The Story of Computer Technology at the Farm

Spring is approaching again, and I see that it's been nearly a year since our last blog posting. One of the challenges as we incorporate all this new technology into our business life is knowing what to use when. At this point, we have a website, a blog, a facebook page, and email has become the primary form of communication between the farm and our members.

This is a very different situation from 1998, when we started the CSA. At that time, we had only a very old, seldom used DOS based computer, no website, and hadn't even considered using email. The FAX machine was the big technological tool in the farm office, and everything was still done on paper.

Somewhere around 2001, Farmer Karen had concluded that we really needed to be using email for communication from members. Many of our members at that time (and now, for that matter) were very web-savvy individuals who liked the convenience of email. They found that email was a more efficient way of communicating, and they wanted that connection with the farm as well. Around the same time, Karen visited some friends, and came home with the idea for our domain name- csachestercounty.com. This was before SEO or search engine optimization, was popular, so our domain name was chosen to boost our rankings in search engines.

Once the website was created, we essentially went dormant on technology for a number of years. We had many projects outside, and went through several major changes in the equipment used to run the farm. During this time we also expanded the size of the CSA, and steadily moved more and more to email for our communication needs. In 2009 we started this blog with the hope that it would be a way to share more of what's going on at the farm with members and friends of the farm.

The next major technological innovation didn't come until recently, in January of 2011. After a lot of research and discussion, Karen made the decision to move to Farmigo for our CSA record keeping needs. This cloud based productivity application has simplified our record keeping, and will provide an interactive member portal through which our CSA members can order additional items to be delivered with their share. www.farmigo.com

new Peach Orchard

Did I mention we planted a new peach orchard? And a few plums too. Our trees arrived from the nursery mid April and it took a little more than a week to plant all 100 or so of them. It's very exciting and quite exhausting as well. We added a couple of 5 gallon buckets of our lovely compost to each hole as we back filled them and then watered each one in so each tree is getting a good start. Now we have several years of tending and training before we get to taste the fruits of our labor. Faith, skill and preserverence are helpful fruit grower virtues. All those pictures in the catalog look so inciting. I certainly hope that the fruit is good and tasty too. Stay posted.
Karen

Springtime work work

Sorry it's been so long since my last blog posting. Spring arrived very quickly once it decided to come. The weather extremes stepped up the orchard bloom time by about two to three weeks earlier then normal and that means I lost a bunch of time to work in the orchards. Now everything needs doing at the same time. We just got our all essential skid steer back working again after it decided to founder on the neighbors property edge at the beginning of April. I'm sure when they asked us if we could just dump a couple of scoops of compost on their garden they never dreamed they would end up with such a lovely yard ornament[ hey - it was only in their yard for a week]. We managed to finally get it back to the barn where we could rip into it. Now many, many, hours later it's back in operation with so very much to do.
The greenhouses are nicely filled with young seedlings awaiting their special time to go out to the fields. We've planted lots of lettuces, swiss chard and onions. The potatoes are up and showing their green heads to the sun. Tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant seedlings look great and we'll begin planting them outside when the weather stabilizes a bit.
It's been great to see many of our work share members again this Spring. We're getting a chance to get caught up with what's been going on since we saw each other last year. Thanks go to all our work share members -you're doing a super job! Lots of hoeing, weeding and planting going on around here. Karen

Life is getting real busy down on the farm

We've started working in the greenhouse seeding flats of kales, lettuces, and swiss chards. Tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants are sown in shallow seed pans and will get potted up to a larger pot size when they've made some more growth. New plantings/sowings are made weekly to try to time it so each kind of transplant is at the right stage of growth when the weather is appropriate to transplant them to the field. This means waves of sometimes sequential sowings.
We have been working at creating new compost piles, turning compost piles, and spreading compost onto various farm fields as the weather permits. Even though our spreader looks like it holds lots of compost in it- it takes a surprising number of trips and time to apply compost to even one of our fields. This job must be done when it is dry enough to both load the compost and make it through the fields without making ruts or cause damaging compaction to wet soils (very bad).
Our elderly skid steer machine that we are using to create the compost piles and load compost is a marvelous machine (pictured above) but it seems to have almost daily problems. I think we have worked on just about every aspect of the machine by now- surely we are about to the point where nothing else will fall off or break on a daily basis.
We just received 1 3/4" of rain over the last three days (much better than the 2-4 inches predicted). We will likely need to wait for three or four days for the soil to dry out enough to resume our compost dispersal project. We have plenty of other projects to keep us more than busy at this time of year. Though everything needs to be done in proper order and in a timely fashion so we can keep moving forward.
We're all praying for moderation in the weather. Seasonal temperatures, sunshine, and a slight breeze during the day would be perfect. But then, how often do we really get perfect?
The first sowing of peas and spinach is beginning to peak their heads out of the soil now.
Karen

Thoughts of planting.....

I thought I'd post a picture from last year- as a reminder that good things are coming. We'll soon be planting again. In the meantime, here's a picture of long rows, soon to be harvested. Everyone keep thinking good thoughts of Spring!

This is it- no more snow!

We got the ladders dug out of the snow pack and the van removed from its snowy resting spot on Tuesday afternoon. The snow is disappearing quickly and we enjoyed some lovely, sunny days of pruning this week. With the use of our new found ladders we were able to prune the tops as well as bottoms of the trees. The rain we're scheduled to have will wash this snow away completely. Good riddance! We look forward to lots of sunny days with moderate temperatures and not too windy please. There is still plenty of pruning to do in the apples and once finished we can start on the cleanup. Then, there is always the peach orchard to prune and then the raspberries and blackberries after that. Oh yeah- don't forget the greenhouse work, compost application, plowing, and other field work. Spring is closing in fast.
Karen

Ahh- To Prune Again

We've been pruning in the apples for the last couple of days now. How lovely to be outside and have the sun shining! The snow pack has melted substantially, but it is suprising to see that it is still a couple off feet deep where it really drifted in the orchards. Our orchard ladders, which we carefully laid on the ground but propped up on some prunings before all this snow came, have still not appeared through the drifts. As luck has it, it looks like the biggest drifts are exactly where we left our ladders. We like to prune a whole tree at a time from the bottom to the top with a person on either side of the row. If it is really windy or wet we sometimes just do the bottoms, then come back later to do the tops. It's no fun being blown off a ladder or getting your gloves wet or muddy when it is cold out. So, since we couldn't get up to the ladders we've been working on the bottoms of the trees where we can get to them. We're still walking on a fair amount of snow and have skipped over some areas because the lower scaffold limbs of the trees are still drifted over. I think we could have lost a VW Beetle in some of the deepest drifts between the apple and peace orchards this year. Yesterday I got our van stuck in the snow still left in the access road. I thought I could blast through what I thought was 5" of snow tot the bare spot 40' away. Turns out it was more like 16" deep. We'll talk up today and take a couple of shovels so we can get the van out and find the buried ladders too. I drove to Downingtown a couple of days ago and was quite surprised to see the snow was almost all gone there. With these temps and some sun shine it's just a matter of time. I bet come July and August we'll be thinking more fondly of snow piles.
Karen