This is the bottom-of-the-coffee-cup time of year, with only dregs of sunlight left at our latitude. Yesterday, the time between sunrise and sunset was a mere 9 hours, 21 minutes...but the good news is that today will only be 39 seconds shorter. Back in September, the days were loosing an outrageous three minutes of light every day! Aren't cosmic ellipses cool? Once we get to the solstice on the 21st, it starts getting better, the days slowly getting longer. Its a farmers New Year, the real start of the 2019 growing season.
We've hustled in the last week to get the rest of our root crops out of the ground, and succeeded in packing in a full quarter acre of carrots out of the mud and into root storage. Those crunchy, sweet, bright treats will store perfectly for months. At this point, almost everything that we are bringing to markets will be from the high tunnels, or from our cold storage.
We get lots of questions about what we do in the winter. We stay quite busy, but work fewer days, with people in our crew ranging from 2 to 5 days per week on the farm and with many finding part-time winter work. Through the year, we try to schedule certain projects for winter and hold-off on some summer breakages for winter repairs so that we can distribute workload a little more evenly through the year. Winter farmers markets keep cash coming in to keep payroll flowing, ensuring we can provide our crew some level of continuing income. It is tricky to manage, since growing veggies primarily outside in the field in NJ is inherently seasonal, but our workforce is not - everyone lives here year-round. Lots of vegetable and fruit growers approach this seasonal disparity by hiring migrant labor and do not have employees at all in the winter, but for a myriad of reasons, that hasn't been a route that has been inspiring or comfortable for us. So, we pay attention to the what both feeds our souls and keeps the farm as a business alive and go with that, accepting that in certain ways it will be harder! You can help make it a little easier by finding those winter markets and supporting your local businesses year-round.
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