My name is Henry Brockman from Henry’s Farm near Goodfield. Some of you belonged to my CSA in years past before I turned over my Eureka membership to Bill Davison last year. Now that Bill and Mercy have quit farming, I am restarting my CSA in Eureka and would like to invite you to join.

If you are interested, please go to my website (http://www.henrysfarm.com) and read all about my farm and how the CSA works. Information about the price, duration, pick-up location and pretty much everything else you might need to know is there. If you have any questions not answered on the website, feel free to contact me via email.

One thing not mentioned on the website is that as part of your membership you will receive the 2010 Farmer-Annotated Calendar-A Year on the Land, which includes annotations for most days in the year telling you what is being done on the farm that day.

For instance, the entry for today reads, “Change 5-year-old plastic on hoophouses as needed.” I do need to change the plastic on one of my hoophouses, but (looking out the window at the snow) today is not the day for that job. But it is on my list to do on the next fairly warm (at least low 50s) and perfectly quiet day. That is not a job you want to do if there is any wind at all.

Speaking of the hoophouse, the first seeds of the season (the onion family) will go into the ground inside one of them in less than three weeks. They will germinate in about 10-14 days and then grow slowly but steadily until early April when they will be dug out of the hoophouse soil and transplanted out to the field. There they will grow ever so slowly at first, but then rapidly swell to baseball-to-softball-size in early July and soon after the 4^th of July you’ll start to see some red, white and yellow onions in your CSA shares.

That first sowing of the onions—usually right around the last day in February—marks the beginning of the new season of sowing, tilling, harvesting, weeding, working for me and my family. On the last Tuesday of May, you will see the first fruits of the three long months of work that follow that first sowing in the hoophouse. You’ll pick up your first CSA share on Tuesday, May 25^th and it will almost surely hold spinach and green garlic, rhubarb and lettuce, radish and green onions and who knows what else.

When you are sure you do want to join, please let me know immediately by email so I can save your spot. Don’t send in a check until you get a response back from me, because I will stop taking new members as soon as I hit my 200-member limit. Once I let you know whether I still have room or not, then I’ll ask for your sign-up form and check.

Don’t delay. There are over 100 on my waiting list and only about half that many slots are still open.

Hope to see you all in the spring!

 

Henry Brockman