Winter CSA at Brightwood

It seems that it has been about a year since our last blog post...things are pretty busy around the farm and it is hard to keep up with 'extra' things like blogs!  But I am determined to try again to share our experiences here on a more regular basis.

The winter was very mild with only a few nights below 20 degrees and only a little snow.  It was the perfect winter for our first cold weather CSA (Community Supported Agriculture, where regular customers agree to buy vegetables from a farm for an entire season).  We had a good mix of storage crops (potatoes, winter squash, sweet potatoes, garlic, onions), root crops (turnips, carrots), and greens (salad mix, Asian greens, kale, chard, etc.) and made up a box of veggies for each of our CSA customers every week from mid November until the beginning of March.  Here are a few of our boxes, lined up in the car port, ready for pick-up.

I find that I really enjoy growing during the winter.  Most of our crops are grown in our unheated hoophouses with some of the hardiest doing well outside under row covers.  Even on a cold day, the environment in a hoophouse is warm and inviting.  It is great to see all those green growing plants when the view outside is dreary and cold!  We have already begun planting for next year's winter CSA-  the potatoes are in the ground and looking good and we will be planting sweet potatoes and winter squash within a couple of weeks.  We wait until late July and August to begin to plant the other crops that will provide delicious vegetables all winter.

Next post; Leia and Luke, our two Great Pyrenees guardian dogs....