Winter at Powisset Farm

Meryl paints a pretty picture in words, below, of her home office (a.k.a. her kitchen) and the view outside. Keep reading, though. Sh’s in full-fledged planning mode–reviewing, assessing, number-crunching and creating the new season’s crop plan.

Here I am, sitting at my kitchen table, in the farm house on Powisset Farm. Seed catalogues are stacked all around me in three piles, each a dozen high. The snow is two-feet high and pristine outside the sliding doors leading from my kitchen to the back forty acres of the farm. The coffee pot is half-full, and my favorite little white mug with a royal blue stripe around the rim is luke-warm, needing a refill. Three documents are open on my computer screen:  ‘crop plan 2010’, ‘crop plan 2011’ and ‘master seed order 2011.’ Welcome to January at Powisset Farm.

It is in these first few weeks of January that I, along with my assistant farm manager, figure out our master crop plan for the upcoming season. Several weeks in December and a few long days in January are spent reviewing the successes and challenges of the last season, specifically, as they relate to the crops that we produced. Crop by crop, all 65 of them, we go down the list,  discussing what varieties we liked, what we want to grow more of, less of. We talk about how we might want to experiment with different ways of planting, cultivating and harvesting. We review specific moments throughout the season, discussing when and why that particular row of beets was super weedy, or when that cauliflower was the best we’ve ever grown. Once we share all the information we can about the past season, it’s time to start creating the ultimate plan for the upcoming season, which we always hope will be the best ever!

The first thing we do, before ordering seeds and choosing our favorite varieties from those stacks of catalogues, is figure out how much of each crop we want in order to meet the needs of our summer CSA, winter CSA and farm stands. I’ll use carrots to explain how we get to that number.

At Powisset Farm, our summer CSA program runs for 21 weeks. We have decided that we would like to have carrots available to our CSA members for 16 of those 21 weeks. We will have about 320 CSA shares this year. We want each member to be able to receive 1 bunch of carrots for 16 weeks. Therefore, we need to produce 5120 bunches of carrots this season for our summer CSA program (320 bunches of carrots x 16 weeks). We use a similar equation to figure out how much we need for our winter CSA and farm stands. This season we need 1240 bunches for our winter CSA, and 800 bunches for our farm stands. Then we add those three numbers together in order to figure out what the total number of carrots is that we need. We then multiply that by a margin of error of 20%–because we know that we always have to plan for something to go wrong! After all of the math, we find that we need to grow 8592 bunches of carrots to reach the goals we set for this season.

After we get the total yield needed from each crop, we go on to figure out what this means as far as how many row feet, beds and acreage of each vegetable that we will be growing this season. Next, we go back through our crop plan and make sure that we really want to grow that many carrots! By the end of January, seeds should be ordered and varieties selected. So, even as snow covers our fields and seed catalogues clutter our desks, the picture of our upcoming season is beginning to become clear to us.

Powisset Farm nestled in snow