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Sunday, October 27, 2013

Catalpa Ridge News–Volume 18 No 21–October 28, 2013

Last Delivery of the Season!

It is hard to believe that it has been one year since Hurricane Sandy which greeted everyone last year at this time. We know many of you were impacted with either the inconvenience of electrical failures and long gas lines or the tragedies of losing parts of your homes to water. Our only loss was the big greenhouse within our main field. The plastic was torn to shreds and the metals bars were twisted beyond repair. Our only choice was to tear it down and look to replace it. We didn’t get to replace it before the growing year for 2013 but do have plans for 2014. We also want to build an on-site walk-in-cooler and packing house to make our distributions go more smoothly.

The harvests this year have been much more abundant that last year and we also were pleased with the overall variety that we were able to offer. It is amazing what better weather and growing conditions does! Though we lost our big greenhouse to Hurricane Sandy, we did till up new beds and took advantage of extra growing area. The early spring was wet and we did have our usual weather problems i.e. too wet, too dry, but overall we were able to manage the weather related problems.

As with any business model, the success is dependent on great employees and we truly have the best crew in the world! Without their dedicated work ethic and going over and above the call to duty during the harvest year makes our life less stressful.

 

Thanks to all CSA members for your support this season.  If you have any ideas for different veggies you would like to see next year, just send us an e-mail and we will look through our seed catalogs in January as we prepare our large seed order for 2014.

Franklin Greenhouse Report:  The Franklin Greenhouse will be cleaned out during the next week or two. We hope that all the plastic covering the greenhouse will be good for next season and we hope

that we don’t have too severe of a winter. Michael has been busy fixing up a few things, i.e. the doors on the heated greenhouse.

 

From the Fields:   We have been lucky this year with these later deliveries in that the weather has been warmer than in past years. We have had heavy frost early in the mornings. During the cold mornings we do have to wait for the plants to defrost before we can harvest them! In past years we have had to harvest, run to the truck to warm up and then go back to the fields. This week we all started later in the morning around 9 am and were still able to put together nice harvests.

 

During the off season, we will continue to clean up the fields and start to prepare new areas for next year. We will work until we can’t work anymore, which is usually the first snow storm.  

 

Weather report:

More dry weather. It didn’t matter too much with the crops this late in the season. On the positive side the dryer weather is holding back the newly planted garlic from growing too much before winter (which is a good thing).

Animal report: 

All quiet on the farm with no problems to speak of. No deer have been sighted in the area, probably due to the start of deer season. No update on the wooly bear caterpillar report as all sightings have been the same as previously reported. The folklore of a larger center stripe on the caterpillar predicting a mild winter. We can only hope!

LAST DELIVERY OF THE SEASON

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Thanks to all CSA members for your continued support.

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