Category Archives: Farming

Crops Team Working in Hoop House

Crops Update: CSA Kickoff Successes

All went well during the first spring CSA farm share distribution thanks to the teamwork of the Admissions, Property, and Crops staff teams. CSA coordinator Gabrielle, and farmers Greg and Caroline, did a nice job figuring it out as they went through the process for the first time. And we were lucky to have the experienced help of volunteers Sheila, Nina, Sandra, and Ashleigh, all of who helped package shares last season. In their shares, CSA members received carrots from the hoop house, assorted greens from the field, and the spring delicacy green garlic. This week we’re looking forward to the first head lettuce and kohlrabi harvest of the year.   

Crops Team working in hoop house

It’s very dry in the fields after several days of high heat and no rain for the past fourteen days and counting. We’re hoping to catch a storm this Wednesday afternoon. We continue to plant with the water wheel—the implement carried on the back of the tractor that delivers a little bit of water at the moment of transplanting. After that, we rely on the rain alone and the soil-improving effects of our management practices like composting, cover-cropping and fallowing. This past week, volunteers returned to the fields for the first time this season and helped us transplant seedlings on three separate afternoons—community volunteers planted cabbage and cauliflower on Tuesday, Starbucks volunteers planted broccoli and sunflowers on Thursday, and on Friday, volunteers from Engie helped us weed onions and transplant even more broccoli. Thanks all for helping us keep pace!

This past Saturday morning in the hoop house, we pruned the cherry tomatoes to increase air circulation, and then we put on the first clips for support. You can see Sean unspooling the line and Caroline attaching the clip underneath a sturdy leaf about halfway up the stalk. Hopefully, all those flowers will be delicious tomatoes by early July! Perhaps you’ve noticed the improved condition of the roads in the farm fields and around the farm yard too. Thanks to Metro West Sanctuaries Directot Renata for your amazing work writing and securing this second round of grants to make these necessary upgrades!   

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Bok Choy

Crops Update: Getting Farmer’s Market Ready

We’re looking forward to the first Union Square Farmer’s Market of the season in Somerville this coming Saturday from 9 am to 1 pm. After 15 years in Union Square, the market is moving out into the middle of Somerville Ave between Carlton and Hawkins St! That’s right, the city will be shutting down its main thoroughfare every Saturday to make room for dozens of local vendors. Apparently, the logistics of hosting the market in the square became too complicated with the road and subway construction, in addition to the new pandemic-inspired restaurant patios overtaking the square’s parking lot. Assistant Growers Greg and Elizabeth will be managing our three tents there with help from Highsmith and Avril, who both worked in the fields in previous seasons. Stop by our tent and you should find carrots and scallions from the hoop house, violas, green garlic, and an assortment of spring greens like arugula, spinach, and this beautiful baby bok choy:

Out in the fields, we planted 1.5 acres of potatoes this past Thursday and Friday. That was the last of our big spring plantings, and we were thrilled when it started to rain last night. So nice to get an assist from mother nature after raking all those furrows closed! Thanks Mom, and all moms.

Now we’ll begin moving peppers, basil, and eggplant out onto the cold frame, and we’ll be checking the forecast constantly trying to anticipate any dangerously cold nights. We’re remembering the frost we had on the mornings of June 1 and 2 last year, and it killed 50% of our sweet potatoes. But sweet corn can take a little cold, and that’s the next big planting project we’ll undertake tomorrow. Otherwise, we’re trellising and mulching peas, hoeing crops, and preparing to attach the first clips to the hoop house tomatoes.     

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Crops Update: Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

From Left to Right: Caroline Bowes, Sean Moriarty, Jill Banach, Greg Suplinskas, and Elizabeth Ventura

 Say “hello” to this year’s Assistant Growers: Caroline Bowes, Sean Moriarty, Jill Banach, Greg Suplinskas, and Elizabeth Ventura. Caroline recently graduated from Hofstra where she studied sustainability; Sean is entering his second year of farming, having spent last season in the Berkshires at Square Roots Farm; Greg most recently worked as a research technician at Children’s Hospital in Philly where he also volunteered at a community garden focused on providing work opportunities for adults with disabilities; and Elizabeth has been a beekeeper with Boston’s Best Bees for the past three years. As a community, we’re depending on them to apply their many talents to growing and marketing our food, and we’re equally committed to supporting and teaching them.

And we’re off to a good start. We started planting onions on Tuesday of this past week, and by Friday, we were halfway done with this enormous job. On Thursday, we moved most of the old, overgrown rhubarb patch to its new location near the hoophouse. We had fun undercutting the old plants and separating the roots so as to expand the patch. Yesterday’s rain is helping the plants get re-established. All this prep to get ready for the 2021 CSA season, which kicks off May 19!

The team is coming up to speed quickly thanks in large part to Jill’s help in training them. Jill has been at Drumlin for the better part of four seasons and is deeply familiar with our marketing and farming strategies. Over the winter and spring, Jill has been writing down procedures and organizing documents to help teach her successors. Wednesday of this week will be her last day with us before she heads out to a farm near the Olympic National Forest in Washington state. We know she will succeed there because she has greatly improved all that she has attended to here. Thank you, Jill, and best wishes! What a pleasure it’s been farming with you!

As a parting note, she’s written to our community:

“With each change of season, I appreciate more aspects of farming than the year before. Thanks to Matt and many others, I have learned more about crop production and soil health than I ever would have imagined. This spring, however, I have been especially thankful for all of the people that Drumlin has connected me to and for the conversations we’ve shared. The new crew of assistant growers and field workers is no exception! Their collective excitement is energizing, and I look forward to hearing about all of the successes of the upcoming season.” 

Your Farmers

Crops Update: 2021 Season Kickoff

With our spring CSA season on the horizon, we’re back with more updates from the farm’s Crops Team. Follow along for the latest news from the fields this growing season.

How’s your garden growing, veggie lovers? Our first peas, fava beans, and spinach are up, and seemed to have enjoyed last Friday’s storm. We got the first seeds into the ground on March 24, and are following our regular seeding schedule: greens each week, roots every other week. We began transplanting lettuce to the field in early April, and have since transplanted leek, scallion, kohlrabi, and beet seedlings. In the past, we’ve seeded beets directly to the field, but haven’t been happy with the results for several years so are switching it up. We rarely find the time to thin the rows, and this leads to small beets prone to foliar disease. The advantage to starting beets in the greenhouse is that you can space them properly as you plant them. The disadvantage is that it takes loads of time to plant the beds we had previously seeded in a matter of minutes. Wah! You mean we can’t have it both ways? Despite the painstakingly slow transplant, we’re going to try this same method with chard.

Hoop House in Boyce Field growing seedlings, protected from the elements.

We planted out a quarter-acre of new strawberries on April 14 and uncovered the over-wintered patch on the same day. In the week ahead, we’ll plant out the first kale of the season under ProtekNet and start the two-week process of transplanting forty thousand onions. As usual, we have our remarkable volunteers—Anne, Sheila, Francesca, and Allison—to thank for their dedication to keeping up with our ambitious greenhouse seeding calendar.  

The Crops team has been busy since the mid-February tapping of sugar maples. We’ve been bottling syrup; installing an overhead irrigation system in the hoophouse; applying compost to the fields with our new spreader; cleaning the Green Barn, greenhouse, wash station, and crops vehicles from top to bottom; harvesting, donating, and selling greens from the greenhouse and hoophouse; hiring and training new staff members; researching and purchasing a new grant-funded box truck; and trying to get everything in order before the season truly begins, and, like a Gravitron, thrillingly spins us out.      

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Crops Update: Preparing for the Cold

Snow and twenty degrees is predicted for this Friday night, so, in the days ahead, we need to focus on harvesting any last sensitive crops like daikon and cabbage, while also protecting immature greens. We’re in good position after a week that brought three corporate volunteer groups to the field. All those Brussels sprouts in last Wednesday’s CSA share were separated from their stalks by lawyers from IBM. They also helped us trim the leeks that went into the share boxes. The next day, volunteers from National Grid helped us break apart and plant the last three beds of garlic. We now have eleven beds planted (using about 14,000 cloves)—a new high for Drumlin. This reflects our customers’ and our own newly discovered enthusiasm for cooking with green garlic—the immature plants pulled whole in May and early June. National Grid volunteers finished their afternoon’s work harvesting parsnips. The drought has affected the size of the crop, and, above, you can see Paige and Margaret sorting the parsnips by size into two separate crates—small and smaller! We still have more parsnips to bring in, but they won’t mind being buried in snow for a while.

On Thursday, Jill and Margaret delivered 750 pounds of potatoes to The Greater Boston Food Bank (GBFB). This is our first time visiting the enormous warehouse, a relationship made possible by one very generous donor. That’s Jill on the right holding up some of our precious Kennebecs with Emily Yerby, manager of local food donations for GBFB. That day, as part of our restaurant circuit, Jill and Margaret also donated produce to Food for Free in Cambridge, something we’ve been doing every week throughout the season. Thanks to you both for building relationships out in the community and for coordinating all the ins and outs of our complicated Thursdays.

On Friday, volunteers from ENGIE, who help businesses move toward energy sustainability, helped us harvest the last watermelon radishes of the season and prepare Brussels sprouts for sale at the weekend market and farmstand. Saturday was a warm and beautiful day, and many shoppers in Somerville and here at the farm were so thrilled to get those sprouts that we sold out! Out in the fields, we worked with community volunteers to finish the turnip harvest. Now it has turned much colder, and given the challenging predicted weather ahead, it’s time to close the farmstand and express our gratitude for the volunteers who made it possible for Drumlin to operate a stand during the pandemic—Richard and Nancy, Linda and her grandson Jake, Leah, Alden and Basha. Thanks all for working to feed our community.

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Crops Update: Garlic Planting

Like Tusken Raiders on Tatooine, befuddled by sandstorms, masked and wrapped in layers of protective clothing, envious of the moisture farmers drinking blue milk in their droid-maintained compounds, we croak out our dismay at this enduring drought! Rain is predicted for Monday night and Tuesday, but with so few growing days left in the season, cover crops will benefit the most. At this time last year, we were beginning to put away some of the 3,000 pounds of carrots that would eventually fill the root cellar. This year, having lost our main patch of storage carrots to the drought, we are just now beginning to harvest from the Hail Mary carrot seedings we continued to put in the ground week after week following July 15. Strong winds have been further damaging plants already stressed by the lack of rain and cold temperatures. Even though this past Saturday was warm and sunny, by Sunday morning several crops appeared newly frosted, burned by the previous day’s lashing wind. But the row cover is still holding in place over the last round of lettuce thanks to the extra rock bags we heaped along its edges. We plan to start harvesting it later this week, and the heads should be in good condition as the cover protects against cold and wind.

We’re approaching the end of garlic planting thanks to the good work of the team and lots of assistance from volunteers. Starting on Friday afternoon, we began the process of breaking apart and planting 400 pounds of our own seed. We planted three beds with community volunteers that day, and three more with volunteers from the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) on Saturday.

Above, you can see us leaving the stems and papers on the field as we separated cloves on Saturday. Today, we planted two more beds with yet another volunteer group from AMC—the fifth of the season! Thanks Kate and Katie for continuing to recruit and lead AMC members at the farm. Breaking apart the garlic bulbs is a serious workout for the hands, and we’re so grateful to all who have helped with that. We’re in a good position now to finish up the garlic planting with more corporate volunteers later this week, and then it’s on to the parsnip harvest.

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Field Work

Crops Update: The Last Potato

This past Thursday, we dug the last potato of 2020! Ten volunteers from Astra Zeneca helped move us toward the potato harvest finish line on Wednesday afternoon. The group started apart, some harvesting 200 pounds of storage turnips, while others pulled up the last of the tomato stakes. Then, we all met and together dug 600 pounds of potatoes. Astra Zeneca sent volunteers to the farm last summer during the garlic harvest, and some in this year’s group were reminiscing about how many days it took for the smell of garlic to entirely leave their cars following the commute home after an afternoon spent on that fragrant job! They must not have minded too much as they came back and did great work once again.      

In the week ahead, we’ll continue harvesting storage crops into the root cellar. Each fall, volunteer Fred reprograms the motherboard controlling the root cellar fan and AC unit to make best use of cold night air to lower the room’s temperature. Our goal is to get the hyper-insulated cellar to 40 degrees as quickly as possible using the least amount of electricity. The more cold night air we can fan into the room, the less we need to run the AC.  We start by grabbing 50-degree air, then step that value down as the room cools. Eventually, we’ll target only 35 degree and colder air to maintain the room near 40. Thanks Fred for all the time spent tapping at the keyboard and monitoring the gauges.

As the nights get colder, we’ve protected the chard and last planting of lettuce with winter-weight coverings. On Friday afternoon, the team secured the covers around the obstacle course of deer fences. Nice work all! The poles and twine were already in place to keep the deer off the greens, and we decided to leave them there to prevent the deer from walking across the expensive covers and cutting them with their sharp hooves. But then the wind twice lifted one of the covers, and we had to remove the hoops to lower that cover’s profile (pictured above). The purpose of the hoops is to keep the frost above the crop. We’re now hoping that the cover is thick enough so that when a light frost settles on it, the leaves pressed against it from below won’t get burned. While we worry about the greens, day after day volunteer Anne has been returning to the last planting of shelling beans to pick those that continue to ripen. Thanks to Anne’s persistence, Jill and Margaret brought fifty pounds of those beans to market, and then donated any that didn’t sell to Food for Free.  

Talulla, one of the restaurants we deliver to each week, recently catered boxed lunches for a group that gathered at Drumlin Farm. The chefs included the following note in each box, and their words provide another illustration of how our community sustains this farm, and vice versa.

To Our Guests,

Talulla is a small, family-operated, Mom and Pop restaurant for which our daughter is the namesake. A connection to our farmers and their ingredients is a core value in our business. We love Drumlin Farm because they are more than just a farm to source ingredients: they are an extension of our family; from the farmers that deliver our produce each day, to the staff at the farm who helped organize our daughter’s Birthday Party last year. We support each other because we both believe in the importance of operating on a smaller and more local scale. At our restaurant, about 90% of the produce we use is sourced from Drumlin Farm. We hope you enjoy the ingredients of your basket. As many products as possible are sourced from Drumlin Farm.

Xo,

Danielle & Conor

We hope to see you picking up a farmshare box, walking the trails, or connecting with us on social media. Happy Harvests!

Your Farmers

Crops Update: Oh Deer!

We spotted three new fawns running out of the fields this morning, bringing to 13 the number of individual deer we’ve counted out there. Our two solar chargers and electric fence set-ups are deployed around carrot patches, and, so far, have been effective. We continue to set up twine fences around ever more crops, three beds at a time—that’s the largest area we can effectively protect without electrification; go larger and the deer just hop right in—, but we only seem to be pushing them onto new crops. Deer are now eating cilantro, radish, bachelor buttons, and next year’s strawberry crop. Even after last weekend’s frost killed the sweet potato vines, we sprayed the beds with repellant just to keep the deer from pawing up the roots over the few days it would take to get them out of the ground. We got a jump on that big job thanks to the helpful work of volunteers from Enterprise Holdings. On Tuesday of last week, seven Enterprise volunteers worked with part of the Crops Team to dig over 1,000 pounds of sweet potatoes, while another seven helped us harvest, shuck, and trim this year’s popcorn crop. Thank you, Enterprise!

We  finished the sweet potato harvest over the next two days with help from community volunteers. And on Friday, more community volunteers helped us do a final sweep through the tomato, pepper and eggplant patches looking for any last fruit that had escaped the frost. By Saturday, we were cutting down tomato twine in preparation for extracting the hundreds of stakes we pounded in June and July. That day, we also began harvesting storage potatoes into the root cellar.

On Sunday afternoon, volunteer Kate from the Appalachian Mountain Club brought another awesome group of ten hikers to the field, and they cut down the rest of the tomato twine and dug 600 pounds of potatoes. Many thanks to Kate and the AMC! Volunteers from Concord Open Table arrived on Sunday afternoon for the second of their weekly pickups, and they took away lots of greens and winter squash. Jill has been doing a great job tracking our food donations to Food for Free, Concord Open Table and the Lincoln Food Pantry. She let the team know that last week we passed our $50,000 target for donated produce. Nice to start the Friday harvest with good news like that! Our thanks to all who are contributing to Drumlin’s efforts to feed those in need through the pandemic.

Your Farmers

Crops Update: First Frost of the Season

This phone camera is as beat as these plants. If you can make it out through the impressionistic haze, that’s our frozen tomato patch on the left and two burned-up bean beds on the right. We noticed the first frost damage of the year on husk cherries and purslane weeds on the morning of 9/15, and have had several freezes since then. Remember, the last frost of the spring killed half our sweet potato patch on the morning of 6/2. That means we had a total of only 104 frost-free growing days this season! The Crops team and volunteers worked throughout last week with an awareness of the looming cold, and did a great job maximizing the final tomato, pepper, flower and string bean harvests of the year.

On Friday afternoon, volunteers from Definitive Healthcare (the first corporate group of the year!) picked 80 pounds of beans and 90 pounds of cherry tomatoes. They’ve been working remotely throughout the pandemic, and this was their first opportunity to be together outside of Zoom meetings. You can see them picking away and then proudly standing behind their bean harvest, while in the background of both pictures, notice volunteer Anne, intent on the job at hand—saving more beans! While this group worked in the front field, a separate group of community volunteers thoroughly picked through the main tomato patch and another planting of beans. And then, for the second week in a row, a large, fresh wave of volunteers arrived at 4 p.m. to cut flower stems. All told, Drumlin had about 30 people harvesting that day–right before the killing frost!

And so, we made the most of the summer. To all who have been helping, whether it be by greeting volunteers in the parking lot, pulling weeds in the field, seeding trays in the greenhouse, harvesting crops, boxing CSA shares, paying bills, mucking barns and making compost, fixing broken things, ordering supplies, and/or, at the other end of the process, buying the farm’s food, take a moment to reflect on the delicious bounty the earth produced all summer, and to appreciate the role you played in that. Thank you!

By the end of this week, we plan to begin filling the root cellar with storage potatoes. Before that, we need to dig all the sweet potatoes that survived the June frost. Now that the September frost has burned away the vines, the deer have easy access to the tubers, and they will dig down with their hooves. Root harvests have been made easier by the lack of rain; it’s as if everything is buried in sand and lifts right out. We would trade that ease for the water the storage carrots and cabbage really need right now. It hasn’t rained since 9/11, and there are so few days left for crops to put on size!

Your Farmers

Crops Update: Preparing for Frost

If not tonight, then by the weekend, we’re expecting the first light frost of the season. We take the forecasted low and subtract ten to account for the farm’s frost pocket. This means that in the week ahead it’s all hands on deck for what may be the closing bean, pepper, eggplant, summer squash and tomato harvests of the year. And while there is a mountain of work to get through this week, the Crops team has one less farmer, as Jen finished her season with us this past Friday. Jen accepted a job helping underserved communities in the Berkshires access public transportation. We will miss her steady presence on the team and wish her all the best. Given that, we’re really looking forward to having the help of our first corporate volunteer groups of the season later in the week, and we’re hoping to see some of our committed community volunteers on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon to help with these important harvests. Last Friday afternoon, we had wonderful volunteer help throughout the tomato and bean harvest, and then some people stayed, while even more arrived, for a total of nine volunteers on the evening flower harvest. Their good work helped us reach a season’s high in flower sales at Saturday’s market. Below you can see volunteer Nancy surrounded by a portion of that enormous flower harvest at Drumlin’s farmstand on Saturday morning.  

While Nancy was making bouquets to order for farm visitors, seven more volunteers fanned out across the acorn squash patch and helped us bring them in before the arrival of another cool evening. Temperatures below 50 can cause chilling injury to squash and pumpkins, so it felt good to get the very last of this year’s crop into the greenhouse just in time. Acorn squash will be in this week’s CSA share, along with peppers, tomatoes, and some really nice carrots you can see lined-up below. We need to cut the tops off the carrots since we’ve sprayed the ferns with repellant to keep the deer away, and lining them up helps speed that process. The twine fence you see around the carrot patch is an added measure of protection against the ten deer we’re seeing on a regular basis in the field (4 does, 6 bucks).  

One crop family the Drumlin deer leave alone is brassicas—broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, etc. Turkeys will occasionally eat brassica leaves, but its main pests are cabbage loopers and aphids. We spray organically certified bacterias to help control loopers, and for aphids, we seed cilantro in the patches and let it flower. The white flowers attract insects that also eat aphids. The flowering cilantro is taller than the already tall Brussels sprouts (we seeded the cilantro in the same week we transplanted the Brussels). On the soil you can see the top growth of the plants that we’ve just cut away to encourage the sizing-up of the sprouts—it’s like removing the garlic scape to boost bulb size. With this one bed of sprouts, we’re about two weeks too late with topping. But we’ll be able to compare sprout size in this bed with three others we topped earlier in the season.

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