Photo: Courtesy of Powisset Farm
Meryl LaTronica
Farm Manager, Powisset Farm
Winter on a farm is something that I’m pretty sure most vegetable farmers look forward to. The winter is, in part, our time of rest. It’s a time when we stop working fourteen-hour days, seven days a week. By December 1, I’m down to about four days a week, eight hours a day. Not a bad life. By the time our hours have diminished, we have also said farewell to most of our seasonal farm crew, leaving just me and my assistant manager to simultaneously “put the farm to bed” for the season and begin the real planning stages for the next.
Like the last four seasons, this period of rest, planning and putting the farm to bed is happening at the same time that our winter CSA is going on. Here at Powisset Farm, and on most farms like us around Massachusetts, we run a winter CSA program. Much like our summer CSA, we have members who participate in buying a “share” of winter vegetables from our farm. The members come to the farm two times, once in November and once in December, to pick up their vegetables. The share is heavy on root crops, winter squash, onions and hearty greens, but we try to include as much diversity as the weather will permit. This year the weather has allowed for quite a lot!
The pick-up days are boisterous, joyful chaos, with families and friends coming back to the farm after being away for a few weeks. There are reuniting hugs between CSA members and crew members, there are smiling children running in and out of the barn and fields, and there are plenty of comments like, ‘how do we still have lettuce out there!’ The weeks leading up to the pick-ups are even more chaotic, as the dwindling farm crew and stoic volunteers pack the cooler with dirt-covered root vegetables, harvesting sometimes 1000 pounds of one vegetable at a time, hauling it into the cooler only to haul it out a week later. Tired backs and knees are spending time in cold soil, and shoulders are working hard not to tense up as we dislodge roots from the earth. Working an eight-hour day in the cold, windy fields, covered in so many layers it’s hard to hear, is more strenuous then those fourteen-hour August marathon days.
Year after year, as our season of growing food gets longer and our time of rest gets shorter and shorter, we have to ask ourselves why we do this. Is it just because we can? Or is it that our community’s commitment to getting their food locally has increased? Our collective desire to rely more on ourselves , to source food from New England as long as we possibly can, has increased exponentially since I became a farmer.
This Saturday is our last winter share pick-up. One of my CSA members has asked me, “Where am I going to get my produce now?” We both know that it may soon be time to wander back to the grocery store, to pick through unappealing items shipped from far-away places. As I observe many of my fellow farmers move to a year-round CSA model, I can’t help but wonder if I will do the same. But I might wait to see how they look in the Spring!
P.S. from Sue: if you’d like to visit Powisset Farm, take a walk and/or say hello to Meryl, tomorrow’s a perfect day! Dec. 4th, noon-4pm, is the farm’s last winter veggie sale. Powisset produce for the having will include potatoes, parsnips, rutabega, onions, leeks, shallots, garlic, winter squash, radishes and more. There will also be local jam, honey, dried flowers, popcorn and a special pottery sale. Straight from Meryl: “Yay!”
Photo: Courtesy of Powisset Farm