“What do you do in winter?” It’s a common question I get this time of year and the answer is a lot! It’s true that winter is a much slower time of year for us here on the farm but we stay pretty darn busy. Especially now as our winter offerings have expanded. In this weeks farm update I’ll go through what we do here on the farm each winter season.

Planning!

I'm a planner and I love putting together a good plan and look forward to executing the plan each season. The biggest and most important piece of the planning work I do is our crop plan. We grow over 90 varieties of produce and each year I go through each variety and assess if it's meeting our expectations for flavor, consistency, yield, and overall appeal. Some things get removed entirely from our crop plan (daikon radish, I'm looking at YOU). Others get replaced with a different variety. I also look at the timing of our successions and ask myself if I think we can grow something earlier or later? Did we run out of something consistently? I tweak our planting dates and quantities accordingly.

We also look at our financials and put together our financial plan for the year so we have an idea of how much we need to grow and how much help we need to make it happen. Once the financial plan is done we work on our plan for our farm crew for the summer.

The first photo is a couple of our seed catalogs from a couple years ago. There are hundreds of varieties to consider which seems like a lot but I love pouring over the catalog and thinking about what's possible and what you all would love to see us grow. The second photo as a screen grab of part of our crop plan. The blue bars represent the "off season", the thin grey bar represents when the crop is in the ground but not ready for harvest, and the thick grey bard is the harvest window for the crop.

Winter Crops!

We've been dabbling with winter growing for the past 3-4 seasons as we've built out tunnels and other infrastructure on our farm to allow for some degree of year round growing. The crop care is A LOT less demanding in the winter. We generally don't have to deal with weeds in the winter and most of the work for our winter crops is done in the late fall.

Spinach is our main winter crop. It's incredibly cold hardy surviving temperatures well below zero. It's also incredibly delicious in the winter as the plant creates more sugars to help it deal with the cold temps. We're harvesting, washing, packing and selling spinach for most of the winter!

Microgreens! Micros are a relatively new crop for us but they've been a big hit. We grow these completely indoors in our heated pack shed so we have a continual supply of them year round.

Storage Crops: Carrots, Beets, Potatoes, Cabbage! These crops are stored in our walk-in cooler at optimal conditions allowing them to be stored well into the winter.

Experimental Winter Crops: Lettuce, Green Onions, Bok Choy, Mizuna, Tat Soi, Celery, Komatsuna and Kale. We're testing these crops out this year trying to understand what the extremes are for these crops.

We slow down.

There's no two ways about it; there just isn't as much work to do in the winter. That's ok. We work REALLY hard from May-October to bring fresh, sustainable, delicious, produce to you and so we're ok with slowing down a bit during the winter.

We are especially looking forward to really slowing down once baby number 2 arrives in January. We'll soak up new baby snuggles and give Addie extra attention. There may be more daddy-daughter donut days in the future!

Hobbies!

Winter is time for hobbies. Two of my biggest hobbies are woodworking and video games. Woodworking for me is both a creative outlet but also another way to keep moving in the winter. I like to build furniture and larger pieces but dabble in smaller work from time to time.

Video games are a bit of a vestige of my younger self and how I stay connected to some life long friends. I find them to be relaxing. It's fun to play a video game where at the end of the day your choices within the video game don't really matter. A welcome reprieve from small business ownership where your choices DO matter monumentally.

What do you do in winter?

The Great Garlic Mulching of 2024