New Picadilly Video!

Follow the bounty of Picadilly Farm from field to plate in this beautifully shot video by shareholder Ben Pender-Cudlip.

Click this link for the video http://vimeo.com/30028281

Wrapping up 2011

Farm crew 2011! From the back left: Elizabeth, Jose, Antonio. Biz, Jess, Chris, Jenny, little Jesse, Bruce. Susie. Adelina, Jodie, Iver, Laura, Alejandro.

Whew – we made it!  This growing season presented more weather-related difficulties than we can remember from more than a decade of farming. We look back fondly on about ten weeks of nice summer sun – a time where we actually ran our irrigation equipment. But bracketing those summer heydays were weeks of relentless rain. Countless rain storms, constant drizzle, hurricane Irene, and eighteen of Halloween snow to top it all off. And though our farm was spared dramatic damage, the hurricane cast a sober shadow over the autumn as we learned about other growers and friends who suffered devastating losses. Picadilly Farm’s location about half mile away from the Connecticut River, combined with our relatively sandy soils, both served us well this year.  But we wonder, like everyone, is this wacky weather the new normal? And how then will we fare?

With your support, we fare well.  Farming during this perfect storm era of wacky weather, sky-high land values, and subsidized Agribusiness, presents daunting risks for any one farmer or farm family to shoulder. Community Supported Agriculture makes so much good sense.  We saw a funny seed catalog cover yesterday, from a Maine cooperative called FEDCO, that rang true for our times. The cover showed a Victory Garden-era person, amidst a heap of home-canned tomatoes, with the slogan, “TOGETHER WE CAN!”  What a nice spin on the “everything local” buzz alongside the political primary season.  Remember as well a few more of the reasons to feel good about Picadilly foodstuffs: it is all grown right here; and more than 60 cents of every dollar of the share price goes to pay the farmers and farm crew directly. Much of the remainder is spent locally, with businesses run by our neighbors and to seed coops like FEDCO.

So here we are. Even with relentless rain, hurricane, blizzard, we still eat. We all have plenty, even more than we need. For this, we remember to be grateful. When we eat the onions, we can remember back to March, when they were seeded in our greenhouses, and we had no inkling of the future (that is now the past). When we roast the butternuts, we are awed that any harvest could have been pulled from a wet September field, then cured in a too-humid greenhouse, and then still be here for eating today! When we slice a carrot, we recall a July summer day, any one, which could have been the day that these were planted in hot, sandy soil. And when we pack out our last December shares, we are grateful for all of our eaters, the final link in the chain from seed to soil to harvest to table to good health.

So, accept our gratitude at the end of this crazy year. Thanks for eating local and for supporting young family farms. May you thrive in the New Year.

Warmly,

Jenny & Bruce (and our crew)

Catching up After a Busy Summer

It seems during the hot summer months that it is all we can do to keep up with the fast growth of all the plants on the farm. Now that the shorter days of autumn have arrived, we can finally take a deep breath and start to catch up on some of the things we’ve kept on the back burner– including this blog!

Below are the best of the newsletters from each month since June, to give you a sense of the summers happenings and harvest. We’ll have more photos up in the photo gallery soon as well. Stay tuned!