Our last share of the year should have been on September 27 with any bonus shares, because of good weather beginning in October. But we needed a vacation and had the opportunity to visit Kathy’s sister in Atlanta at the end of September and beginning of October so we moved the final pickup from the 27 of September to the 8th of October. The first week of October was very rainy. We got more than 6 inches of rain. While that meant that Keith and Joanne (Kathy’s parents who were staying at the house and caring for the animals and collecting eggs) did not have to worry about watering the garden it also meant that the tomatoes got too big too fast and were splitting by the time we picked them. They were not really pretty this week. We did pull carrots though (the carrots came out really easily in the damp soil) and harvest spaghetti squash for everyone. We also through in half a dozen eggs. The chickens have been producing well and we were starting to get over run.
We are hoping to have one final (bonus) pickup on October 18th if the weather holds. The night of October 10 the temps dropped to about 32 degrees but we kept the water on all night and the basil did not even get kissed with frost.
This has been a really good year. The response from our members has been very positive. I have had a couple of people contact me about starting CSA’s in the area, one of them hopes to include a meat share. I think there is plenty of market for the CSA model in our area right now. We are planning to continue with the CSA next year, though many long term CSA’s across the country are beginning to fold up. Most of those are people that are doing it full time and have reached the point where they can no longer continue to afford the CSA lifestyle. I say lifestyle because for many of them they would have made more money working a minimum wage job than they did producing healthy food for their communities. We are in a fortunate situation. Our CSA is not a vocation it is an avocation. We are not really looking to expand. We want to limit the number of members to what we can handle; at this time that is 10. We have talked about adding a short season during the high production time with pickup on a different day. This would hopefully give us a market for tomatoes, greens, green beans, etc… a second time during the week. We wouldn’t have to add to the garden but would be able to pick a couple of times a week and the veggies do just keep coming.
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