Greeting and welcome back for another exciting season at Green Earth Harvest! Spring is always an exciting time in the agricultural world, and here on the farm, this year is certainly no exception. Despite the cool, wet weather we have had this season, in contrast to the warm dry spring last year, we are doing our best keeping the produce growing! For context, cool damp springs are the farmer’s greatest foe, quantifiably so. During last winter’s ‘Farm Follies’ bracket at the organic vegetable grower conference, organic farmers across the country voted for their biggest farm challenges, and cold wet springs came out on top, so it’s official!
The hardest thing for farmers to work with is cool damp weather in spring, and this is for several re 
asons, only one of which is comfort. When the weather is cool, plants and seeds grow more slowly and sporadically. With greenhouses, we can mitigate temperature issues easily with artificial heat. However, the cloudy days that come with the regular rains still limit the sun exposure to our plants, which leaves them yearning for more photosynthate. After all, plants use the sunlight to feed themselves and their soil-borne partners. With cool weather and cloudy days, even the greenhouses slow down.
In our fields, the issue is not as much with the cold as it is the wet. There are several crops that can be planted in cool weather; brassica crops, potatoes, onions, to name a few, but to get them off to a healthy start we need to work in cover crop residue from last season and till our beds so that the soil texture allows us to plant successfully. The trouble? Wet fields can’t be worked. Working wet fields results in compaction and un-plantable soil texture reminiscent of gravel. Until it dries up, we have to keep our tractors out of the fields or we will cause lasting damage. It’s a challenging situation for sure, but one that every farmer before us has lived through, as will we!
What helps us make it through the more challenging aspects of farming is knowing that we are backed by a kind, caring community of supporters who let us know week-in and week-out that our work makes a positive difference in their lives, in your life! Knowing this, feeling this support, keeps us motivated and engaged so that we are ready and willing to tackle any situation we find ourselves in, even a cold wet spring!
You may have heard of some of the other exciting things going on here this year, and it all goes back to the support of this community. Through a combination of private and
corporate donations, we are outfitting our farmers with modern tools and equipment to keep things going as smoothly as possible. In addition, we are constructing a new pole-barn to house all of our new and old equipment, while also providing us with the infrastructure to better store our food and germinate our seeds. All of these additions seem crazy to us, it’s SO much! But, it is so much good, and we are all well-aware that these donations to our program, the fact that we filled our Spring and Main Seasons so quickly, despite expanded our capacity — all say to us the same thing; not only is our work needed, but it is very much appreciated by everyone involved. For these reasons, and for other more personal reasons for each of us, we are grateful for this opportunity to provide the community with a valuable resource, fresh local food, and for us to be able to do so in a way that protects natural resources and preserves a way of life that we hope to see thriving far into the distant future. We couldn’t do it without you, keep snackin’!
~Farmer Russ
