Transitions

For the past five years Sarah Brewer has been our CSA administrator (a job she meant to take over only “temporarily” when her mother Chrissi moved out of the area). Sarah has done this job so well that I don’t ever have to worry about the running of this end of the farming venture. I know that our CSA members will get a prompt, accurate, and helpful response to any question or need they have, and that the detailed paperwork she gives to Steve and the drivers for CSA packing mornings will always be absolutely accurate and complete. She understands the quirks of our Farmigo on-line software well and knows all the ways to work with and around them. She has helped keep us organized and made sure that the delivery routes run as smoothly as possible. She communicated with the hosts about any issues that come up, and was always willing to jump in to help if things got crazy on the farm. And she has put her heart into researching and writing the Veggie Notes for the newsletters, interjecting her own wonderful sense of humor and writing style. Now she is phasing herself out of the administrative duties to pursue a career in cultural resources management. Go Sarah! We’ll miss Sarah greatly, but this is clearly a good move for her at this time in her life and we wish her the best in her new career.

It softens the blow that we are able to welcome Hayley Reitman as our new CSA administrator. Hayley comes to us from Everyone’s Harvest in Monterey where she was focused on bringing farmers markets and educational programs to underserved communities. We expect her love of vegetables, farms, and people will serve her well in this position. She will be transitioning into the job over the next couple weeks and wrote the Veggie Notes for you this week. Welcome Hayley!

Fall is in the air, by which I mean that the sun is shining fiercely on us, burning off the fog, and there are “v”s of geese honking overhead and a gang of turkeys on the edge of the farm field. We’ve picked the pears over the past few weeks; they now need some time in the cooler as part of the ripening process. We should be getting those into the boxes in the next week or two. We have mostly Hardy Buerre variety with some d’Anjous in the mix. It’s been a tough few years for our pear orchard — some varieties we had planted succumbed to the fireblight that devastated many pears in the area a couple years ago, and the whole orchard was beset by pear slugs the year before. Last year, we didn’t even harvest pears, but this year things have gone better for the varieties that survived, with some trees producing very well. Probably the normal amount of rainfall we got this year played a part. We are taking out some of the most damaged parts of the orchard and working toward a smaller well-tended pear patch of a few varieties going into the future. Farming is nothing if not humbling, but we have to go into each endeavor with hubris, expecting we will meet with great success, and then let reality prune our plans into something more workable.

Meanwhile, over at Annieglass in Watsonville, muralist Taylor Reinhold has repainted the back of the shipping container that is our Farmstand. He was unhappy with the pelican that he had previously painted on the box, so now we have a new bird to represent our organic vegetables! The owl is vibrant and striking —  it’s quite impressive that he is able to paint with such finesse onto the corrugated surface. Hopefully this gorgeous new owl mural will catch the eye of some previously unaware passersby and lure them into the farmstand.