Decembrrrrrrr

It’s bloody cold out here. Thursday night the thermometer hit 10 degrees. It hasn’t been above freezing for a week. Despite leaving water running 24/7 in our kitchen sink, our pipes still froze. Drat. The good news is that with sunny days, the kale and radicchio and other veggies still in the field do stand a chance of making it through this Arctic weather.

Beautiful, below freezing, weather

We spent all last week harvesting like crazy, trying to bring in as much as possible to store in the coolers before the mercury dropped. Even with our nifty bed lifter and root washer, we quickly realized that we wouldn’t have time to harvest and wash all our roots.

Transporting carrots

Washing roots in the dark and cold, illuminated by car headlights

So we quit washing them about half-way through and now have boxes upon boxes of unwashed carrots and beets and such in our coolers. We managed to finish the week with somewhere in the neighborhood of 4000 lbs of roots, 1000 heads of radicchio, and heaps of other assorted veggies in the coolers.

10×10 walk-in filled to the brim with produce

We already had lots of squash put away, so we feel ready and able to meet this year’s newest challenge, the year-round Broadway Farmers Market.

Broadway Farmers Market in the winter

Every year, we are always strategizing about how to do a better job, how to grow our business in the most effective ways. We make the vast majority of our income between July and October. That’s five months in which we make 75% of our gross revenue. It’s those five months that make the rest of the year so crazy. The change we decided to implement this year was to grow more storage crops, in an attempt to flatten that income curve somewhat. It was a huge undertaking and a substantial investment infrastructure to bring in all that produce and have a relatively secure place to keep it all, and it took that looming Arctic cold front to force us to bring it all in. But now we are sitting on a lot of wonderful storage vegetables – tons of winter squash, four varieties of carrots, beets, parsnips, parsley root, rutabaga, Gilfeather turnips, celery root, daikon, leeks, Brussels sprouts, three types of cabbage, and three types of radicchio. Our plan to grow and store enough produce to make it through a winter’s worth of markets was a success…. now we’ll see how long they store in the coolers and how quickly we can sell them.