Complimentary Blueberry Juice

New year, new season, new schedule. As I always like to say, this is the best time of year for farming…because nothing has gone wrong yet. It’s all the purity of the platonic farming season, where everything grows perfectly, everything goes to plan, harvests are abundant, and perhaps most importantly, there are no weeds.

I’m working on analyzing last year’s season and all the data and photographs of our best successes and worst disasters. That is my typical off-season work project. But for this upcoming season, there will be a new challenge: pushing the limits for what we can get early, by up to three weeks.

Historically we’ve been pretty bad at this part. We try for early stuff and then it doesn’t work out for any number of reasons. Wisdom is not in the accumulation of experience but in knowing when to deploy the lessons from said experiences. Done successfully this is what is known as the so-called “green thumb.”

So I made a calculated bet that I could go for it. Yes, I’ve frozen my spinach seedlings because I thought they could survive -2C with no cover. Yes, I’ve lost spring sown crops to weeds. Yes, I’ve stuck stuff out in the field and dry farmed, I suppose, expecting they could magically find themselves water. We tried many “early” varieties with eyebrow-raising-low days to maturity, only to find out that the end result vegetable was small and underwhelming.

Despite all these farmer fails (and many, many, many, many more) over the years we defaulted to playing it more…safe. And we had no driver for requiring ourselves to get stuff early. We placed our CSA program into the back half of June when we knew we would likely have enough product for everyone. So we also favoured varieties that we knew were solid, they would just take some more time. The strategies we put into place made sure by end of June, and early July, we were flush with stuff.

So no better place to begin challenging oneself than with the same CSA program. This year I put ourselves on the hook for a two-week-earlier experimental pilot program, without even having any real idea of what it would look like, or what we could offer.

Now begins the exciting part, experimentation. I’ll be honest, I get downright bored if I am not experimenting. I need it. Part of the privilege of running a farm is getting to do exactly that. Part of it to is the knowledge that all these trials, many will surely fail, and some will succeed, but most importantly, there will be many surprises. And I like to use experiments to leverage those surprising results for future plans. You always learn something. And if you’re not actively trying to get into the failure zone, you might still learn, but definitely not at a fast rate.

The challenge that will be enjoyable now is looking at every vegetable, and asking is there some way I can get this earlier. For sure. Of course there is. Is there some method I’ve just not bothered considering so I wrote off the possibility of getting this crop early? For sure. Of course. Have I just been lazy, and could have covered something or watered something and succeeded? Be honest. For sure. Of course.

With the finalization of the new hoop house and quite a bit of no-till infrastructure, there is a lot less for us to do up front on the farm in the springtime this season. These infrastructure projects sucked a lot of valuable time and energy out from other things. With these projects in the 95% finished zone, we have a lot more energy to devote to what we should be focused on in April and May: growing stuff. As much as we can. As early as we can.

So we begin the new journey of 2026.

Graham

thanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice