Friday, April 17, 2009

First Shares Delivered ... With a little help from our friends

Our 2009 CSA members received their first shares of the season today! Due to the two week gap between when the CSA starts and the first markets open we are offering home delivery. All 20 Shares were delivered in just under 3 hours. CSA members this week received Spring Onions, Salad Greens, and a few brave souls took us up on the offer to also receive dried chilies from last season. I really enjoyed meeting our new customers for the first time. There is no greater feeling for a grower to be able to shake hands with the consumer.

Due to numerous events with our first season growing on our new site we were unable to deliver the quantity we were hoping for the first week. On Wednesday we realized that no matter how hard we stared at them our greens were not going to be ready for delivery this week. Thankfully our good friends at Victory Farm were able to provide us with salad greens to balance out our first weeks delivery. Victory Farm is located in Hanover county and only a dozen or so miles away by way the crow flys. The amount of space they have under greenhouse is quadruple ours and they have literally ten times the years of production experience. Victory are currently providing for a 400 member CSA doubling their size from last year. We have the greatest respect for their natural growing process and are deeply in their debt for their assistance this week.

We are hopeful for Broccoli Raab and Arugula next week, but late April frosts are not helping our progress. We will be adding large quantities of compost to what will soon be our tomato and squash fields and look forward to warmer nights and lots of rain.

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Greenhouse up, Tomatoes in








The green house has been up for a little over a week. The first 200 plus tomatoes were planted last week. The green house tomatoes are a mix of sub arctic plenty and an early producing Italian variety. These are both a traditional red beefsteak varieties. The beds were prepared using the double dug method. The soil in each bed was enriched with a mixture of composted saw dust and a small portion of pearlite. We will be installing irrigation as well as several hundred additional tomatoes this week and are hopeful of a June 1st harvest date.

Change in author

Edible Old Dominion has to sadly announce that our founding blog author has moved on to other projects. Rachael Deane established this blog and has maintained it since it's inception. Her non horticultural perspective has been greatly appreciated by all and will be sorely missed. Rachael will be dedicating more of her time to her first love, land use law. Everyone on the farm wishes her their best, and are looking forward to seeing what this amazing women accomplishes next. Russell Bell will be taking over updates immediately. Russell is the head grower and EOD's founder. Expect more technical updates on the plantings, soil conditions,. and water consumption. Please don’t hesitate to send any questions to Russell care of Farmerrussell@gmail.com.