Author: Farmer Greg

Here are yet another ten. Look at Reason #1:

 Local veggies and fruits in season are the freshest and most flavorful produce available.

That statement is absolutely true. What you will receive each week in your share from Blackbird Farms has not spent a couple of days on a truck, then another few days in the produce wholesaler’s cooler, and then even more time sitting around at the grocery store. Instead, the vegetables in your share (with the exception of crops that require curing, such as winter squash, garlic, and onions) will be picked that day or, at the most, the day prior.

Thanks so much to all of you who have already subscribed for our 2014 season! I literally could not do this without you. And for those of you still on the fence, please do join us. As I never tire of saying, we have a place at the table waiting for you.

They say your garden never looks so good as it does in January. And they’re right. The memory of last season’s failures are fading, and this seasons failures, blessedly, haven’t happened yet. Everything is perfect, because everything is still potential.

Also, the seed catalogs have been filling the mailbox since early December. With the big winter storm earlier this week, it was a good chance to hunker down, leaf through these little shots of summer, and start piecing together this season’s planting schedule.

On the one hand, reading the catalogs is a lot of fun. In fact, it is something of a gardeners’ tradition to get carried away with their fantastic promises.

But on the other hand, I have to confess that I am little daunted. This season is going to be a bigger deal than ordering a few packets of seed for my backyard plot in town, and a more complicated deal than planning a little one-acre plot of vegetables to sell at market. I have to run a twenty-two week CSA program, and I am not quite sure I know how to do that. Yet.

The encouraging thing is that making the plan seems merely daunting rather than simply impossible. Back when I first was a farm intern, I remember being thoroughly impressed (and totally intimidated) by how the farmer had the whole season sketched out and bounded in a spreadsheet fastened to a clipboard. It seemed like sorcery. Now I know the plan was never as bulletproof as it appeared, and creating the plan is not an act of magic, just work tempered with experience.

Plus, I already have the clipboard.

In case you need more persuading. I especially like Reason #10:

Opening a box of beautiful produce is like getting a present—every week!

Indeed it is. Belonging to a CSA should be a pleasure, something that delights all five senses: the sweet jolt of a sungold cherry tomato, the nubby blue-gray skin of a hubbard winter squash, the crunch of a cool slicing cucumber, the sharp scent of fresh dill, the multi-hued palate of heirloom peppers. All this, and much more. I do hope you will consider joining Blackbird Farms for the 2014 season.

A quiet New Year’s Eve here at the farm last night. No fireworks or noisemakers. No carousing. Nothing loud or flashy. Only four deer drifting through the yard just after midnight, quiet as moonrise, pawing through the snowcrust for the last of the seedpods fallen from the big black locust tree.

Despite the stiff wind blowing the snow nearly sideways, four nesting pairs of cardinals perched at the feeder this morning, bright daubs of red against the pine tree’s frosted boughs.

Once again, we mark the pause at the bottom of the year. With the farm so still, I can almost feel the earth tilt its face back toward the sun, just as I, in this silence, bend my mind toward spring.

For a while now, I have been keeping my eye out for an old Planet Jr. push seeder. When I got word that a used farm equipment dealer up in Grant had a couple in stock, I made a point of going up there this week and buying one.

The Planet Jr. is a drill-type planter, a category of mechanical implements that allow the farmer to sow seeds in designated rows at specific rates and depths, which reduces waste and increases crop yields. (Thank you, Jethro Tull — no, the other one.) The Planet Jr. version is simple and effective, and the scale of the push model is correct for the size of this farm.

The Planet Jr. and other tools manufactured by S. L. Allen and Company were originally targeted to market gardeners and “one-horse” farms in the early years of the twentieth century. As the scale of agriculture increased after World War II, the market for these tools steadily shrank, though it never disappeared. Planet Jrs. continued to be manufactured — you can still buy new ones today — and the original design has remained essentially unchanged.

As smaller-scale farming rebounds, these old seeders are making something of a comeback. Many of the growers I know swear by them. I will use mine to plant crops such as greens and beans, beets and carrots, turnips and radishes and the like, and it will be far more efficient than doing so by hand and hoe.

Push seeders like the Planet Jr. belong to a class of tools — including wheel hoes and over-the-shoulder broadcast seeders — that modern agriculture has left behind but that remain effective for the small-scale grower. And the old ones were built to last. You can still find them around and, with a bit of elbow grease, put them back to work. I have to confess that I like these tools not only because they still work but also because they remind me that sometimes latest and greatest, new and improved does not always beat old-school tried and true.