Greetings on a beautiful winter morning.

You are receiving this email because you signed up on my website for the waiting list for the 2010 season of Henry’s Farm CSA.

I am now taking new members for the 2010 season. The cost is $400 for the 26-week season, which runs from May 25^th to November 16^th. You will also receive our Henry’s CSA Recipe Collection that covers all the vegetables that I grow (If you plan to share your share with another family, please include an additional $10 so each family will get their own cookbook.) You will get a weekly email newsletter during the season, telling you about what you are getting that week and some cooking ideas for it as well as news of goings-on on the farm. You also 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.

If you are considering joining the CSA, please go to my website (www.henrysfarm.com) and read all the information about how the CSA works. You will see that there are four possible pick-up locations: Bloomington/Normal, Eureka, Morton, Peoria and on the farm. The hours and locations for pick-up are listed on the website. The details of the Peoria pick-up have not been ironed out yet, but it will be somewhere in Peoria or Peoria Heights, also on Tuesday evenings.

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 open.

Important: If you don’t want to join this year, please email me anyway and let me know. That way I can take you off the list and offer your spot to someone else.

If you have any questions that aren’t answered on the website, feel free to email me.

Hope to see you at that first vegetable pick up in the spring!

 

Henry Brockman