farm report....

This was sent to all members of the Pennypack Farm CSA...

Farm Notes ~ June 4, 2009
From Farmer Fred

We've just wrapped up the first week of summer share distribution, and we hope everyone was happy with the strawberry bonanza. Not only were the berries easy to find in the patch, they had mouth-watering flavor. But let's consider the cold-hard cash value question. I just checked at Whole Foods and saw that a quart of California organic strawberries was selling for around $4. On Wednesday, June 3, Pennypack Farm members could pick up to 3 quarts of strawberries, and take 3 more item besides.

Those three items could include a three-quarter pound bunch of kale with fronds 18 inches long and stalks so tender and sweet they snap in your fingers. Another two items (out of many to select from) could include a half-pound each of spinach and arugula. Sorry to pound our own drum here, folks. But the fact is that a Pennypack Farm share is a great value. At a cost of $450, a small share works out to $18 a week over the 25-week season. We strive to meet or beat an equivalent supermarket shopping basket value each week. We're off to a good start in that effort.

In Community Supported Agriculture, members take the bitter with the sweet, and we know that there will be crop failures as well as triumphs. At the moment, some of our spring broccoli is looking a little peaked. Broccoli needs a lot of available nitrogen, and we took a gamble by trying to reduce our purchased organic fertilizer input. Last fall we sowed a cover crop of legumes, which were supposed to add a significant amount of nitrogen to the soil for following crops to use. But it didn't seem to work out that way, at least not for the broccoli beds. We will harvest less broccoli in the coming month than we planned, but there will be much more coming in the fall, so we hope to make up for any shortfall.

We're trying another experiment in sustainability this season, which is to use biodegradable, corn-based plastic mulch on some beds. Each season we use thousands of row feet of disposable plastic sheeting as one of our primary weed control methods. We'd love to reduce or eliminate all this waste. But the corn-based plastic has only been commercially available for the last year or so, and it may not function as well as "real" plastic, or biodegrade completely in our conditions. I'll report back on this effort later in the season.

The weather this spring has been very cool and damp. One result has been an explosion of slugs. We use organic slug bait on a few crops, but it isn't that effective under these conditions. As a result almost all of our leafy greens have some slug holes. We've even seen slugs on mustard family crops like kale, which is quite unusual. Hopefully we'll turn the corner on summer soon and the heat will end the slug problem. Remember that week of 90-degree weather back in April? We're ready for some more of that!

Raised beds...

3 hour project for a Saturday afternoon, building a 25 sq ft raised bed. Consists of cedar and pine planks screwed to corner stakes with stainless steel screws. The bed is 10 feet long by 2 1/2 feet wide and I will most likely use it for carrots and other root vegetables.

25 sq ft raised bed (April 4th, 2009)

I spread out about 2 inches of the free leaf compost I get from the town composting system, then covered that with a heavy layer of newspaper to act as a weed preventer.



Another couple inches of leaf compost and that is it for today. I will eventually fill the remaining 12 inches of this bed with a mushroom soil mix from my local garden supply yard, Primex Garden Center




I used salvaged wood that I have been saving for about a year, and together with the free compost and newspapers, the only cost of this raised bed will be the price of the mushroom soil mix... probably about $25. So the gardenomics on this project will mean very low production cost considering this bed should give me at least five years of use.

An interesting side note... this area used to be a bed of Hostas. I dug them up at the start of this project and put them out at the curb. I placed a curbside alert ad on Craig's List, and before this raised bed was finished all of the Hostas were gone!

community mulch pile....

The town I live in has a pretty large leaf compost system. In the fall we rake our leaves into the street about once a month, and the township comes along and sucks them into converted trash trucks and then composts these leaves into garden mulch. In the spring they dump huge piles of mulch in the town parks for anyone who wants it.
When I was a kid in the 1960's we used to rake the leaves into the street and burn them!



While I love getting free composted mulch for my garden beds, I also consider it more or less a responsibility to use this stuff. This program costs a lot of money to implement, and with everyone complaining about where our tax dollars are going, in my opinion this is a very good use of taxes. It is environmentally friendly and it helps promote local gardening systems. And yet, in my three trips to this mulch pile today to fill up some containers, I was the only person helping myself to free mulch. (it is early in the season, and the mulch was only just delivered to the local parks this week)

gardenomics 101

I have invested a good bit of money into two different CSA's this year and I am going to track the economics of this experience. I joined these CSA's for the benefits of good locally produced organic foods, not as a way to save money. But in light of the economy turned upside down, I am interested in comparing my cost of homegrown and CSA produce to what I would spend buying the same produce at the grocery store.

Here are my baseline costs to date:

Cold Season Veggies- 5 flats @ $18.00 ea. = $90.00 (180 plants @ .50 each)

Pennypack Farm- Veggie CSA $450 for a 6 unit per week share

North Star Orchards - Fruit CSA $225 for a 12 week share


I will keep track of the comparable retail pricing of my harvest and share amounts throughout the 2009 season. Both Pennypack and Northstar advise share members that the overall cost is comparable or slightly less than Farmers Market pricing. I am going to use Whole Foods pricing as my comparison because that is where I buy 90% of my produce that is not grown in my garden.