Improvements for 2022

In January, we sent in our seed orders. It’s a fun challenge to embrace and it allows us to get a wide range of varieties for your dinner table. If you want to learn more about sourcing and how we decide what to plant, click here to read our farm journal post from last January, it’s a good one.

Share Feedback Results

Thanks for your input! 34 shareholders filled out the year-end survey.

“My family loves spending time at the farm and harvesting our own food! It’s also nice to pick the exact amount of food that you need rather than getting a mixed bag with vegetables that might go to waste (which has happened with past CSA shares from other farms). We plan all of our summer and fall meals around what we get from the farm.”

“littleGrasse is a gem of our region and every visit becomes a special highlight of the week, whether because of the peaceful environment or the interactions with the plants, soil and elements or the other community members.”

In 2022, littleGrasse is again committed to creating a place where you have the freedom to come when you want and flexibility to choose which items to take.   

Improvements for the 2022 season

• Printing a larger color map marking the names of each farm field
• Give you a heads up about when the one-time crops, will be coming and noting that it’s a brief opportunity
• Planting more honeynut squash
• Planting habanada peppers, a no heat, fruity version of habanero (thanks Sean!) as well as shishito peppers
• Aiming to distribute potatoes and orange carrots starting earlier in the season
• Less “unusual” greens such as mustard, mizuna and tatsoi and more common greens such as spinach and lettuce. We will still plant a mixed green occasionally with these less common greens but they will not be standalone plantings since they weren’t very popular.
• Planting beans as a single row in the bed rather than double, so picking is easier with more space in aisles

In some cases, we do not make any changes to plantings usually because it is too laborious, or our growing season doesn’t allow it without the use of a lot of plastic/protected growing space. A prime example is that we simply will not have every popular vegetable available continuously throughout the summer. Examples of this are broccoli, asparagus, brussels sprouts and edamame, which will come and go. All we can do is aim to plant enough so if we have a good harvest everyone will get those crops 1-2 times. We learn to savor them when available and then move on to enjoy another crop.

Your favorite crops

The group has spoken and folks love tomatoes, flowers, kale, carrots and spinach! We will continue to plant and tend these important crops 2022.

A couple people mentioned they wished there had been more sweet peppers- us too! Every season is different and we try for a bounty, but it doesn’t always work out. Sweet peppers were our biggest disappointment in 2021. We lost hundreds of plants to late frost, replanted and those plants were not vigorous and succumbed to disease. In 2022, we are planting 5 varieties of sweet pepper.

Results for crops you would like to see more of

Our Response

• Yes, we’ll aim for more potatoes along with some savoy cabbage
• We will never be a Free Choice fruit farm, but there are some crops we hope to have in limited amounts for fun diversity such as elderberries, Dutchess apples, currants and grapes. Gooseberries should be available in snacking amounts. 
• Cauliflower will not be a crop that is part of the free choice share. We love it too, but it takes a LOT of time, nutrients and space for the yield.

Borderline Crops

We asked about several vegetables to see if there was enough interest to grow them for the Free Choice Share

Here’s what you wanted
Yes: Brussels sprouts, radish
Maybe: fennel, turnip, chinese cabbage
No: Collards, kohlrabi, mustard greens, rutabaga, tatsoi

In 2022, we aren’t planting the crops in the “no” line for the Free Choice Shares. We apologize if that is sad news for some, but the upside is that there are still 40+ other vegetables (plus all the herbs and flowers) available.

That’s a wrap for highlights of the share survey. Stay tuned this month for 2022 sign-ups!