Valley Mama CSA

First Farmer's Market

Last weekend was the first farmer's market of the season, and it was so much fun.  It feels great to be back, right where we belong, between the community gardens and Kretsinger Grassfed Beef, sharing a booth with our good friend Melinda, of Green Frog Juice.  Melinda, by the way, makes the most amazing juices and smoothies you will ever have.  Seriously.  I'm not exaggerating.

Though the majority of our produce is sold through the CSA, the market is a great way to share what we do with the community and hang out with some awesome people.  I did not go to the market the last couple of years, and had forgotten how much fun it is.  

Though it is still early season for us, and we did not harvest much, our table looked beautiful!  We brought some of our lettuce and basil boxes, and Melissa made the most adorable sign in the world.  Again, I'm not exaggerating.  It's that great.  

The farm kids played with other market kids most of the morning, while the farm babies mostly hung out on us, sleeping and taking everything in.  Utah, of course, made a run for it several times.

The first market is always a little slow, but even so we nearly sold out.

River spent some time hanging out with Seanna, who stopped by for a while.  I could not resist these two healthy, radiant girls in sunhats...too sweet. 

We had a great CSA pick-up yesterday, and tomorrow we harvest for market again!  In between harvests and markets we work to keep the weeds at bay and replant whatever we can.  We have a very short season in our high valley home, but we get the most out of it that we can, while we can.

Rain

I never get tired of the smell of rain.  Probably because it's so rare here.  Melissa and I and all four farm kids were in the garden right before the storm hit yesterday.  I suppose one of the benefits of being able to see so far in any direction is advance notice of storms rolling in.  We were replanting beans and cucumbers...many of the seedlings of the first planting got consumed by grasshoppers...when we felt the first drops.  We put everything away and started towards the house.  I was in the back yard when I noticed a glimmer on the ground out by the animals' pen.  

                                                

Sometimes someone turns on the hose to fill the goat and sheep water and walks away to tend to something else.  Every once and a while someone forgets and does not return for some time.  When this happens, the area outside of the pen is flooded.  The farm kids love this.  The grown-ups and animals...not so much.

                                                             

It's evening time - time for the goat and sheep to come in from the field and go into their pen for the night.  Also, a storm is coming, so Melissa and I go out to bring them in, babies on our backs...of course.  Melissa finds a huge board (fairly easy to find in our yard) and puts it across the lake that we discover by the pen to make a bridge for us to cross.  I open the gate to let the the girls in.  Normally, then run right in.  Tonight, however, they are not thrilled at having a lake where there used to be solid ground between them and their hay.  They are not going in, and the rain is coming down a little harder.  They bolt a couple of times, we are soaked, and Melissa is up to her knee in mud before we get them in.  Then the rain really comes.

                                                                       

An actual drenching, ground-quenching rain.  

                                                                        

Rain always feels like such a gift here, and with fires burning all around us, this rain feels even more like a gift than normal.  

        

The garden loves it.  Since we don't get much rain from the sky here, we irrigate everything.  It keeps the plants alive and they do pretty well, but it cannot compare to an actual rain.  After the first real rain of the season everything pops (including weeds).  It seems the plants grow inches overnight.

                                          

                             
I went out this morning to check on everything, slipping and sliding in the mud.  Maybe it's my imagination, but I'm pretty sure the plants look greener...happier.  

                                       

                           

It's raining again this evening, and we're loving it...it sure is nice to not have to turn on the drip for a couple of days.

                                     

First Harvest

This past week was our first harvest of the season for the CSA.  It is still early in the season for us (we have a very short growing season here), but there is already quite a bit ready for harvest.  The box had spinach, lettuce mix, baby greens (like kale, mizuna, arugula), young spring onions, and radishes (mostly Easter Egg this week).  We do lots of bagged greens early in the season when things are small, but switch to bunching for just about everything later on.    

The spinach is amazing this year and we've been putting it in and on everything!

The baby greens are so tender, still mild, and perfect for eating raw.  They are also great lightly cooked. 

The Easter Egg radishes are mild and a favorite of the farm kids.  If they had their way we would probably not have any left.  We are planting more all the time to try and make up for how many they are eating.

I love young onions.  We eat the whole onion, from the little baby bulb to the tips of the greens!

It's the season to welcome back fresh-from-the-garden salads.  We can't get enough.

Of course, this is just the beginning of what we will have available this summer.  I'm working on creating a page on the blog of our complete planting list, so check back soon for that.  

Besides the veggies, we are trying something new this year...look for salad and basil boxes at the market!

 

It Takes a Village

I like to keep these posts fairly current to give you an idea of what is happening around the farm now.  This post is about something that happened a few weeks ago, but I never got around to posting because we left for a cross-country road-trip shortly after (ten states in ten days!).  It is still important to share because it is a great example of why we grow here.       

I love living here in the San Luis Valley.  Really.  I do.  I will admit that from time to time I think about what it might be like to live in a place where there's a little more green than brown.  Where it rains more than a few days a year.  Where you can throw seeds outside and watch them grow.  Where it does not get to thirty below zero and hang out there for a few weeks in January.  

And then, I look out into this beautiful high desert valley, surrounded by mountains, and I think about the community that we have here.  I am rooted to this land, to the valley, but most of all, I'm rooted to this community.  I've lived several other places in my life, but I've never experienced community like I have here.  

Aaron sent out the word about a work party to put up a new fence around the garden and the field after our garden expansion and septic system nightmare.  It was kind of last minute, but so many friends showed up to help.  Aaron asks for people to bring post hole diggers if they have them, and Mark shows up with this...

  They had the holes dug for the aspen posts (which Aaron cut the day before in the mountains), in no time.  A few hours later, we had this...

The garden and pasture are now completely fenced in, keeping the chickens and goat and sheep out...for now.  Buttercup (the goat) always finds a way in.  It's crazy to look at this picture.  All of those rows are now filled with green, and it has only been a few weeks!  

Other work got done that day as well, like some prep work for the base of the new greenhouse and some new beds around the old greenhouse.  We are so thankful for everyone who came over to help!  Thank you all so much!

River did her job of playing in the dirt...

While the farm boy did work of his own...

Thanks to some amazing people, it took one day to complete what would have taken a week on our on.  These are the kind of things that happen all the time in our community, and why we choose to make this place our home.  

We grow here...and we grow so much more than food.  

Garden Babies

Little seedlings are emerging everywhere!  It is such an exciting time in the garden.  Melissa and I have been working hard the last two weeks to prep and plant row after row, entrusting seeds to the brown earth...and now, we have green.  

Potatoes, onions, spinach, lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, radishes, peas...these are some of the plants whose little leaves have come up from the soil so far.  Speaking of peas, we are amazed at our pea germination rate this year.  We usually have a fairly low germination rate for peas here, even when we use innoculant.  This year we soaked them for two days with the innoculant and then planted them.  So many peas.  We are amazed.  We should have lots of snow, sugar snap and shelling peas to enjoy this year.

We're not quite done planting, though we're getting close.  We'll, I suppose we're never completely done...there is succession planting of  certain crops that will happen all summer...but we are nearing the end of the big, two-week planting push.  We just finished planting carrots, beets, chard, kale and many other varieties of green things.  Now we're on squash, cucumbers, beans, basil, herbs and flowers.  I'm sure I'm leaving a few things out.  

And the two cutest garden babies are growing like weeds as well.  Eating dirt, pulling out drip lines, splashing in water, exploring bugs and tools...they are doing their own important work.  

Not a bad way for them to spend these first summers of their lives...here's to many more.  

Where have all the radishes gone?

Don't let the title scare you...we will have plenty of yummy radishes available this summer (if the farm kids don't eat them all first).  The thing about kids who participate in growing their own food is...they love to eat it.  My son, who claims to dislike just about anything spicy, will munch radishes with a bit of a kick.  All.  Day.  Long.  The same goes for peas (of course), lettuce, spinach, green onions, carrots and most other garden produce.  The kids love eating food straight from the garden.  

That's why we were not surprised when Mason and Bella were thrilled to eat the first radishes from the green house.  

And why we should not have been surprised when we walked in a little later to find most of the french breakfast radishes gone!  

We convinced them to leave the rest to get a little bigger before they ate them.  This was only a small patch in the greenhouse for our early season salads, so they can eat as many as they want.  We will have to keep a close eye on our radishes in the field though.  

There should be plenty of radishes for you to enjoy this summer.  Because radishes show up each week of the growing season, we try to keep them interesting by planting lots of varieties.  Slender french breakfast radishes with a little bite, mild and colorful easter egg radishes, spicy asian varieites, classic round reds, black spanish radishes with white insides, large radishes that look like watermelons, and plenty of daikons...hopefully we won't get bored with this easy garden vegetable!

 

 

Let the Planting Begin

What a week it has been!  Melissa, myself and the farm kids have been in the field every day laying drip lines, prepping rows, building pea fences and (finally) planting!  It always feels so nice to get the first crops in the ground.  

After Alan tilled, we spent most of a day just setting up the irrigation.  Since the shape of the garden is changing a bit this year, the layout of our drip lines has to change as well.  As we went about our work, cutting main lines to add new pieces, solving the puzzle of how to get water to all the spaces to be planted, connecting lines and rolling out new drip tape, I laughed to myself at how easy it all seemed now.  We have this irrigation thing down.  It may seem like I'm bragging, but when we first began this garden-to-market adventure I knew nothing about this mysterious process of irrigation. 

There were so many different sizes of everything, from the poly tubing to the drip tape (and what kind of drip tape was the best?), not to mention the various connectors, emitters, valves and tools to make it all work.  Luette was our irrigation specialist that first year.  (You can read more about how we got started here.)  After a few years of experience, I actually now enjoy this part of spring.

Getting-water-to-plants problems solved, we moved on to prepping rows.  This  means using our hoes to form hills, making a trench down the hill, and adding a little compost.  A lot of work, yes, but definitely worth it.

Oh how good it feels to plant those first rows!  We've planted the greenhouse, salad boxes and various starts, but there is nothing like digging your hands into a freshly prepared row in the field, carefully tucking in little potatoes and onion plants.  

While the recently cut potatoes were curing, onions went in the ground first.  We planted onion plants and sets.  Mason enjoyed helping plant the onion plants.  We'll have plenty of onions this year...red, yellow, white, scallions and even some cute little minature onions.

Utah has his milk while Melissa keeps planting onions.

Now he's ready to help plant onions!

The next thing in the ground was the potatoes,  and what a lot of potatoes we planted.  I believe the phrase of the day (thanks to my superhero obsessed farm boy) was, "Holy potatoes, Batman!"  Yukon golds, reds, fingerlings, and some purples for fun...we love potatoes.  We actually just finished eating last year's potatoes from the root cellar, so I'm excited for those tasty little new potatoes will get soon. 

Yesterday and today we worked on the pea rows. Sugar snap peas, snow peas and shelling peas...I love peas.  Of course planting peas means building pea fences, and we got that finished today as well.

As we work, we sit in a vast expanse of brown.  It's a good brown...a hopeful brown.  We plant, we talk, we watch the farm kids, and we marvel at the way this garden will look in a month.  We honor the brown, and are so excited to welcome the green.

Soil and Seedlings

We were inside the house attempting to clean (well, I  was attempting to clean), when we heard the sound of our gate opening.  When Mason saw that Alan was here, he jumped into his boots and ran outside.  Alan brought his tractor, a different one this time.  How many tractors does Alan have?  We had a little chat to confirm what was to be tilled, and then he got to work.  

I have to admit, I felt as excited as Mason, though not for the same exact reasons.  My farm boy darted around the yard to watch the action of the tilling from different views.  I busied myself in the greenhouse and tried to contain my excitement.  Now, it was really happening.  Now comes the hard work.  Now the garden would begin to come together before our eyes, springing to life as irrigation is run, rows are prepared, and seeds are planted.  This is the work I love.

River, however, is not so sure about the tractor, but she rolls with it as she does with everything (except being separated from me, of course).  

My thoughts turned to this soil, as I watched it become soft and smooth before my eyes.  This is good dirt.  This is soil that is loved, and offers up so much in return.  We have come a long way since we first planted this space, and our care for the soil shows.  I think about a shift to no-till gardening, something I've thought about a lot.  The idea behind no-till is that you leave the soil structure in place, and continually build the fertility with specific crops and organic matter.  It preserves the intregrity of the soil and allows all of the various organisms to thrive, and protects our precious topsoil from erosion.  We are trying it out on a small scale this year, so we'll see how it goes.  I still have a lot to read and learn about it.

As Alan was tilling, it started to rain.  Two days in a row of rain!  And not just a little sprinkle...we're talking a good, heavy rain.  I stepped back into the greenhouse, mostly for the baby on back.  The greenhouse if my absolute favorite place to be when it's raining, especially now that there are beautiful green seedlings everywhere.  

We thanked Alan, Mason jumped out of the boots he jumped into earlier, and ran around in the soil of the new garden plot in the rain.  Beautiful.  

Thank you Alan, thank you millions of soil organisms and thank you rain! 

Spring Update

Happy spring everyone!  I've started a blog for the garden.  Finally.  I've been wanting to do it for years.  I'm still working on it, and will be adding more content soon.  This first post is a spring update that customers received via the email list.  It seemed an appropriate beginning for a new blog!  

We are in full spring swing here, and I'm loving it.  As I sit here thinking about what I'd like to include in this update, River is making her first attempt at crawling on the braided wool rug on the living room floor.  The familiar sounds of Mason playing come from behind me (something related to superheros, I think).  I can look out of one window and see freshly turned earth.  I look out of another window and see the metal frame and lumber that will soon be put back together to become a greenhouse.  I feel so incredibly thankful.  For so much.  So, I offer a garden update this spring in the form of my thanks.  Right now I am incredibly grateful and thankful for...

                                                                    

This amazing Mother Earth, who continues to provide.  From the millions of little organisms in the soil I hold in my hands, to the water that comes from the snow in the mountains.  Melissa and I planted garlic earlier this spring, and there is nothing like digging my hands into the soil for the first time of the season.  

                                                        

One truly incredible partner, who's hard work makes this life possible.  I get to be with my children every day, and grow food for my family and yours...there is nothing else in the world I would rather be doing.  Without Aaron and his ability to put up quick fences for my ever-expanding garden, the animals would have eaten everything.      

                             

Two amazing little people who provide the inspiration and the joy for all of this.  Farm boy is such a big helper this year, and farm girl just had her first taste of soil...I think she liked it.  

                  

Did you hear?  I have an amazing garden partner this year.  Or maybe I should say three, because with Melissa comes Bella and Utah, and I can already tell we're going to have a blast.  Babies on backs, while the farm kids play...we are going to make some amazing things happen this summer.

                          

Alan Simpson.  With his generous help (and his tractor) we are increasing the size of the garden this year.  Seriously.  What would we do without Alan?

                                   

My parents are in Creede full-time now, which means lots of grandma and grandpa time for the farm kids.  They are already helping in our garden endeavor as well.  Just this week they came down from Creede with their truck and trailer and we headed to Jaroso for some of David West's compost and greenhouse soil.  

                         

The gift of a greenhouse from our friends Angie, Russ and Cecily.  Also their time and energy to disassemble this greenhouse (in the rain), load it up, drive it here, and unload it.  They are a beautiful family, and I'm so happy to know them.

                                

Tom Barr, the best sheep shearer in the Valley, who just this week stopped by because he was in the area and sheared the sheep.

                                   

My circle of mamas (you know who you are).  For being inspirational and working to nourish the health and wholeness of us all.   

                                              

All of you.  For buying veggies, offering lovely, kind words of encouragement, and supporting local food in this community.          

                           

For one tiny seed, literally and metaphorically speaking.  Oh how much potential for life and growth can be contained in something so small. 

                              

Also...green tea and functioning septic systems.     

                            

Happy spring to you all!