If you are wondering why you are seeing the Terra Firma CSA newsletter in your email box on Tuesday instead of Wednesday, well, it’s Thanksgiving week. In case you needed another reminder, it also means that you will need to pick up your box TODAY if you normally pick up on Thursday or Friday.
Thanks to all TFF subscribers who are making our produce part of your Thanksgiving week plans. We’ve done our best to plan, pick and pack a nice variety of produce that should fit into your meals this week whether or not you are participating in the holiday. We had quite a bit of wet weather to contend with this year to get this done, and while we greatly appreciate the rain we received, the timing wasn’t the best. But it could have been much worse.
Just a few miles to our north and west, the Atmospheric River (AR) dumped an enormous amount of water. For example, the mountains on the west side of Lake Berryessa received more than a foot of water during 72 hours of continuous rainfall. That amount would have flooded our fields, which we were still irrigating until fairly recently, and dramatically impeded our ability to harvest anything at all. The timing with the upcoming holiday would have been really bad.
It really helped that we got a heads up about the rains 5 days or so before they arrived. This time of year, we take any forecast of rain seriously. Probably about half the items we grow during the winter cannot be harvested effectively during or immediately after rainfall, and it’s just about impossible to do much of anything outdoors during a big storm. We do our best to work around the weather: preparing in advance and re-scheduling around it.
We ended up in a Goldilocks position on the southern edge of the AR, where we were treated to mostly off-and-on light rain over three days with long breaks between. While the ground is soaked and muddy, we had no flooding and very little wind. When the rain started last Tuesday night, we were below average for the season but including today’s drizzle, we are now well above average. For us, the storm was 100% beneficial. Our field crew worked on Thursday and Saturday in mostly-dry weather to get everything done, and have this week off.
Our packing crew is super busy though. Not only do we have to squeeze 5 days worth of work into 2 days, but it’s one of our busiest sales weeks of the year. Luckily, we have a nice facility with indoor and fully covered areas for them to do the critical work of washing, sorting and packing all our produce. It’s not warm, but at least it’s dry. And the very short week means they’ll get a nice long break for the holiday.
It’s also a crazy busy week for deliveries. Our drivers will be battling holiday week traffic to delivery 4 days worth of deliveries in 2 days. All three of our trucks will be out on the road tomorrow to make that happen.
Everyone who works at Terra Firma deserves a round of applause for doing a great job in advance of the holiday and for getting us through another season. As always, we appreciate your continued support of our farm and wish you and your families a safe and enjoyable holiday.
Thanks,
Pablito