had shared with you our trouble with the irrigation.

We have good news in that we have been able to supply an abundance of water to our fall crops including: lettuce, pac choy, chinese cabbage, kale and swiss chard, tatsoi and broccoli, turnips, salad greens, radishes, carrots and beets.

We did have to abandon a good third of one of our fields on which we were growing all the cucurbits (squash, cucumbers, winter squash and pumpkins) in order to be able to supply enough water to the fall crops and the remaining summer crops with the small well we are now using – this decision was relatively easy since the plants had been heavily impacted by the lack of water over the summer. As a consequence of this drought, the winter squash yield this year is not very good. Equally impacted is the potato yield – which is probably going to come to an end soon.

The recent cold nights took a toll on the field tomatoes which have slowed down production to almost nothing. We have a beautiful second succession of beans that is yielding abundantly at the moment and should continue to do so for the next three weeks if the weather holds up and we don’t get any early night frosts.

So you should expect to see more cooking and salad greens as well as root crops going into fall – but keep in mind that the usual basics of potatoes and winter squash might be missing this fall.

Thank you again for your continued support!

“Know Your Food!”

Julia and David Smagorinsky
Woodbridge Farm LLC
30 Woodbridge Road
Salem, CT 06420
phone: (860) 531-8090
e-mail: woodbridgefarm@sbcglobal.net
www.woodbridgefarmonline.com

Email to members 9/4/10:

The last few weeks have seen a decreasing yield in our CSA shares, culminating last week in what was probably our smallest take-home in three years. Farmer Julia provided us with a detailed explanation of their challenges this year with irrigation and water supply, problems highlighted by the general lack of rain this summer. You can read her full letter on our web site, but the gist of it is not good news — the pond that Woodbridge Farm has relied on for irrigation has practically dried up, and they expect sparse pick-ups for at least another few weeks.

Julia is hoping for better results for their fall crops, as they’ve been given permission to tap into a neighbor’s well. We’ve asked for an update on their progress, and will post that to the web site also as soon as we receive it.

It’s worth noting that CSAs were invented precisely to help growers withstand the natural unpredictability of a small farm, as well as to provide amazingly fresh produce with no chemicals to consumers. That is, we ask that you patiently take the bad with the good. Our CSA provides Julia and Dave with the kind of economic security family farmers have never had; CSAs in NYC and around the region have helped re-energize family farms across New England; in particular, the movement has encouraged more small farmers to grow organically, which leaves their crops more susceptible to the vagaries of weather and disease. In other words, we hope there’s more to your CSA membership than the desire for tasty tomatoes.

We try not to get too mission-preachy here at the Grand Street CSA, but when all you get to take home is a pile of purslane, maybe a big-picture pep-talk is in order.

(Speaking of purslane … we posted some information about what you can do with the stuff to our web site, and thought it was a good time to remind you of all the veggie tip sheets from Just Food. There’s even one for purslane.)

Please feel free, as always, to email us your comments and complaints, or to talk to the core member at distribution on Tuesday. And if you have time in your busy day for a quick rain dance, Julia and Dave and the salad greens will appreciate it.

Important news from the farm:

We hope all of you are enjoying the vegetables we have been providing so far this year. For those of you who have been members from the beginning or if this is your second season with us you may have noticed a decline in yield of some of our crops like salad greens, lettuce heads and cooking greens as well as the size of our peppers and cucumbers. We have been been facing some different challenges this year especially with irrigation and water supply. We wanted to update you as to what we have been encountering and share our concern for potentially lower yields in the weeks to come.

This year we had implemented a new system on a new field we call,”Gadbois Field”. The system is drip irrigation which utilizes drip tape the runs the length of each bed that we grow in and as the word implies water drips out of the tape to irrigate our plants. The drip tape and bed is covered with plastic mulch to stop weed growth and the paths in between each bed is mowed to keep everything accessible for harvest and a healthy environment for growth. The water source is a pond adjacent the field that is pumped to the drip tape that runs up and down 60 beds (about 4 acres). We noticed about 2 months ago that our veggies were not growing as expected and started a comprehensive fertility program using fish emulsion and calcium, and irrigated more often. Still something was not right and as we were planting our fall crops last week we discovered the answer when the pond went dry during an irrigation attempt. It became apparent that we had been irrigating less water then needed by clogging up the pumps filtration lines with sludge from the “near” bottom of the pond. This is not good news as what has not received enough water during this period are a good amount of the vegetables we had planned for the next 4 weeks. So expect some sparse pick ups in the near future.
For the fall crops we have hope that a well the neighboring farmer agreed to let us use will pull us through the remainder of the season. It has only been 3 days since our discovery and that we have been using the well. It is not a deep enough well to irrigate all 60 beds at once so we have started with 3 at a time and will be adding a bed at a time until we find the wells “breaking point” and irrigate as often as we must to save as many crops as we can.

Rain…Rain…Rain!!! We need rain. We have had only a few rain falls since May which plays into our struggle greatly. Both the pond and the well is dependent on rain fall.

As all of you are part of our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program we do greatly appreciate your understanding and continued commitment through all the good and challenging times the farm has had in the past and the struggle we are encountering currently. Thank You!

“Know Your Food!”

Julia and David Smagorinsky
Woodbridge Farm LLC
30 Woodbridge Road
Salem, CT 06420
phone: (860) 531-8090
e-mail: woodbridgefarm@sbcglobal.net
www.woodbridgefarmonline.com

Julia from Woodbridge Farm writes:

The vegetables are looking beautiful, lush and green, and it appears that this spring a lot of leaf crops are exactly 10 days early. This means I am going to send a lot of lettuce and boc choys your way next week. There will also be some herbs and a mild salad greens mix with spinach, as well as kale and swiss chard.

On the dairy side of our operation, things are looking fabulous as well. The pastures are lush, cows and calves are happy and healthy, and we now finally have our official raw milk license.

See you all Tuesday!

Julia, from Woodbridge Farm, wrote in to give us some feedback on our feedback — her response to our end-of-year survey:

David and Julia are looking for volunteers to help mulch tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, and peppers during the weekend of June 6. If you’d like to get your hands dirty, email them for more details: woodbridgefarm at sbcglobal.net.