Heirloom Harvest

Greenhouse action

The greenhouse is hopping with activity this week as CSA members, volunteers, interns, apprentices and managers have all raced to keep up with the fast-growing crops.
In the foreground, tomato transplants and peatpots seeded with cucumbers. Behind, eggplants, peppers and more tomatoes. The heated front of the greenhouse is filled with the early semi-tropicals that need lots of heat.

Heirloom Harvest now selling local wine shares

Early in my farming career, I worked in the vineyard of a small winery in Lincoln, MA (where my daughter goes to school) that was just establishing itself. Kip Kumler, the owner of Turtle Creek Winery, entered into a longterm agreement with the town to install vineyards on some of its conserved farmland, the first example I am aware of anywhere in the state (if not the country) of a vintner taking over stewardship of town-owned conservation land for the purpose of producing wine.
I am still in touch with Kip, and recently I spoke with him about the possibility of Heirloom Harvest offering a share program for his wines. He grows on European vinifera stock, and has won bronze, silver and gold awards at competitions in San Francisco, Sonoma and internationally. He produces reislings, chardonnays, cabernet sauvignons, zinfandels, sauvignon blancs, etc. (see his website for more info www.turtlecreekwine.com).
This share program would be run entirely as a favor to members (no money goes to Heirloom Harvest) and to support another local farmer (Kip). The share purchase would be directly from Kip, and I would just swing by the vineyard to retrieve your wine when I am in Lincoln to pickup my daughter. For Kip this would operate like a wine buyer’s club, and he would offer some discount for Heirloom Harvest participants.
This program is available to Heirloom Harvest CSA members only.

Grace Note

I’d like to highlight the new relationship that developed this year between the farm and Highland Grace House in Worcester. Highland Grace, which encountered neighborhood resistance and media controversy when it opened, seeks to divert teenage girls with drug convictions from jail to a 6-month live-in recovery program that helps them beat drug habits and gain life skills to avoid bad situations.

Only about a dozen girls are enrolled in the program at any time. They range in age mostly from 14 to 16. This summer, about half came from middle-class homes in towns like Westborough, and half came from situations of urban or rural poverty.

The girls and their staff brought good attitudes, open minds and their senses of adventure and humor.

Trish Stefanko, the assistant farm manager, and I provided supervision and worked with them harvesting, transplanting and weeding.

I find it appalling to think that just 18 months ago, the kids we interacted with in work and conversation at the farm would have been warehoused in a juvenile correctional facility, lacking support and at greater risk of drifting further into crime and high-risk behaviors both in jail and when they completed their sentences.

Small, intensive programs like this (and their staff) need to be better funded and expanded upon.

For kids and teenagers, the farm is a big experiential learning opportunity, and a place where they can experience no small amount of adversity. At the farm, the girls were followed everywhere by dragonflies, peed on by toads when they tried to pick them up, startled by snakes, surprised to see all the variations of vegetables beyond what appears on grocery shelves, learned to tell the difference between dog and coyote scat, observed birds, handled grubs, threw worms on each other, and were swarmed over by biting flies.

Trish and I used these experiences to try to teach about the relationships between these creatures (“Don’t swat at the dragonflies when they swoop around you. They are busy eating the biting flies”) and the food.

They also received “farm homework:” After each visit, we sent them home with a basket of vegetables—the more obscure and unusual the better—the idea being that they would be challenged to learn new cooking skills and new vegetables that weren’t a part of their diet (they live in a dormitory setting and must cook for each other). We also donated a CSA cookbook.

The big hits this year were raw tomatillos and kale. Though Heirloom Harvest is not a nonprofit charity, the time, labor and effort we put into working with kids like these is part of what you pay for when you join Heirloom Harvest.

New for 2007: Live-in farm apprentices

I am in the process of moving into an old farmhouse here in Westborough. The house has an extra room that will allow me to host live-in farm apprentices.

Apprenticeships allow aspiring young organic farmers to gain experience working on different kinds of farms at different stages of business development all over the Northeast. If you have a single-bed frame or two in the basement or attic that you would like to donate to a good cause, I would appreciate it, and you would be supporting a good cause. Bedsprings and mattresses are ok too (as long as you don't have bedbugs). Contact me at farmer@heirloomharvestcsa.com.

Pipes Dreamed

We completed the irrigation pipe installation that runs to the back field. We are looking forward to rotating more planting next year back to that area. Rotating crops is important to allow fields to “rest,” a process in which natural processes return nutrients to the soil while fields are not being cultivated. A lot of farms in the Boston region don’t have enough land to do proper rotation, so they wind up adding a lot of amendments to the soil to make up for that, including adding cow, horse, chicken and chicken manure. We are fortunate to have as much land as we do have, which makes us more unusual in being able to apply our energy elsewhere.

New face

Sunday, a new farmhand started. Scott Lodzieski is a graduate of the organic farming program at UC Santa Cruz; he will be with us the rest of the season.

Onion Time

The onions in this week’s earlier blog pictures are red sweet onions and white sweet onion. They are not storage onions, so members will want to use them within a month of receiving them in a share. They are being cured right now in the open greenhouse with fans circulating the air around them, which is a process that will increase their storage life a little bit. You want to store them in a cool dry place. If they haven’t been properly cured, they could rot sooner, but they should be pretty well cured by the time people get them.

More to Come

Trish Stepanko gives lettuce seedlings and other baby greens a soaking in the greenhouse.

Reminder: Membership payments

We’re coming into the peak of the season, but we regret that some members have not yet completed their payments to us for the vegetables we provide. If you haven’t yet had the opportunity to complete your subscription fee, please do so as soon as you can.

Rain Starting

We’ve planted out the first rounds of tomatoes and potatoes. We direct-seeded the bush beans, and we are erecting the netting trellises for the peas to grow up. This year, weather and farm variables permitting, we are going to have sugar snap peas, shelling peas, and snow peas. Snow peas are new this year: They have a flatter pod, and are typically used in stir fry, when you cook them. They’re also sweet enough to be eaten right off the vine.

As for the first pickup, we can’t of course, make any promises, but we are hoping for the first week of June. The plants are running a little late; they’re sulky right now because of the cool weather.

The heavy rain has not caused us any harm. We have been doing pretty well because we have good drainage except at the far back at the back edge of the field next to the forest. There’s a shady enclosed one-acre plot that juts out into the swamp there. It’s sheltered from the wind, and members wouldn’t typically go there because it’s not in the you-pick area, ever. We do have some crops back there already, but it seems to have weathered the soupy soil back there. We’ve picked things that don’t mind the water, like lettuce.