CSA / News

GEE CREEK FARM 2011 – WHAT’S NEW

We are very happy to announce the opening of our 2011 season. We are now taking applications for subscriptions to our farm's CSA program. If you are new to buying your veggies and fruit through a CSA and want to find out more please look through this CSA section to learn more about this innovative way to buy the fresh local organic produce while also doing so much more good at the same time.

We plan to build on our successes and make this season even better! To the many of you who supported our farm last year, thank you! We have made some adjustments to our CSA program and our business model. These changes are a result of trial and error and listening to you our members. We are grateful for all the feedback we receive and we try to implement your suggestions.

2010 was very difficult year weather wise. Spring weather particularly had very low temps and lots of rain and we got on the ground late. We had the coldest and rainiest spring since 1888! Then the heat came fast and irrigation needs were on us earlier than usual, just as we were trying to get the early planting caught up. Then the weeds came in force. We managed to make good crops despite the cool weather during the summer. But it was trying and stressful. This is one of the challenges of farming. To help us this year we hope to have a few field tunnels in place which should moderate weather conditions even if the outside temps are low. We are hoping also that our mill products and value added products will give us a safety valve so to speak for any unforeseen weather glitches we might experience in the spring.

We will try to move again to using more farm interns this year. There has been a call for these positions and we like the idea of training folks in the skills of organic agriculture. We hope to open the farm up to larger segments of the population and facilitate skills transfer to the next generation.

We continue onward with farm experiments. We developed a novel tape winding machine that we hope to market to other farmers. We hope this machine will encourage farmers to reuse their drip tapes and for other farmers to consider using drip irrigation which can save significant amounts of water over traditional irrigation methods. We started more value added products to our retail offerings and will be hopefully adding more retail outlets. We hope to add field tunnels for season extension. We plan to experiment with more diversified herbs planting and flowers too. We will plan on adding some ground for a bigger pumpkin patch if we can get more water. We are excited about this diversification as a way to make the farm more profitable and add more jobs for our community. Many value added products currently available in local grocery stores are produced far away. On average the food we eat (not including your CSA share!) travels 1500 miles from where it was produced to get to the local store. We think that there just might be a market for fresh, locally produced foods. We hope to record our successes, failures and observations so we can pas along our experiences to others. Please wish us luck!
Farm Day.

One effort we would certainly like to cooperatively organize is farm visit days. Sadly the difficult season had us playing catch up to such a great extent that we could not get ahead enough to have a break in work to get this off the ground. We hope to enlist the help of members to assist us this year to make this happen. We think it is great to have the members here to see the work that we do to raise your food. We love to teach folks about farming and what organic agriculture is all about. We hope our farm family members will step up and help us put these together so that we can enjoy and appreciate the beauty of our working organic farm. We are so blessed to live in one of the most beautiful places on Earth her in the Pacific Northwest. Our beautiful mountains and forested hills looks particularly spectacular with the under story of multicolored vegetable crops. If these farm visits days and picnics sound interesting to you, please consider helping us organize them. Look for announcements about these in the newsletter.
A big year is ahead for us all. Share in the harvest of renewal and rebirth as we, together move toward a more sustainable path to growing food and health. We look forward to seeing you all soon.
Peace,

Gee Creek Farm Community