One of the most challenging aspects of growing for CSA is that you’ve already sold a product that does not yet exist.  Unlike farmer’s markets, where you can bring whatever you have, CSA customers are expecting a diverse bounty every week.  In principle, CSA customers agree to take some of the risk and weather a bad harvest now and then.   If this happens too often, however, many of your customers will not return next year.

So, as each week of harvests goes by, I find myself with a bit of anxiety over next week’s harvest.  To deal with this, I hold myself to a very regular pattern of succession planting.  I plant broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, and spinach every week.  Every two weeks, I plant snap beans, cilantro/dill/arugula, radish/salad turnip.  Every three weeks it’s carrots, beets, peas, cabbage.  I plant summer squash and cucumbers twice in the season, and I plant one big planting of onions, potatoes, winter squash, brussels sprouts, garlic, and strawberries each year.

So every time I get a bit nervous about next week, I just think about all the successions growing in the field.

Here are pictures of this week’s CSA harvest:

There’s a difference between a farm and a garden. That’s why there are two different names.  It isn’t merely size.  It has to do with the mentality that goes with the space. A garden.  A garden is created, maintained, beautified.  This alone does not separate it from the farm.  The garden may be neglected and from which one may walk away, even during the height of summer, without feeling too much remorse.  It is not a source of income, or rather, not… Read the rest of this article »