Full Sun Farm CSA – Week 3
The Spring has been a beautiful one and it is almost gone. The heat of summer has already found us. The warm days have helped some things along, but has caused many of our Spring crops to bolt earlier than usual. We take the good with the bad. We’re starting to harvest summer squash, but the spinach, broccoli raab, and the baby bok choi are on their way out. We’ve spent much of the past week planting those great and wonderful summer staples of tomatoes, peppers, basil, and eggplant. The first round of sweet corn went out as well as the second round of summer squash and cucumbers. We’ve sown edamame soybeans, runner beans, more lettuce mix, arugula, and radishes. The next big thing is sowing the winter squash and hilling the potatoes. Amongst all of the regular crunch time projects and plantings that happen the first few weeks of May, our delivery van died, and our irrigation pump broke. I finally had a chance to work on the pump and got it running again on Monday. The van was going to cost way to much to fix all the things that were wrong with it, so amazingly we found a replacement van that it’s a bit bigger, about ten years younger, and in our price range to replace it. So Alex and his dad drove down to South Carolina and brought the new van back. We’re back in business! Below is Nick’s weekly essay…we need to come up with a name for his weekly column….
It was only two weeks ago that Maggie and I took a trip into town. Trips into town typically are a Wednesday afternoon or weekend off from farm work. This was neither. We had been informed by Vanessa and Alex that Richard Wiswall would be speaking at Malaprops bookstore in downtown Asheville. He has written a book that changes how many small farmers look at their livelihood. The Organic Farmer’s Business Handbook, is textbook sized full of spreadsheets and graphs which at first glance seems overwhelming (a CD of all of the spreadsheets is also included in a sleeve on the inside of the back cover!). I was having flashbacks of my college Calculus class, and beads of sweat emerged on my forehead. However, at closer examination the book is simple and straightforward. Wiswall gave a brief reading from his book and proceeded to open the floor for questions. Wiswall, when asked what he would say to those of us in the audience who were considering starting a farm, he very calmly fixed his eyes upon us and with the upmost sincerely said, “there is no right or wrong way, I don’t have silver bullet for the perfect farm. It’s more like a silver shot gun where there are many ways to make it work. You just have to do it, and figure out what works best for you as you go. “