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Change of plans for Saturday

Tomorrow I wanted to start a new routine; taking care of our gardens in Providence, because they're both in need of attention. But because of all the rain we got, and my week that was so heavy with harvesting, Mathewson Farm needs us more. So if anyone wants to join me, I will be there by 10 (I might try and do a little housework when I get up). I'll leave Johnston by 2, hopefully, because New Rivers should be nutty with mayors. Let me know if you can join me!

Harvest Photos

Farm Work Schedule This Week: Come put in your hours!

Hey everyone,
Sorry I've been at MIA the last few weeks, but I'm back on track and going to encourage all of you to head out to Johnston and join Catherine and Matt in the field.
Christie and I joined the two out at Matthewson site on Monday for an afternoon of transplanting tomatoes, spicy hot peppers, and great discussion about local and global agriculture under the shade of the trees.
One cool thing I learned yesterday was the spicy and sweet peppers have to be planted far apart, otherwise the spicy pepper will spread their spicyness to the sweet peppers. So we planted a row of hot peppers, to be followed by mild, then eventually sweet, alternating colors as we went to help Catherine and Matt tell the difference between the dozens of varieties they plant each year.

But now its your turn to head out the farm, get your hands dirty and make a dent on your sweat equity hours.

Here's the schedule for the rest of the week:

Wednesday: Harvest and Pick Up Day - Johnston
Catherine could use about two people for some harvest help after 9.
She could also use someone around 3 to help with CSA set-up.

Thursday: Farmers Market and Transplanting Day
They will be harvesting in the morning for the afternoon farmers market and could use a hand or two.
If the afternoon hours, join Matt for prepping beds and transplanting

Friday: Maintenance Day
We need some people to do some mowing, weeding and mulching.
Ideally catherine wants to regular help with this, especially mowing.

Saturday: Catch Up Day at the City Gardens
More info to come...

We'll have a sign up sheet at the farm for the pick up this wednesday - try to find some time to put in an hour or two in the next week. Catherine, Mat, and the fields would greatly appreciate it!

For a few of you who have already gone out (thanks for updating the spreadsheet!) - what are your stories? Post your stories to the comment section or email me and I can post them for you.

If you can come out tomorrow (wednesday) to help with the harvest or CSA set-up, please email me: hannah@farmfreshri.org, or catherine at marsfarmer@yahoo.com.

Thanks!
Hannah

Pick up Tomorrow

Just a reminder that we will have a pick up tomorrow, June 10. I will start picking in Johnston around 9:30, before that I will be at the city gardens picking herbs. Let me know if you'd like to pitch in! As I've said before, I could use some help with the set up, starting around 3. Hopefully it will be a dry day. See you then!

Because Mercury is retrograde....

I didn't realize we weren't picking up yesterday, so the girls and I got to the farm plenty early to do some work before our pickup. We had a great time. We planted four rows of corn, which will hopefully be heavy with organic corn deliciousness in about 65 days, despite 3 pairs of little feet that couldn't remember to walk on the grass paths instead of in the lovely loose tilled dirt. I dug my first (uneven) furrow, and thoroughly appreciated Matt's patience with three active little ones. We also made friends with the chickens and dreamed about goats and cows. And we learned that the field is low in potassium, which can be easily remedied when we get together soon (say June 27 or 28?) for a potluck/grill work party--the ashes from burning wood can be applied to the field to raise its potassium levels. (Right?)

Thank you guys for sponsoring such a great, natural farm!

No Pickup next week!

Just about everybody heard this from me yesterday, but I want to remind everyone that next week is a no pickup week. Opal is finishing school, and there's a lot to take care of; plus the FARMERS MARKET starts up, which always feels like a huge thing. I hope to have some time to work on our organization. Like posting a schedule. But also to look back at the first meetings and emails and figure out who wanted to do what in the CSA.
Party Planner? We need you! Weeders? Come on out! And we are going to need harvest help on a regular basis. It hasn't been too important so far because I've been harvesting more from our two city gardens than at Mathewson farm, and I didn't want to make anyone else run all around like a crazy person (like me) But yesterday it was great to have Donald and Jason picking all that arugula. Now we just need someone to commit to joining us around 3:00 to set up the distribution table. It would help so much!
I hope to hear from the members how they want to get involved. And I can't wait for our first garden party.

Farm Photos!

Hey guys, I brought my camera with me this afternoon to the CSA pick-up and wanted to share some of my favorite photos!
Thanks to all the parents who let me take pictures of their children!

Did you know there are 3 sets of twins in the CSA?

Anybody wanna work today?

We're hoping a few people might have time to pitch in with today's harvest, pickup and general chores. It'll be a soggy day, so company would be welcome. The forecast calls for rain in the morning and then kind of cloudy foggy afternoon. We could use people from 1:00 pm and later to do some picking, washing, and table setup. If all that goes smoothly, we'd then probably be doing a little transplanting and weeding.
We're looking forward to a getting a fire going in our "stove" to keep things toasty.
If you're coming out to work in the garden, wear stuff you wouldn't mind getting muddy. Rain pants and waterproof shoes really keep you comfortable, if you have them. It probably won't be crazy wet today, but I'm just covering the bases...
Well, see you all today.

There is ,of course, a CSA pickup tomorrow (Wednesday) from 4-7ish on our farm at 544 Greenville Ave, Johnston RI USA. Since we're all getting in the swing of this thing, I figure reminders are important until we all get into a routine. Reminders prevent Remainders.
We had a few rather minor issues come up last week, all of which should be easily resoluble:

• Parking. We didn't anticipate this one very well. Basically it didn't work out well to park the cars in a line in front of the barn. When you arrive, you can hook a right at the barn and just park down alongside the barn, OR you can park on the shoulder of Greenville Ave. in front of the farmhouse, OR my favorite: park on quiet and tree-lined Carpenter St. in front of the big white garage or on the shoulder; from there it's a 30 yard nature walk to the back of the barn where your food is.
  
• Ah, directions. I'm a map person, as in obsessively poring over them in my spare time, but I realize not everyone is. There are many ways to get to Mathewson Farm but the simplest is this: Route 6 West out to the 2nd exit for Rte 6A/Hartford Ave., the one just past Killingly. Bear right off this exit, which means West, toward Johnston. You will come to the intersection of Hartford and Atwood Ave. It's real built up and ugly. The Town Hall is on your right, BONO PLAZA is in front of you, Shell Station to left. GO RIGHT on Atwood and get the Hell out of there, going uphill through more strip stuff. Once you've passed all the architectural gems, you will pass a huge barn on left, HEYWOOD FARM. Go left just after this on Carpenter St., which will deliver you, at it's end, to Our Farm, and the good parking I referenced above.
  

• And finally, please communicate. If you can't get your share at the pickup venue for whatever reason, let us know. We hate to waste food, and the work it takes to pick it and wash it. There are many ways to reach us. Phone: 481-6115, Blog, or email marsfarmer@yahoo.com.

I hope I'm not missing any vital issues in this here post. I hope to write about more fun things in the coming weeks, like that some folks think we should have a garden party soon, and others have asked about recipes. These are two subjects that I like to discuss a lot more than parking.
I have to go, but I will close with a recipe for your mixed cooking greens, which are so tasty this time of year:
Olive Oil
Garlic
Salt
Pepper
A little liquid (water, stock, wine, beer...)
simmer garlic in oil for a few seconds, throw down a mess of those greens, add liquid, toss and cover for like 3 minutes. uncover, stir, add salt/pepper, cover again for 5-10 minutes, depending on how cooked down you like them.
These greens go great with shellfish, sausages, goat cheese, pasta, flatbread, on a pizza, in a quesadilla, over rice...

Congratulations to Beatrice and Eric!

Two of our shareholders had a baby on the day of the first pickup, so they couldn't make it out to Mathewson Farm. Congratulations! I can't wait to meet the new girl in our CSA! I hope the whole family is doing great. And please tell us her name!

Mathewson Farm Wikipedia entry

See you all this afternoon at Mathewson Farm! Perhaps we should add some info here!

First Pick up tomorrow, May 20, at Mathewson Farm!

Don't forget to come out to the farm tomorrow and get your spring greens & herbs (I guess the radishes need one more week) I'll be picking at our city gardens in the morning, and shouldn't need help. On the other hand, if someone wants to show up a half hour early and help us set up that'd be great. Or show up a couple or a few hours early and work in the garden with us. Just make sure you come by before 7, or get in touch with us if you can't!

Act Now! Don't Delay! Call 1-800-HELP ME PLANT ALL THIS STUFF.

This week will be busy. We've got tons of things to plant, our first CSA pickup, the weeds have woken up, and then there's everything else. You could probably just make up a job using random
words and it's probably something we need done.

Let me try. I'm opening the dictionary...to the word... neutral. Hey that's pretty good, because one of the jobs for this week is spreading lime, which is of course limestone powder used to neutralize acidic soil. Most plants prefer a pH of 6-6.5, but our soil before cultivation comes in at around 5.5. Applying lime at a rate of 170 lbs. per 1000 sq. ft. gives us the pH range we need to grow all these tasty vegetables. Without this very important rock we'd have some sickly plants. Most New England soils are acidic because our bedrock, granite, is acidic. Putting lime in your soil basically imitates the effects of limestone bedrock. What's great for us is that our lime is locally quarried right down Limerock Road at Conklin Limestone, the oldest working quarry in the USA. (right)

So if anybody has free hours this week, don't hesitate. We need hands, even if you can only spare an hour. I, Matt, will be working at Mathewson Farm most dry days. When it's wet, I'll most likely be potting plants or doing maintenance. Catherine will be harvesting on Monday and Wednesday. If you're unsure where we are on a given day, just call our cell: 481-6115

Beautiful Day!

Today was gorgeous. Matt and I were late getting to the garden, because the mower needed fixing. But we got there around ten, and left at seven. We got so much done, and it's looking really loved right now. I wish we had a camera!
But we never got to the planting, which is sometimes the most fun.
So tomorrow we'll be back there, I'll say we should get to work by 10. If you want to join us, we'll be planting an apple tree (my mother's day present) and a lot of flowers. Some herbs and veggies too. Come by if you can, to the corner of Bowdoin and Amherst.

Directions to Mathewson Farm
by bicycle from the westside:
from Olnyville Square take Manton Ave. to Aleppo St. at the BigTop, or Atlantic Mills, I think it's called.
take a left onto Aleppo, and left again onto the Woonasquatucket Bike Path. (although it is spelled differently on the sign)
Follow the path into Johnston to the end, which is Lyman Street. Go up the hill, there'll be a flower shop on your right. Cross the street and continue up the hill on Greenville Ave. Conti's will be on your right. You will pass Baffoni's poultry/paving/excavating and Dimeo's farm on your left. After about a mile you come to the intersection of Rt.5 Atwood Ave. and Greenville Ave. Keep going straight. The first house you see on the left is the Mathewson's, 544 Greenville Ave. There's little sign. The house is white, and there's a beautiful barn behind it. You should be able to find us from there.

by car, from providence
take Rt.6 west. after the Killingly St. exit there's a "6a Johnston" exit. That's the easiest one. It lets you off on Hartford Ave. At the exit go right. Follow Hartford to the intersection with Atwood Ave., Rt.5. (you'll see Bond Plaza on the left) take a right on Atwood Ave. Follow it for about a mile and a half, past the library and the car dealers and the new Walgreens, past Heywood Farm, to the end. At the end, take a left. The Mathewson's is at 544 Greenville Ave.

Feel free to post directions from other places. I hope this helps, anyway.

Tomorrow Red Planet will be at the Bowdoin St. garden getting a bunch of work done. Join us if you can, after 9am until sometime mid-afternoon. The garden is at the corner of Bowdoin and Amherst Streets in Olnyville. It gets weedy from our periodic neglect, and trash strewn from whoever. It has a fence that needs repair, a compost bin that needs dismantling, and wood that can be cut. Then we hope to transplant some flowers. We'd love to see any and all of you. Bring some gloves if you can. Just let us know a general time we might expect you.

And remember, the first pick up is next wednesday, the 20th. Most of the harvest will be in the city, and I don't think we'll need much help. The share will be some combination of spinach, salad greens, cooking greens (like kale, red dandelion and mustard), radishes and fresh herbs (mint, cilantro, parsley, sage, chives, etc).
Thanks,
Catherine

CSA Update: Organization

Hello CSA Shareholders!

For those of you who weren't at the meeting last night, here's an update on what we covered.

• CSA Pick-ups: Wednesday from 4 - 7 pm at the farm in Johnson

• First CSA Pick-up: May 20th

• Blog: Updates on what's in the CSA, what needs to be done on the farm, news from the farm, photos, recipes, and more

• Googledoc: This is where we will keep track of how many hours each shareholder has work

• Calendar: Pick-up dates, CSA events, work that needs to be done

• Ongoing jobs at the farms and urban gardens (for this week, contact Catherine and Matt to coordinate)
  

- Mathewson Farm: prepping beds; direct seeding and transplanting; building pea
trellises, weeding
- Bowdoin St.: clean up and weed; planning some beautification (new fencing,
planting borders, dismantling old compost container, mowing)
- Grove St.: cleaning out beds of winter greens; potting on pepper, tomato, and
EGGPLANT seedlings


We are using the blog, google doc and calendar to help organize ourselves and make things are easy and clear as possible.

Once Catherine and Matt get into a regular schedule, we'll be posting farm jobs online each week on the blog and calendar.
Give us a few weeks to work out the kinks, and please let us know if something is not clear.

I accidentally deleted the spreadsheet this morning around 11 am and remade it. If you made any changes to your name and contact info, they were lost. Please make them again! Sorry!

Feel free to email me at Hannahmellion@gmail.com if you have any questions regarding the googledoc or calendar.

Thanks and happy spring!

2009 Member Task Sheet

Let's see if we can link to our 2009 CSA Task Sheet google.doc here. The spreadsheet shows the tasks that need to be done each week:


If you can't access the google.doc, please leave a comment here.

Getting started

These first five years at Red Planet have been exciting for us. Sometimes a little too exciting. For one thing, we've had to change location three times! It's hard to keep the details straight, but each year consisted of clearing, nurturing or gardening some new patchwork combination of the following venues:

• a rock strewn but idyllic hayfield ½ mile down a dirt trail in North Rehoboth.

• a bullet casing strewn Federal Hill back lot, which we turned into a compost-strewn greenhouse.

• a trash strewn Olneyville hillside, which we are trying to strew with awesome.

• a loamy paddock on the holdings of a South Rehoboth blue-blood (and our subsequent flight, in terror.)

• an abandoned Federal Hill garden, with some unique but hard-to-describe challenges.

• a 300 year-old farmstead in Johnston which has been owned by the same family since 1780, and they're really great people who want to keep their farm a farm and not make it into a huge Rite-Aid.

As you know, this is a good way to develop a plotline for a quirky novel, but not a good method of organic gardening. Any business has start-up costs, and farming particularly so. If you're unfamiliar with the business of sustainable farming, imagine spending your life savings and a year of your life opening a restaurant, then imagine moving the place across town after only being open for 6 months, oh, and you have to buy all new tables, chairs, dishwasher... maybe you get to keep the stove. It's analogous to what we've done once a year or so, and it's been a thorn in the side of an otherwise great market-gardening business.

Starting from scratch so often has taught us a lot: we've learned to be pretty lean as a business, and we've learned to grow vegetables intensively on small urban plots. But this constant movement has kept us from recovering our start-up debt or achieving financial stability.

We think this year could change that. With our three city gardens and an amazing opportunity in Johnston, things are finally feeling stable. Jenny and her brother Chris, the owners of Mathewson Farm, are really happy to see the land being farmed again, after being untended for over 20 years. And we are glad to finally be in a situation that truly makes sense for us. The fact that this farm is being preserved is thanks to years of Jenny's hard work and determination, which resulted in the department of agriculture purchasing the development rights in late 2008. This achievement guarantees that the land will be preserved for agriculture. All of us want to see this farm become a vibrant part of the community once again. And the time has come for Red Planet to try something new: a CSA during the traditional growing season. We are inviting you, as members of our community, to join us in making it happen.

Community Supported Agriculture

Many of you reading this have been members of our very experimental winter CSA, but this one is different. Accentuating the community component of Community Supported Agriculture, we are happy to have found 20 people who will work with us at Mathewson Farm and in our city gardens as core members of our new CSA.

We are in our second year of production at this beautiful historic farm, just 3.5 pleasantly bikable miles from the west side of Providence. There's a lot of work to do. This year we will be planting 1.5 acres: starting with peas and radishes along with the sweet and spicy greens of spring. Followed by favas, string beans, shell beans, and all sorts of crazy cucumbers, plus summer squash and beets and turnips and cabbage, and of course, tomatoes, eggplant and hot peppers. And a great variety of greens and herbs. Plus a few other things.

As a core member, we are asking you to be deeply involved in the organization and running of the CSA, choosing work that suits you. Possible jobs include:

• Harvesters: picking, washing, and, if necessary, transporting vegetables to the pickup site.

• Distribution: dividing up the harvest, and organizing the pickup.

• Weekly Chores: glamorous repetitive menial labor. Including weeders, mowers, and occasionally bug squishers.

• Communications: keeping track of membership, maybe writing a newsletter or setting up a website.

• Event Planner: picnics and potlucks, plus meetings, and maybe workdays.

• Crunch Time Help: folks who can put in a day's work when we have a whole bunch of transplanting, or trellising, or harvesting to get done.

• Projects: if you've got a particular interest in working on something a little more complicated, like irrigation, building fences, or cleaning up the borders of the field. Maybe some repairs to the barn, or general maintenance of tools and machinery.

Divvying up these tasks means that we would ask for around 15-20 hours of work per person for the entire season. It also means that members are more involved in decision-making on the farm. This, in our view, would make the farm more responsive to the needs of our membership, and will more evenly distribute the share of mosquito bites throughout the group.

And of course, adding this work component means that we can ask less for the cost of a full share; $350 to $450 (depending on what you can afford) for 24 weeks of produce, starting mid-May. Weekly shares will likely be worth between $15-25; more during the height of the season. We're also thinking about a special share for Picklers, Canners, Preservers and Brewers. But let's discuss all of this! We'll have fun, and grow some delicious food.