Hi there folks!
You’ve heard a lot about the joys of life on Oz Farm through vague descriptions of sunsets and redwood forests and friends around the table. However, I’m going to flip the switch to shine a light on the dark side, behind-the-scenes problems and mistakes that take up a lot of our energy every day and can keep me up at night. I think it’s important to share the realtime challenges with you as you have signed up for the ride with us and unknowingly experience the impact of each success and failure in the fields through the contents of your box each week. This is the really juicy and sweet part of the CSA model, where we make this agreement together to roll through the highs and lows together. You’ve lent your trust and upfront financial support and we’ve given our best effort to grow wholesome, diversified, beautiful food for you. As new farm managers we came in kind of blind, and have been feeling our way slowly in the darkness over the course of this season. Right up close each challenge can seem catastrophic, but with a little perspective looking back on the season it appears more like a comedy of errors. I hope you’re laughing with us.
First, early in the season before apprentices arrived, we spent a month trying to gopher/rat/bird-proof the greenhouse tables as mysterious night prowlers took out thousands of plant starts under the cover of darkness. It was devastating to see the continuous loss, morning after morning, which hit us hard especially in terms of flowers and early produce.
Then it flooded, water logging the fields and making for a very late start - so we couldn’t plant all those eaten starts anyhow! We optimistically thought the flood might lower the gopher population (which it may have done short-term) but woooodoggy they’re back with a vengeance!! They have recently destroyed about 50% of mid-summer plantings of lettuce and brassicas, which is cutting into our autumn supply of greens and broccoli. What the gophers are not pulling underground to eat (they suck whole plants down into their tunnels), the deer are browsing from overhead! They love to chomp the tops off of fennel, dig into every lettuce heart they come across, and even browse those bitter chicories that you’re probably thankful to the deer for eating so no more giant escarole goes into the csa boxes ;).
We built temporary hoop houses in the spring for the tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant. Two out of three have survived the coastal wind, but our poor peppers and eggplant are exposed and not producing without the greenhouse effect. We miss you friends!
Our summer plantings of brassicas- meaning kales, chard, broccoli, cauliflower, etc - have been impacted by an explosive overpopulation of flea beetles this season, which nibble lacy holes in the leaves, stunting the plants’ growth. As a certified organic farm we do not use insecticides, and are limited in our response, which has mainly been to spray regularly with a mixture of soap and neem oil. We are hopeful that the population will decline over the winter and we can implement more proactive strategy next season, using cloth or net covering to protect the plants from insect damage.
One of the greatest and latest challenges that we’ve been facing has to do with water - first noticing how quickly we were running out and the related crop stress. As you can imagine, the underground water infrastructure and plumbing at Oz is somewhat mysterious, having been cobbled together over the decades by many different people with varying skill sets and visions (kind of like everything here). For the past couple of months, water has been seeping out of the system to the extent that we have had almost no ability to store the water pumped out of a well when the light is on the solar panels during the day. During this last week, some of the crew have been digging in search of the broken pipe, 24” under a hard-packed road. Due to continuous weddings and retreats on the property, we are unable to use large machinery to dig up the line and locate the leak. We are still deep in the problem-solving on this one, running all the irrigation we can during daylight hours on the annual crops and trusting the deep root systems of the perennial trees to survive the summer without irrigation.
These are just a few of the countless facets of mystery and mistake that we have encountered over the past months that have shaped the contents of your csa boxes. Some weeks it’s on the lighter side when available crops are limited, and some weeks the box is heavy with abundance. We try to balance it out with confidence that we have your full support in our effort to grow the soil, grow community, and grow good food to feed your life energy. Thank you for your trust and understanding in bearing with us through the ebbs and flows of the season. May we remember that every challenge is an invitation to learn, grow, and respond with grace and stability in the current of ever-changing conditions.
Katy, Farm Manager
