We hope you’ve stayed warm and safe during these last few weeks of snowstorms! We’re finally fully dug out and today the cows ventured out of the barn to enjoy the balmy twenty-nine degrees. The kids are loving the snowbanks, and the farm is beautiful with such a thick white blanket. Mid-winter may bring many challenges but it has an upside, too.
For years Bill and I have known that the CSA is our favorite way to share vegetables with our community. Wholesale vegetable sales helped pay the farm’s bills for a long time, but the CSA most fully embodies the values of why we farm. The CSA brings together community, healthy food, and care for the environment in a very tangible way. Therefore, we’ve made the big decision to focus almost entirely on growing for our CSA members in 2015.
The biggest change is that we’re giving up our wholesale accounts. You’ll no longer find our vegetables on a regular basis at the Co-ops. The CSA is going to be the full focus of Hatchet Cove Farm, which means that instead of growing huge swaths of certain vegetables for the wholesale market, we’ll be able to grow an even wider range of different varieties that are specifically chosen with CSA members in mind. We’ll be able to rotate our fields the way we have always wanted, manage pests and soil fertility better, and hopefully give our apprentices a more diverse field experience. We’ll finally get a chance to grow those watermelon radishes and patty pan squash that you’ve asked for but that we just didn’t have room to experiment with before!
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To close some of the gap in our budget from the lack of wholesale, and since we also love our cows, we’re currently in the process of building a certified milking parlor! That means that by late spring we’ll be selling state-certified raw milk from our cows Daisy, Cookie and Star. A milk CSA will even be offered as another add-on option to your veggie CSA share. We also plan to offer a short spring greens CSA share as a prelude to the 16-week summer CSA, as well as offer a longer fall CSA. Our goal is to provide our CSA families with the ability to eat locally and organically, at a reasonable price, for six months out of the year!
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Details and a sign-up link for the coming season will be emailed and on our website by the end of next week. We’re so excited to be growing solely for our members this year. Thank you for being a part of our farm as it evolves in exciting new ways!
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Reba and Bill
HATCHET COVE FARM 