Season's Greetings From New Minglewood Farm

It's the last week of December... this is my last chance to get a farm blog out for 2013! How does this happen? I had every intention of blogging this past season, but somehow other things just kept taking precedence. This is a good excuse to give a brief recap of the season, as well as, to wish all our friends, family, and customers a happy holiday season.

Believe it or not, this was our fifteenth growing season at New Minglewood Farm. Last winter we finally got around to having a barn built for our operation. Actually, it's a bit more than a barn - it's mostly a new and improved vegetable washing station/packhouse and a storage space for tools supplies and equipment. I can't believe how long we managed with the old open sided wash shed. The new space is so much more spacious and efficient. It's also nice to be able to close up the doors and stay warm on cold and raw harvest days.

The frame takes shape

Roofing day

Completed

Classic barn red

We also made a few other improvements to the operation, mostly replacing things that had worn out or broken over the past 15 years - new greenhouse plastic, a new commercial grade salad spinner, new potting soil mixer...

In our ongoing efforts to move the farm in the direction of a "lean, clean, machine", we limited our marketing to one farmer's market a week and kept the farm crew mostly to a few dedicated and experienced workers. We do miss having other outlets for our products, but life is much more sane if we just keep things simple and don't get over extended.

As far as growing seasons go, we have had worse, but we definitely have had better too. I like to sum it up this way: it was too cold in May, too wet in June, too hot in July, and just too late by August! The spring was actually fairly normal. We had most of our snow last year during March, and it took awhile for things to warm up in April and May. We had our last spring frost on May 26, although it had been in the 80's earlier in the week. The old rule of thumb around here is that the last frost can be as late as Memorial Day, but rarely is it ever really that late.

March 20 - still lots of snow

Chris' sister Ailea visited from England in April

In June we started getting some serious rain, and it just wouldn't quit. We had an incredible 15+ inches of rain during the period from late May through mid-July. Much of it fell during intense thunderstorms - one storm dropped almost an inch in 25 minutes. That's just a lot of rain no matter how you look at it. Unfortunately, all this rain fell during the time of the season when the crops needed to be put in the ground, so finding a window when it was dry enough to plant was very challenging.

The rains lightened up some later in July, but that led to a string of days with temperature well into the 90's. Fortunately, August and September had less weather extremes, and October was down right beautiful. It was a nice long and relatively mild autumn. We had a few light frosts in September and early October, but the killing frost did not arrive until October 24.

Considering all the crazy weather, our crops really didn't do that bad. Yes, there were some failures: more than half the potatoes rotted in the ground, our weekly plantings of spinach drowned all though May and June, and the tomatoes eventually got late blight, which significantly reduced their yield. But... we still had a lot of beautiful produce to sell throughout the whole season. Other than spinach, our greens did quite well - we had perhaps the best year ever for baby arugula. We also had good crops of green beans, boc choi, escarole, eggplant, peppers, kale, and radicchio.

Beautiful crop of Costata zucchini

The highlight of the season was our weekly farmer's market on Saturdays in Saratoga Springs and seeing all our dedicated customers come back week after week and year after year. With all the frustrations and disappointments that go along with farming - your support and enthusiasm for what we do, make it all worth while! There is a lot of competition out there now for your food dollar - far more than when we started - lots of new farmers starting, new farmer's markets, and new natural food grocery stores. We truly appreciate the loyalty of our long time customers... Thanks.

So, the seed catalogs arrive every other day, the days are getting longer, and we've got a lot to do to get ready for next season. Can't wait to get started.

Here's a few more pictures  from the 2013 season.

Baby chard - new product this season

Costata zucchini

Assorted bell peppers

Farmer and giant boc choi

Assorted mini-heirloom tomatoes