Late Winter Lull

Whoa it’s been a while.

But after all this is a farm blog and our farm in February isn’t much to write about, at least not yet. Granted we could be posting pictures of snow-covered garlic and spreadsheet screen shots but to be honest we’re enjoying our winter recess.

So here we are in Cleveland in February: seeds ordered and stored in a cold closet, planting schedules calculated and re-calculated, a foot of snow still on the ground.

And I’m beginning to get a little stir-crazy.

So to break the spell we’ve made a couple of acquisitions and started a few projects that we hope will make this year’s efforts to scale up a little easier.

First we finally found a truck cap that fits our trusty ‘96 Nissan pickup. No longer will we suffer the embarrassment of being the only farmers market vendor to roll in on a rainy day without one. But more important than weather protection, we’ll now be able to stack our bins two-high, effectively doubling the amount of produce we can bring to market. Cha-ching!

Second, we bought another reach-in cooler off of craigslist – this one from a pizza shop fire sale. Ideally we would be building a CoolBot walk-in in our basement or garage, but alas we rent both our house and our post-harvest garage so used reach-ins are an inexpensive – yet less efficient – way to go. Doubling our cooling capacity means that we can stretch out our harvest work across the week and keep everything cool for our Saturday market.

Third, we built a simple screen table for washing and drying the harvest. For only $40 in materials and about an hour of labor it’s a good investment that will give us more space to spray-wash root vegetables, drip-dry greens, etc.

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