Summer & Fall On the Farm

My goodness, time has flown! We've missed being in touch with you all - we just kept getting busier and busier! In any case - hi! And here's what we've been up to this season, and a bunch of cute pictures!

This has been one of our toughest growing seasons in terms of weather that we've ever experienced. It started out with a very rainy spring, which made weed management extra difficult, and incredible pest pressure, likely caused by the mild winter. Then the extreme heat set in in mid-June, followed by essentially no rain until Hurricane Debby blew through in mid August. We are able to irrigate (aka water) our crops, but we don't have nearly the amount of water that we need in order for crops to do their best during the hot weather. The weather has shifted in our favor, but we had a very tough spring and summer season, and it led to some decreased yields in our long season fall crops like winter squash. I don't mean to be "woe is us", just wanted to give you a sense of what made this year so difficult for us and all farmers in our region. 

Annie in the peas this June

While it was a difficult year, some parts of it were also great! . I (Joanna) have been back on the farm more which has been great. Our returning and new crew members have been amazing, and getting to experience the farm more with Annie has been a true joy. Below are pictures of her helping out on the farm - she’s become especially adept at planting (with lots of supervision!)

Lettuce planter

Native plant planter

Tomato taster

Market helper

Squash pointer outer

Basil harvester

Scape harvester

Flower destroyer

Pepper planter

Here’s a smattering of vegetable snaps from this summer and fall as well. It’s been so nice having potatoes again after a complete crop failure in 2023. We’ve also been experimenting with shiitake mushroom growing with some success, which we hope to expand in future years - they’re so yummy!!

Fall cabbages looking cute

We’ve also gotten to pop up at the 32nd St. Market, and will be joining again this Saturday October 12th! We’ll be back on Saturday October 26th and Saturday November 16th as well.

We’re also having another baby in February! So we have another busy winter ahead of us.

It's almost CSA time!

It’s hard to believe, but our Main Season CSA starts in just over two weeks!

Why do we love CSA so much? Let us count the ways! Here are five reasons:

1. It allows us to get you the freshest, highest-quality produce because we can harvest and pack everything to order. Your produce hasn’t been sitting out, waiting for someone to give it a loving home like at a farmers market. Also, we’re Certified Naturally Grown, which you can read about here.

2. We designed our CSA to be as accessible and flexible as we could muster because that’s the kind of CSA that we would want to be members of. Just getting little bits of lots of different things was never appealing to us - we wanted to make it possible to “shop” for your CSA produce, getting larger quantities of the exact things you like. But if you like more of a sampler of veggies, that works for us too! We just really like having the options available for you. We also try to increase flexibility by offering a payment plan and expanded pick up hours at our numerous pick up locations across Baltimore.

3. It helps us plan for the season to come. Knowing how much food we need to grow helps us to plan every aspect of our farm, from the varieties of tomatoes that we should grow to how many folks we need to hire. With the unpredictability of weather, plants, and climate change, to name a few, having a sense of what’s in store for the season demand-wise is incredibly helpful to our small business. We like to think it’s helpful to our members to be able to invest in their own delicious, satisfying, nourishing cooking and eating ahead of time, too.

4. We love knowing where our food is going. When we started the farm in 2016, we only worked with wholesale customers and felt very disconnected from where our food ended up. It’s be so fun getting to meet CSA members and getting a peak into their kitchens on Instagram and Facebook. It gives us warm fuzzy feelings - truly - and motivates us through the heat and the rain!

5. We love that our members love it, too! Here’s what one of our members says: “We loved our CSA through Good Dog Farm last season for their beautiful, incredibly fresh, organic vegetables and friendly faces at share pickup. Our family especially enjoyed the awesome variety— red noodle beans, Korean melon, baby mustard greens and okra were our favorites among the less common veggies— but more typical CSA fare like sweet potatoes and collards were wonderful as well. It’s so nice that they use Harvie for administering the CSA as it makes it easy to only get what we want to eat and to buy weekly extras. We’ve joined three different CSAs over the last 10 years and while they were all great, Good Dog Farm has been our favorite for convenience, choice and more variety of vegetables. We’re looking forward to next season!” - Kristen, member since 2020

You can learn more about our CSA here on our website.

Plants and Planting Them

We’ve got plant fever! The greenhouse is full of baby plants and we’re just starting to plant seeds in the ground outdoors. Next week we’ll put our potatoes in the ground - we’re hopeful that we’ll have great yields this year after a complete crop loss last year. We’re growing them on the home farm instead of our auxiliary site so that we can get them some emergency irrigation if we have another insanely dry spring like last year.

We also have lots of plants growing for our upcoming plant sales! They’re getting the 5-star treatment in our heated greenhouse so that when they get to your house they’ll be ready to rock and roll.

Here are our top tips to grow a great garden this year!

1. Know your soil! Getting a soil test helps you to make informed decisions on how to amend your soil. We use the University of Delaware lab to test our farm’s soil - it’s affordable and has a pretty quick turn around.

2. Be patient! This one is hard…we know! But getting your plants in the ground a little later will not slow down their growth AND protects them from frost. We wait to plant summer crops like tomatoes until after Mother’s Day, although if you’re in the city you can probably plant a little bit earlier. If you can’t wait, try planting them in pots just in case you need to bring them inside overnight.

3. Water those thirsty plants! Did you know that when they’re fruiting (for example, forming tomatoes), plants need 1-3 gallons of water on their roots every week?! Don't skimp!

4. Keep leaves dry! Dry foliage prevents disease. Try to plant with enough space to encourage good airflow. Water your plants at the roots, and water in the morning so that leaves can dry out during the day.

5. Keep planting! Stager plantings by a few weeks to ensure a continuous harvest. For example, in the spring, we direct seed radishes every two weeks so that we’ll have plenty of radishes for weeks to come.

6. Start with great plants! Our Certified Naturally Grown vegetable and flower plants are a great way to ensure give your plants a great start! Pre-order your plants for pick up or come pick out them out at one of our plant sales! Hope to see you there!

And of course, it’s also a great time of year to sign up for a CSA share! We’ll share some of the cool projects we’ve been working on to beautify the farm, and improve our efficiency, soon!

Leaping Into Spring (in our minds, at least)

We’ve got spring on our minds! It won’t be warm, or non-windy, enough for us to plant outdoors for a while, but we are starting some brand new crops in our brand new high tunnel. We’re hopeful that we’ll have spinach and carrots for the early weeks of our CSA shares come May! We also planted arugula and French breakfast radishes that we hope will be ready for our Waverly Market pop up on Saturday March 16th!

We’re savoring the tail end of winter so that we can tackle a few more projects while also resting just a bit more. We have some clean up projects in the farm yard to finish up, plus some tree planting to complete. These super windy days make me excited for the future when these trees have grown up to do their job as a windbreak.

Our new tunnel went up in record time thanks to Bryan and the crew! It has fine mesh netting along the sides to exclude pests, mainly cucumber beetles, which should allow us to have cucumbers later into the summer this year. Fingers crossed that it works - cucumbers are my favorite!

If you’re dreaming of spring today too, head over to our Plant Store to treat yourself to an amazing garden this year!

Winter Bulletin

Greetings from hibernation! We’ve been doing some of our most restful activities, if you consider sitting on the couch an activity, while also cranking out the winter CSA shares and gearing up for spring.

We were thrilled to get real snow for the first time in two years! Annie did not care for the snow, but Zaydee relished it.

We’ve been doing lots of cooking and eating, including getting back into bread and pizza baking. It’s so fun topping pizzas with veggies we’ve saved from the high season. We’re really looking forward to harvesting pizza toppings with Annie in the spring now that she’s walking!

Here’s a family farm walk we took before Annie was walking - she thinks the high tunnels are neat!

We’ve also been taking some trips to see family and friends, including a goat!

We’re harvesting beautiful salad greens from our tunnels for our winter CSA members! We also popped up at the 32nd Street Farmers Market in December, and we’ll be back on March 16th, so mark your calendars!

We’ve also launched our Plant Sale for this spring, as well as our Main Season CSA shares. Hope you’ll check out all of the cool things we have to offer in 2024! We’ll share more in the next couple of weeks about our winter projects and plans for the spring. Stay cozy!!

An Ode to Winter Food

We love growing food in the winter! It feels like we’re cheating nature into being able to eat fresh food even when it’s frozen outside. We grow salad greens in our three high tunnels, which are unheated greenhouses warmed only by the sun. The sides roll up and down so that we can regulate the temperature and increase air flow when it’s warmer out. We also grow directly in the soil, unlike a greenhouse where we grow in trays on tables. Here are some of the main reasons why we love winter growing!

• It brings us back to our roots as a farm! We started our CSA program in the winter of 2016 - 2017, and if you can believe it, some of our members have been with us since then! We moved onto our first farm in the summer of 2016, and we did a Kiva crowdfunded loan in order to build our first high tunnel. From there, we started growing some of Bryan and Nick’s favorite winter greens bred at the farm where they learned to grow - Even’Star Organics.

• It feels good to eat it! We enter these salad days after a summer full of juicy tomatoes, and it often feels like my body is craving something green by September! Eating a salad made with flavorful greens, while sounding virtuous, does fundamentally make me feel fantastic.

• It has boundaries! On a farm, there’s always something that needs doing. While the winter doesn’t completely change that, the cold weather does limit your options significantly. I find this nice a lot of the time - you just have to go with the weather, do what you can, when you can, and then stop and go inside!

• It tastes incredible! We grow hearty and flavorful Asian greens, crunchy lettuces, and new this year, we’re trying to grow herbs like parsley and cilantro, plus bunching kale and Swiss chard! It’s fun to experiment!

• It’s not just greens! Technically this isn’t part of winter growing, but it’s a big part of winter eating. Lots of what we grow goes into storage for the winter so that we can eat it during the cold months, like butternut squash, sweet potatoes, radishes, beets and turnips.

Summer Show & Tell

Hi everybody! My goodness, it’s been quite a while since I’ve been in touch! I’ve been busy hanging out with Annie while Bryan and the crew have been hard at work growing food for our CSA members and wholesale customers. I wanted to share a few pictures and updates before it gets much later, so here are some snippets of our sweet summer!

Here’s Annie enjoying one of her first foods - Swiss chard! It’s been so amazing, almost impossible to wrap our brains around, Annie eating food that we grew here on our farm. It’s been of the sweetest parts of bringing her up on a farm so far, especially since when she’s on the ground she only wants to eat (and choke on) grass.

We grew a staggering amount of lettuce early this summer! We ended up with a lettuce head gobblin on the farm, but it was all worth it!

We’ve been dabbling in growing flowers this summer for our CSA members. Our Assistant Manager Kaiti has been making beautiful bouquets from just a few beds and it’s been such a joy for us all!

We were horrified by the wildfire smoke days. It made the world feel scary and broken. We did our best to keep the workdays short during those difficult days.

While this season’s weather has had extreme heat and periods of dry, there were also some very beautiful days. The drought early in the season took a toll on our potato crop and some of our winter squash, but we’re shaping up to have an incredible sweet potato year!

We also had an awesome tomato season!!

Here’s a fall field of radicchio and lettuce - August was a huge push of planting amidst extremely hot weather. Summer crops start to get pretty weedy and overgrown at this point in the season, so seeing a fresh batch of tidy, new plants in the ground really hits the spot!

Annie loves adventuring around the farm in her stroller and frame pack. Dress code - diaper only.

Here’s a squash harvest action shot - we hurried to pick these up during the extremely hot weather when they were getting too toasty in the field.

As farmers, we're always planting many months ahead of a harvest, so if you can believe it, we're already seeding lots of baby greens in our high tunnels! They all need to grow and get established before November 15th, which is about the last day that we have 10 hours of daylight. From then on plants won't grow quickly enough, so early fall is always a critical time for winter growing! Speaking of winter, we wanted to remind you about our Winter CSA which runs December 2023 - March 2024 this year (no shares the last two weeks of December, though)! You can learn all about our Winter CSA here.

Next time we’ll have lots of pictures of beautiful fall produce to share, so stay tuned!

We adore spring greens

It’s late spring and that means that we’re surrounded by greens! While we feel so lucky to eat fresh greens all year round, the variety and abundance that spring brings is always very exciting. We can eat crunchy bok choi and cabbage, tender baby lettuce, and hearty kale and collards to our heart’s content. The leaves on the trees have gone from light green to dark, and the bunching greens are somehow both green and purple at once!

There’s also a whole lot of crispy brown around the farm given this dry, relatively cool weather. We’re pretty much constantly watering in order to maintain lush greens and keep all of the trees that we just planted around the farm in good shape. So far it’s been okay, but constant irrigation adds a whole lot more to a farmer’s plate. The cooler nights have led to slower summer squash and cucumbers than usual, so while normally this would be what we call a “shoulder season,” we’re still solidly in greens-land for the time being.

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Here are some of our favorite greens recipes - hope you enjoy them, too!

1. BOK CHOY, KALE & BEET SLAW WITH CREAMY CASHEW DRESSING from Dishing Up the Dirt

2. Northern Spy’s Kale Salad from Food52 (from the Northern Spy restaurant)

3. Green Gumbo from Saveur

4. Caesar Salad with Parmesan Croutons from Ina Garten

5 Reasons Why We're Excited for CSA 2023

We are getting so close to the start of our CSA main season - in fact, thanks to all of the warm (and weird) weather that we’ve been having, we might even get started one week earlier than we had planned, so stay tuned! We can’t wait to start feeding our favorite customers again.

Why do we love CSA so much? Let us count the ways! Here are five reasons:

1. It allows us to get you the freshest, highest-quality produce because we can harvest and pack everything to order. Your produce hasn’t been sitting out, waiting for someone to give it a loving home like at a farmers market. Also, we’re Certified Naturally Grown, which you can read about here.

2. We designed our CSA to be as accessible and flexible as we could muster because that’s the kind of CSA that we would want to be members of. Just getting little bits of lots of different things was never appealing to us - we wanted to make it possible to “shop” for your CSA produce, getting larger quantities of the exact things you like. But if you like more of a sampler of veggies, that works for us too! We just really like having the options available for you. We also try to increase flexibility by offering a payment plan and expanded pick up hours at our numerous pick up locations across Baltimore.

3. It helps us plan for the season to come. Knowing how much food we need to grow helps us to plan every aspect of our farm, from the varieties of tomatoes that we should grow to how many folks we need to hire. With the unpredictability of weather, plants, and climate change, to name a few, having a sense of what’s in store for the season demand-wise is incredibly helpful to our small business. We like to think it’s helpful to our members to be able to invest in their own delicious, satisfying, nourishing cooking and eating ahead of time, too.

4. We love knowing where our food is going. When we started the farm in 2016, we only worked with wholesale customers and felt very disconnected from where our food ended up. It’s be so fun getting to meet CSA members and getting a peak into their kitchens on Instagram and Facebook. It gives us warm fuzzy feelings - truly - and motivates us through the heat and the rain!

5. We love that our members love it, too! Here’s what one of our members says: “We loved our CSA through Good Dog Farm last season for their beautiful, incredibly fresh, organic vegetables and friendly faces at share pickup. Our family especially enjoyed the awesome variety— red noodle beans, Korean melon, baby mustard greens and okra were our favorites among the less common veggies— but more typical CSA fare like sweet potatoes and collards were wonderful as well. It’s so nice that they use Harvie for administering the CSA as it makes it easy to only get what we want to eat and to buy weekly extras. We’ve joined three different CSAs over the last 10 years and while they were all great, Good Dog Farm has been our favorite for convenience, choice and more variety of vegetables. We’re looking forward to next season!” - Kristen, member since 2020

You can learn more about our CSA here on our website.

A Farmer’s Top 6 Gardening Tips

Wondering how to get the most prolific plants this season? read on!

1. Know your soil! Getting a soil test helps you to make informed decisions on how to amend your soil. We use the University of Delaware lab to test our farm’s soil - it’s affordable and has a pretty quick turn around.

2. Be patient! This one is hard…we know! But getting your plants in the ground a little later will not slow down their growth AND protects them from frost. We wait to plant summer crops like tomatoes until after Mother’s Day, although if you’re in the city you can probably plant a little bit earlier. If you can’t wait, try planting them in pots just in case you need to bring them inside overnight.

3. Water those thirsty plants! Did you know that when they’re fruiting (for example, forming tomatoes), plants need 1-3 gallons of water on their roots every week?! Don't skimp!

4. Keep leaves dry! Dry foliage prevents disease. Try to plant with enough space to encourage good airflow. Water your plants at the roots, and water in the morning so that leaves can dry out during the day.

5. Keep planting! Stager plantings by a few weeks to ensure a continuous harvest. For example, in the spring, we direct seed radishes every two weeks so that we’ll have plenty of radishes for weeks to come.

6. Start with great plants! Our Certified Naturally Grown vegetable and flower plants are a great way to ensure give your plants a great start! Pre-order your plants for pick up or come pick out them out at one of our plant sales! Hope to see you there!