City Market, Healthy Living, Nhat Long & and the Woman from Wales

Pretty intriguing title I thought. Today I cut a decent portion of what remains of our Napa cabbage to sell to Nhat Long, an Old North End Asian Market. We are selling it (and a bit of baby bok choi) for about half the price we would to City Market or Healthy Living. Why are we doing it? Because neither store is buying as they were in the summer. It seems that the local fever is dying a bit, though there could be other reasons too. We are not certified organic, and perhaps there is only enough shelf space for one kind of Napa (and asian braising greens which we also had been selling them), but I must admit, looking at the organic option from Quebec, I thought "that stuff looks like cr-p." Given the reputation of the Intervale (it is pretty well known around town that everything grown down there must be grown organically even if not certified) and the markets continual touting of local, I was surprised when they didn't take the option to get local produce. Other reasons, to be fair, could be that these markets simply don't have the time or staff that they do during the Summer Season to deal with the smaller farms (they still buy from Digger's and Arethusa). Maybe there is a bit of veggie fatigue on the part of the public.


All the same it is pretty fun to go into the markets (both African and Asian) on North Street, a different shopping experience to say the least, and as you know we at Open Heart like different.

The woman from Wales was here in America on a grant from her country to learn more about CSA structures, which I learned to my surprise aren't as well established as they are here. Without rambling on endlessly, I will say that through our long talk I kinda figured out we are certainly on the verge of a farming-economic change if not revolution: changes seem to range from about 50 different CSA structures, including the mega CSA of multiple possibly even mono-cropping farms, which I guess would be more of just a box-scheme, but could make it with people unexamined as a "CSA." That wouldn't necessarily be the end of small farms, especially since local might only be becoming more of a necessity, not just a few month marketing thing.

Towards Samhain

Samhain (or Halloween for 21st century folk) is rushing upon us! Josh and I will surely eternally know this season as garlic-planting time, and Josh is in fact out there preparing beds for the garlic cloves he's been hobbitting away in our coat closet.

He's been dutifully breaking up the heads into nice clean usable, plantable cloves. Without any help from me, I should add. And moreover, he's applied 6 full cubic yards of compost to the field thus far, in preparation for the planting imminent.

It's been pretty much nonstop rain since Friday, and cold too. Like, sur-natural cold. Like, dude, we had snow on Friday! While we were trying to deliver our last batch of veggies to CSA members!

Also, now's the time for cleaning trays, cleaning the greenhouse, cleaning your gut. Putting away the summer shorts and getting out all that dreaded clothing that mummifies for 8 months.

But no complaints. Tis a gradual thing and there is many a tree with many a green leaf yet, in addition to the reds and golds and oranges.

Resturn to the Bloggosphere

um, i guess you could say it's been a while, and for those who have shown an interest in the blog (and they are actually there and even tell us at farmers markets) I'm soo back. In the past few weeks we have been in wind-down mode, putting the farm to bed as it were. This seems to coincide with a ramping up of festivities, coinciding with harvests and last times that farmers will hang as such for the year, rachel and I got one of those at flat-bread tonight.

The view from the field:
still a surprising amound of radishes out there:

and Rachel's Myspace photo?:


there will I'm sure be lot's of processing of how the season went, all appropriately online, full reports anyway. Now off to try and finish raspberry getting before market, after rain