Happy Holidays from all of us at Terra Firma Farm

This week will be our final delivery for 2015.  You can look for your next Terra Firma CSA box the first week of January.

Farming the way that we do offers few opportunities for down time.  We are constantly harvesting, packing and planting.  And any time we are not, there’s a long backlog of other tasks:  weeding, maintenance, pruning, cleaning, planning.

The short days of late December offer us a natural window to shut the farm down.  The rest of the year, two weeks is too long; many if not most of our crops go from being “almost ready” to past their prime in 14 days or less.  But few if any of our crops actually grow or ripen at year end, between the limited light and the alternating frosty, rainy and foggy weather.  Even the weeds don’t grow much.

We didn’t get as much rain as we would have liked this fall. But the flip side of the dry weather was that we were able to get a tremendous amount done — planting lots of vegetables as well as soil-building cover crops.  This puts us in great shape for keeping your boxes chock full of good stuff once the predicted El Niño storms start hitting in January and into spring.

The farm shuts down completely this year at the end of the day Friday, which should coincide nicely with the first real sustained wet period of the winter.  Holiday travel won’t be much fun, but when you work on a farm, there is nothing quite as relaxing as not having to go to work when it’s raining.