Happy New Year! . . . Welcome to 2020! Registration for this season’s CSA is now 
open. The price is $425 for the 20-week season. We will continue to provide 6-7 items per week with the option of adding on storage crop orders at the end of the season.
To sign up, please click here.
To subscribe to our blog and receive farm updates and CSA details, click here.
We hope you can join us this season!
Well, we are at the end of another great season. As we pull the final crops out of the frosty ground we reminisce about the big-belly laughs, cooking experiments, and hard work that goes into a summer of farming. Earlier this week I heard one of the apprentices say “wow, I can’t believe we did all that!” And we did so much! Each of the items in the CSA boxes and at farmers market passed through our hands while sowing seeds, transplanting, weeding, harvesting, and carefully delivering to Eugene. We couldn’t have done it without the steadfast Bill and Debra, the energetic Lisa, or the diligent, hardworking, curious crew of apprentices: Amanda, Erika, Lily, and Matthew.
It was amazing to see the apprentices grow over the five and a half months they were here at Horton Road. It’s a steep learning curve – they are expected to dive in and get dirty from day one. They each took on their jobs and responsibilities with grace and determination. Through the heat of summer, rainy September days, and below-freezing morning of October, the crew was present through every moment.
You may have noticed, as we did on the farm, that this summer felt different than years past. The heavy rains in March and April meant that we didn’t break out into field work until much later than planned. And while we had some hot days, there were more overcast days with drizzles (is it mist or fog or precipitation?!). Some of our crops, like celery and spinach, love the cooler, wetter weather. But others, like tomatoes and peppers, really need that heat and UV light to sweeten up. Change is hard for everyone, especiallyfarmers. What we can do is be adaptive and hope that y’all enjoy eating our produce as much as we love growing it!
Thank you for a great year and we hope to see you in 2020!
Robin
Assistant Manager 2019
Fall has set in with earnesty, and I can feel winter approaching swiftly. The days are growing shorter and so is the harvest. Many moments spent in the golden light of October on my knees digging for potatoes or in the rain pulling carrots. In the summer, day and night turned over into each other so quickly, and now everything seems to be slowing down with the cold, including time. The last crops still in the field reflect the season, thick skinned and rooted things. With less than two weeks remaining before I leave this place I find myself in a space of appreciation and completion. As I move my books and my clothes out of my room in the barn, I imagine who might rest their head here next year, what they might find here, and how they will feel come October.
October, on Horton Road, has been closely related to the shortening days and cold nights that bite at your toes. This has affected not only those who live and work on the farm, but also all of you. You are the witnesses to the shrinking harvest list and the looming skeletons of plants post-production. But outside of this, what does the creeping cold mean for Horton Road? Well, I’ll give you an answer!
Frost.
It’s the glimmer of the ground under the moonlight and five different layers of wool on your body as you wait for the sun to rise. And the way you roast vegetables to keep the kitchen warm. But more than anything, it’s the condensation of the wet coastal range air crystalizing on, and inside, the plants.
When we wake to a frosty morning, our days are pushed further towards noon so that the crops can thaw under sunlight and, at times, we loose a crop froms our harvest list. From my own perspective and understanding, the damage is similar to your house plumbing breaking during a cold winter where the water in the cells solidify and burst the cell walls. The effects of this show up in many different ways: translucency of the leafy greens, little white spots, and sometime the plants die completely. The death of these plants have been a true show of the season. Watching them return their life force back into the soil and knowing they will nourish the plants of next spring.
Frost means acute awareness of the changing seasons here on Horton Road.
Erika Vu
A young woman changing and growing with the seasons.
It’s no accident that the last 3 posts by the other apprentices have all been about the fall or the season ending. I think we’ve had this collective feeling like we’d just go on as we are for the foreseeable future. But as has been remarked, it turns out 6 months goes fast.
This is the longest i’ve been in one place since I left my apartment in New York in April 2018. This is the longest i have worked at the same place, with basically the same schedule week to week, since my first regional theatre job after college in 2009. The part of me that has been freelancing and traveling forever is restless. The part of me that wishes to be a homebody is anxious for the change that is coming.
Watching the leaves fall, seeing the sunrise come later and later, these are concrete examples that fall has come, and that we’ll all be leaving this farm soon.
Today, as my hands went numb during harvest, it was impossible to deny that the seasonal change and all the changes that come with it are HERE.
I follow the news pretty closely, and I am currently reading The Uninhabitable Earth. So climate change is very much on my mind. Today it occurred to me for the first time, I think i have to take the realities of climate change into direct and not just abstract consideration when i figure out what i want to do next. (abstract consideration: do i want to be in the east where flooding is getting worse, or the west where fires are getting worse? direct consideration: how can I actively and positively affect change?) If you have suggestions, i am open to your advice!
But in the meantime, I will keep harvesting each morning and try to cherish these precious fall days.
