Update, with Squash

Time for an update!

My ICF rotation just finished, and I think I took a lot away from working with such a large farm. (They're nearly 50 acres, and serve a 500 member CSA with about 10 full time employees.) Crop rotations and management practices, harvesting and washing, IPM and weeding. Seeing the efficiencies of working at that size was interesting too. Would I want a 500 member CSA? Probably not, but both of the head farmers there said, when they were starting out, they had that same answer. And I can see the benefits of having a large CSA: a larger member pool, at least at this farm, cultivates a sense of community and activity that a smaller, 20 member CSA might not. People hang out after they pick up their farm shares, children play in the lawn, people go out to pick their own beans, flowers, or raspberries. There's also the benefit of providing really healthy, fresh food to more people, and at affordable prices, even to lower-income families via worker shares. It's worth thinking about, at the very least.

Now I'm on to my next 5-week rotation: marketing! This will entail managing our farmers market and our farm stand (soon to be located on UVM's campus, outside the library). It'll mean harvesting, washing, and packing produce. It'll mean finding strategies to sell our produce, via flyers, the internet, and word of mouth. We'll also be taking a variety of field trips to businesses and farms, and I'll be summoning my long-lost math skills for keeping tabs on our costs, profits, labor, etc. This is much more the "how to run a business" side of farming, which I think I'm really going to enjoy.

Lastly, the farm is awash with zucchini and summer squash! We have so much produce out there now, I'm sure we won't be in any want of things to sell come our Thursday market.

Zucchini, for those that don't know, is incredibly fast growing. Harvesting at the grow site takes place every other day: we pick anything that's the size of your hand or larger. Those 3-inch zucchini that look adorable today will grow to the size of a baseball bat within a couple days if left unpicked.

We've also got plenty of winter squash coming right along! One of our pumpkins is already bigger than my head (even as swollen as it is, with all this farming information!). There's also some hefty sized acorn squash out there too. All this intense heat is really moving the season right along! Can't wait for the tomatoes to turn, although I've been enjoying more than one cherry variety already. Yum!