Our first crop of the season: ASPARAGUS!
Our season starts with ASPARAGUS!
We LOVE asparagus for many reasons. First, it is a delicious vegetable (even though it makes your pee smell weird https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/why-does-asparagus-make-your-pee-smell ). Second, it is a higher value crop that brings in cash flow when the farm needs it for spring start up expenses such as seeds, fertilizers, soil amendments, increased labor. Third it is a lot of exercise; every day we walk the fields taking a few steps, bend down and cut a mature stalk or two, then a few more steps, repeat, repeat, repeat hundreds of times over about 4 acres of asparagus. And here is a fun fact: when it is warm and rainy, sometimes we have to pick it twice in a day – it grows that fast! But the flip side of that is the cold. When we get a frost or cold spell, it kicks back our production to the point the stalks must start over, often leaving us a few days until we can harvest again, and that is money lost. Farmer Dick says he does not need to go to Las Vegas – all his gambling is done here on the farm!
Every day we are watering plants in the greenhouse and seeding more and more vegetables. Some of the cool weather crops such as kale, broccoli, lettuces and potatoes will soon be planted in the field. In addition to harvesting asparagus, we are harvesting garlic greens, shallot greens, scallions, arugula, mizuna, baby turnips, spinach and baby lettuces. The need for labor here on the farm is real. Let me rephrase: The need for GOOD labor here on the farm is real. Over the years we have burned through many workers who “need a job” but demonstrated they just wanted to earn money and not work for it. We will hire good workers for even one or two days a week if that is their availability. Farming is challenging because of the physicality, working in a wide range of weather, nonstop nature of work, and crops do not wait. If someone decides not to show up for work, the crops do not stop growing and wait for them to get back to harvest; it puts more on their co-workers. It is an everyday deal. So if you think you can meet the challenge to be a “Farming Ironman/woman”, send us your resume via email and tell us why you want to work on a farm. It will be one of the best workouts you can get!
Farmer Dick is also busy right now manufacturing Root Crop Washers, something he’s done since the early 1980’s when he designed a machine to quickly muscle through the cleaning of crops like carrots, beets, potatoes, parsnips, turnips, herbs, herb roots and more. He has them working on farms from Alaska to Florida, even internationally in Bermuda and the Bahamas. He is currently working on one for a farmer in northern Maine. When the customer asked how much delivery would cost, Farmer Dick replied, “Well, do you want me to do it or have somebody else do the delivery? If I do it, my wife doesn’t like me driving alone and that means a hotel overnight, lobster dinner for her plus an expensive stop at the LL Bean store. It will be more cost you more.” So you can guess the response. As the farmwife sees it, she deserves a “working vacation trip” every once in awhile!
We are planning on improvements to our infrastructure this year, and work is already being done. We are going to run Town water to our AirBnB Cabin, upgrade the electrical, add a mobile home to the structure number for farmworker housing. Out at our pond we are adding functioning bathrooms, and we are setting up a Glamping (glamor camping) site as well as tenting sites. A lot of it will be rustic, but that is the “farm way”. We are hoping to have more Farm-to-Table dinners this summer in our pavilion and perhaps rent it out for private events. There is always a lot going on here at the farm…just ask our staff!