2021 Year End Reflection
2021 has been a good year!
There are many aspects of the farm and my life that determine how I feel each season as gone. There’s the actual farm production part (how much did we grow?!), sustainability aspects (personal work-life balance and environmentally and financially), weather, there’s family stuff, Land relations and employee stuff and then there’s CSA members and chef feedback. It’s all good AND it’s a lot to synthesize! But every year in December, I am so grateful that I have the down time to reflect back on the year to give gratitude, assess and plan for the next season. Farming is a constant cycle of learning!
2021 marked over a decade of farming for me and 8 years of running my own CSA. It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long and yet I definitely have felt the most competent in my growing skills than I ever have. I think that shows in the steady increase in production we have seen over the last couple years on similar acreage. It feels balanced; I feel like I am feeding the Land what she needs, I am caring for myself and my employees in a good way and we are literally feeding over 140 families every year between our three CSA share types.
I wake up every morning grateful and feeling lucky to do this work: cultivating an interconnected beneficial system of feeding the Land and feeding People. I am sending you each a big heart-felt hug of appreciation for supporting my small farm. This is how we slowly shift cultural paradigms, through small, simple choices based on love and regeneration.
Much of this really hit home for me this fall in some of the feedback I received in my annual CSA survey. I seriously teared up reading some of these beautiful thoughts. I really felt and remember why I do what I do.
“The quality is unreal and the pick up was convenient.”
“I never realized how many veggies I've just never tried before! I loved getting to try new veggies each week and the surprise of not knowing until the day of.”
“I loved all of the alliums! The radishes/beets were also wonderful and I almost cried after biting into a carrot.”
2021 Highlights:
We grew over 28,000# of produce on just 1 acre for 100 CSA members and local restaurants/businesses over 9 months of the year. That’s 6000# more than 2020 (0.8ac)! With me full time, Julie 3 days/week and Olivia 1 day/week!
We raised our first animals on the farm: 100 meat chickens and 40 laying hens (which are producing over 1 dozen eggs/day already!).
We built a geothermal, passive solar, year round greenhouse! I cannot wait for this baby to be humming in the spring.
We had several late frost including a VERY late frost on May 28th and we row covered as much as we could. Most things survived!
After 5 years of growing, our orchard produced it’s first fruit: cherries, plums and apples!
Our family ate only locally grown/processed foods in July in our very own local food challenge.
It rained very little and we irrigated crops we have never had to before (like garlic and potatoes). Many spring crops were weeks early due to the heat and heavy irrigation.
Our daughter, Tillee, has become somewhat helpful on the farm, sometimes!
Crops that did well:
Brussels sprouts: An odd crop to have on this list since I don’t grow a whole lot of them but this is definitely worth noting. I cut my production in half this year and increased plant spacing (down to 3 beds at 18” vs. 6 beds at 12 “ in 2020) and my yield was exactly the same! Half the plants, 50% more space and the same yield! Heck yes- this is intensive vegetable production at it’s finest.
Carrots: did you notice how huge those fall carrots were this year? Wowsa. Here’s another crop that I gave more spacing than usual and got a higher yield. But this wasn’t by choice. It was so hot and dry that I didn’t irrigate as well as I should have to get great germination. So most of the carrots were spaced 2-3” apart so they grew huge and fast. We didn’t harvest them as early as we should have (we were too busy trying to harvest other things!) so they got giant.
Greens: we grew over 640# more than 2020! One reason is because I had enough labor to do so and we had more established outlets for the greens. The greens we had this fall were spectacular- probably some of the best I have ever grown.
Parsnips: we only got 28# of these sweet babies but it was my first time EVER successfully growing these! They take longer than carrots to germinate and you have to direct seed them (no babying them in the greenhouse in flats for these!) so I am quite proud after trying and giving up year after year.
Tomatoes: these do great most seasons and even with the late frost this year, they flourished. Part of my goal with them is to harvest religiously 3x per week to make sure they produce June through October. The result? 1000# more in 2021 compared to 2020 (a 25% increase on the same number of beds!).
Crops that didn’t do well:
Strawberries: we had our best crop of strawberries in 2019 (like almost 400#) and in 2020 and 2021, we have had almost no crop (just a few quarts). I think part of this was due to late frosts killing blossoms. But I also think my strategy of not mulching them over the winter was caught up with me. I thought it was working and now I think we need to go back to it. So we planted another intensively spaced bed of them for 2022 and we mulched them. Fingers crossed for berry belly in 2022!
Garlic: two issues happened concurrently with my garlic crop in 2021. One was they needed to be irrigated and sooner than I got around to it. I have never irrigated my garlic before so I kept holding out that it was going to rain and it just didn’t. The other issue was that my straw mulch was very weedy with a lot of oat seed in it so not only was there not enough moisture in the soil but the garlic was also competing with a bunch of oats!
Watermelon radishes: when you buy hundreds of different types of seeds every year, 6 months before you plant most of them, a few fall through the cracks. I am frankly surprised I only missed buying the watermelon radish seed and not something more important last fall. By the time I noticed I didn’t have any seed, I quickly ordered some but the harvest was later and less than usual. Oops.
Turnips: I love fresh spring salad turnips, they have the texture of butter with a sulfury, brassica tinge to them. Yum! But I am starting to see some brassica root maggot issues in many of my radishes and turnips. I will need to formulate a plan to deal with this as I can no longer pretend it will go away on it’s own. Our yields of turnips suffered the most due to this with lots of tiny yellow worms digging through the roots, making them oddshaped and unsalable.
What’s in store for 2022?
Well, we just got back from a week in Hawaii so I am a bit behind on year end processing but it was so worth it to explore a beautiful tropical island and bring home some amazing tropical fruit seeds to start in our greenhouse next spring.
My first priority will be to order seeds for 2022 and based on the supply chain issues we are seeing due to COVID and labor shortages, I am trying to do that before year end again this year. But I really can’t do that until I fully process 2021 and that takes a few days to get it all written down and to feel into it. One thing for certain though is that I will be raising CSA and veg prices in general. We are seeing at least a 10-20% increase in supply, equipment and shipping/delivery costs so I will be trying to balance all of that uncertainty as we start to plan for CSA sign ups in early January.
For employees, next year I am happy to say Julie and Olivia will be back. AND! I have hired an apprentice farm manager through the new State of WI Organic Vegetable Farm Manager Apprenticeship program. Her name is Hannah and is amazing and I cannot wait for you to meet her. While Julie will continue her flower growing on our land and Hannah wants to explore offering an herbal CSA program. Woot! And one of the reasons we are hiring more is because we are hoping to have another child next year. Woot woot!
Lastly, the thing I am most excited for in 2022 is really working on the new greenhouse and figuring all of that out! We will probably start tomato and cucumber seeds in February for our first harvest in April in there. And I already seeded radishes and greens a few weeks ago. It’ll be interesting to get a hang of year round growing in Wisconsin, including growing some tropicals like cacao, papaya, banana, passionfruit, guava and kiwi!
Mahalo,
Farmer Bethanee
