Hello CSA members!

As I write this I am looking across the farm fields to the sun setting on the Swan Mountains. The pasture grasses are all greening up, the tom turkeys are strutting their stuff for the hens, and deer graze all around. I feel very fortunate that life on the farm has not changed much with the Covid 19 pandemic, unlike many areas of the country. Not to say there wasn’t any concern when it first hit…there was, and still is, a lot of uncertainty about what business will look like this year. But, we prefer not to live in fear, so we decided to plant as much as we could as early as we could with the idea that people will need healthy food no matter what, right? So, we kept our normal CSA planting dates, but also tried to sneak in some extra plantings for early season as well. In fact we rushed to get up our last high tunnel so we could get it planted, so we may now be one of the few farms in the country that has a high tunnel with no entry doors in it (yet).

Our goal every year is to begin the CSA around May 15th, regardless of the weather. Because you all pay for 20 weeks of diverse vegetables, that date allows us to get you a wide variety of vegetables by the time the share ends in late September. If we start the CSA any earlier, you end up with more weeks of greens early on (and for some, there are already more than enough weeks of greens), and miss out many of the fall crops. So, when we realized we were going to have food ready this week, it didn’t make sense to start CSA early. Instead, we decided to open up an Online Market on our website., which you can find a link to here. Anyone is welcome to shop from it, whether you are a CSA member, a farmer’s market customer, or a new customer. All the details are online, but the gist is that we will take orders until Thursday night, harvest on Friday, and have the orders ready for pickup on Saturday, either at the farm (from 10-noon) or at the Kalispell Farmers Market from 9am-12:30pm. It may only be a one time event, but it gets you access to some fresh produce before CSA starts. Depending on what happens with farmer’s markets and wholesale accounts this season, we may continue to use this market as a way to move our produce, but I just wanted to make sure seeing the online market get advertised didn’t create any confusion among the CSA community.

With regards to CSA, it seems as if we will hit our target, and CSA will begin the week of May 11th. We will send you more detailed info as that time approaches to fill you in on pickup times and locations, and any new protocols we might need to institute. In the mean time, we’ll be busy out here getting crops planted. We have a wonderful and hard working crew this year, and they spent the day planting salad mix and over a thousand cauliflower plants, among other things.

The first cauliflower planting of the season went in today!

We hope you are all faring alright during the pandemic, and we look forward to seeing you soon.

Todd & Rebecca