With Thanksgiving in the rear-view mirror, we are now speeding towards the end of 2024 and the year-end holidays. Terra Firma’s final CSA delivery of this year will be on Friday, December 20th. The farm will be closed until January 6th and our first deliveries of 2025 will be on January 8th.
If you’re not travelling for the holidays, you can use our special-order program to load up on extra produce before we close — for entertaining or just to keep your household well fed during our break. We will be sending out an email with availabilities for the special orders next week, and we ask that you get them back to us by next Friday, December 13th.
I hope everyone enjoyed a safe and restful holiday. With the ground here still damp from the recent, generous pre-Thanksgiving rains, we’ve entered a period of warm, sunny afternoons followed by clear, cold nights that bring us copious frost most mornings. When the sun hits it, it is as bright and blinding as snow.
While we grow numerous crops during the summer that are killed by even a light frost — tomatoes, zucchini, corn, green beans — all of the crops we grow in the winter are “frost tolerant”. But that doesn’t mean we can harvest them while they are covered with frost.
Harvesting crops that grow above ground generally requires actually cutting through the stem with a knife: Lettuce, Broccoli, Spinach, Arugula and other leafy greens.. But the plants are mostly water, and if the water is even partially frozen, they are hard as a rock. If we did manage to cut through that frozen stem, the leaves of the plant would wilt as soon as they thawed. The spinach, for example, would have the same exact consistency as frozen spinach.
Once the living plant thaws out, however, it regains its turgidity and can once again be cut with a knife and harvested as a fresh vegetable. Once the sun rises, it slowly warms the plants and melts the frost. The plants are undamaged by the cold, and the vegetables are often more tender and flavorful than they are when it’s warmer out.
We only grow a few crops that can be harvested on frosty mornings: Leeks, Citrus, Carrots and Beets. So we start work later than normal and focus on those tasks while we wait for the other crops to thaw out.
While the frost we have been experiencing lately is a minor inconvenience, a “Hard Freeze” is a different story. That happens when temperatures drop below 32 degrees for 4 or more hours. A hard freeze causes varying degrees of damage to all the crops we grow this time of year other than root crops. When all the water in a piece of fruit or a vegetable plant freezes, it often “explodes” due to the expansion of the frozen water. In citrus, this causes the fruit to dry out inside. In leafy greens, it makes the plant droopy, wilty or otherwise low quality.
In our area, hard freezes tend to result from macro weather events such as an incursion of dry, continental air from Canada or the Arctic. They most commonly occur in December in drought years, and we have lost numerous crops when they happen including mandarins, broccoli, cabbage and celery. We can mitigate them somewhat with irrigation, but we can’t prevent them from happening. In the weeks and months after those events, we fall back on storage crops and root vegetables to keep your CSA boxes full, and even then it can be a struggle.
For now, I feel that the generous rainfall we received in November is keeping the cold manageable. And there are no obvious signs of a dangerous weather pattern right now. If we can make it through the month of December, our risks of a damaging freeze crop dramatically — although we have seen one event in January. The vegetables we are harvesting right now are some of the most beautiful I can remember this time of year and I hope you enjoy them.
Thanks,