The Harvest Bee Blog

Mother Nature, oh how you humble us all. In yoga class last night, taught by one of our CSA members, Bettina, a very insightful and totally relevant story about a weed and a tree was shared by her and it totally resonated with me both personally and with regards to farming. The gist of the story entailed an arrogant tree looking down upon a humble weed, with the tree stating that because he was older, stronger, and better he did not believe the weed belonged in his space. Unsurprisingly, Mother Nature came along and wiped out the foundation of the tree and down that tree went while the weed survived. With the obvious notion of the resiliency of weeds in organic farming aside, the message that really sinks in is that whether its farming or life, in general, how futile do we seriously become when we waste so much time on wrongfully assuming we have so much more power or control than we really do? (I am sure many of us have relatives and/or friends who just experienced the blizzard that just rolled through the Northeast and they can surely attest to who really is in control). Back to farming and Mother Nature...while this mix of rain, wind, cold, warm, etc has not completely stopped our farming pursuits it has definitely slowed it. The wind over the last two weeks effected the plants by uprooting many of the peppers and eggplant plants that we have so patiently been waiting to blossom. Those plants that had started to blossom, including the tomatoes, the wind blew many of those blossoms off the limbs. The amount of rain, including the rain that is coming down as this letter is being written and what we expect to fall into tomorrow, is not causing any flooding issues, but it is stressing the plants out due to the lack of sun/water balance. Despite these shortcomings, many rows were vigorously replanted these past two weeks and the uprooted plants were staked up and hopefully, will reroot even stronger! And a very bright sign for the future...all of the potatoes that were sown a few weeks ago seemed to have sprouted in their beds so, that should be a nice treat come early March, we hope! Much more in the fields is coming along, too. We hope fennel, lettuce heads, swiss chard, stronger kale varieties, and scallions will be ready shortly among other vegetable varieties. Furthermore, with the addition of a bounty of mature fruit trees this past week, we intend to be sharing the harvests of these trees with all of you as we approach summer. (More on this later....but essentially, even if these fruit trees produce after the last week of CSA shares are distributed, we will be offering you free shares of the fruit as they come along as a sincere token of gratitude for your support this season). As for this week's distributions, it will truly be a farmer's choice. Rather than include the same crops in every share this week we will be picking and choosing from a wide variety of crops so that each share will be different from the next. The reason for this is to try not to stress one crop or another too much while we work through these crazy weather patterns. If you have any questions on anything in your shares please feel free to ask. Those of you picking up at Juicelation will all be getting the same contents and they will have the list to explain what those contents are. If you are picking up at the farm or at the market your contents will be explained there. We truly appreciate your patience and hope your are getting a valuable experience in farming...organic farming...if not anything else. We do hope you are enjoying the food itself, as well. Many of you have expressed a sincere enjoyment of trying new, local/native food varieties and we think that is wonderful and really lays the basis for why we love the CSA, The more people, chefs, farmers and all other local foodies can work together to understand and support food that the soil enjoys producing relative to our growing zone the more we all benefit in the end. Stay dry and warm, drink some good coffee, and we can't wait to see you all at pick-ups! Onen, The Bees P.S: Juicelation will be making some awesome vegetarian pulled pork tacos with some jackfruit we provided to them this week. Definitely consider trying them out...just another example of people attempting to do some pretty creative work with local, non-typical food varieties.