Thanksgiving is next week, and as always we are re-arranging our delivery schedule in an effort to get all of our subscribers their boxes prior to the holiday.
— Wednesday deliveries remain unchanged.
— Thursday and Friday boxes will arrive instead on Tuesday of next week, November 22nd.
If you are planning on adding-on to your CSA with items from the TFF Web Store, please get your orders in by midnight this Thursday, November 16th. Thanks to those of you who started your holiday shopping early and are getting orders today.
Wondering what is in next week’s boxes? Here’s the link to the list (subject to minor changes).
Media outlets right now have articles and videos about “How to Start preparing for Thanksgiving ahead of time” to make the holiday itself less stressful. Here at Terra Firma, we also start early. Just as it’s daunting to cook a week’s worth of food in a single day, it’s challenging to cram an entire week’s worth of harvest into two days. We actually start planning our harvest for the holiday in early November, and work our way back. Conveniently, several of the more popular Thanksgiving produce items have already been harvested (winter squash, potatoes) while others are fairly durable and can be picked a few days in advance (carrots, celery).
The weather this time of year always poses challenges. While we hope and expect to get more rain soon, we are thrilled to have sunshine in the forecast from now until next Tuesday, and the ground has dried out from the storms earlier in the month. But when the sky is clear here this time of year, it gets cold enough to freeze the crops most nights. It’s usually not enough to damage them: our winter crops can survive temperatures down to 27 degrees or so. But green vegetables — mostly what is growing right now — can’t be harvested when they are frozen. So we have to wait until the sun rises high enough to thaw them out. We do a crazy dance on cold, clear mornings between crops that aren’t frozen — mandarins, leeks — and ones that are once they thaw out.
And speaking of holiday deliveries, we have decided to limit our mid-winter vacation this year to a single week — the last week of December. We will resume deliveries on Wednesday, January 3rd.