The seeds, except for seed potatoes are ordered and mostly here. There is a LOT behind that statement. With 100 summer and 60 fall shareholders, I need to “know what I’m doing”. Here is a little outline of CSA planning.
I was fortunate to be able to purchase an Excel spreadsheet from a farm that has been doing a CSA for many years. The spreadsheet allows me to play around with assumptions – number of shareholders, amount of land, how much each share gets a week, etc, to be sure we have the capacity to produce enough.
I started laying out a plan for each share each week. Don’t take this as gospel because the weather will determine just when something is actually ready. But, a plan is better than totally winging it. So…
This lays out what goes in a share each week. I try to have at least one thing from each family: onions, beans or peas, cabbage/broccoli, carrots, greens, etc. The challenge is that I tend to think in terms of heads of lettuce or bunches of carrots, and don’t have accurate weights, so the “lbs” column is an educated guess. Gee, it takes so little time to write about it but took so much time tweeking it around.
Then, I took this information and put it into a crop plan worksheet:
I put the numbers in the top line in, and they then calculate how many rows and acres it will require. The person who developed this got the yield per row foot from his experience combined with catalogs and books. This saved me MUCH time. At the bottom it totals the acreage needed so I know whether we can do this much or not. I still have to adapt that information because some things get planted after others so will use the same land, and the program doesn’t know that.
Then I went through my seeds and made a list of what I had, and amounts. That went into the “seed on hand” column. The peach colored rows are aggregates of a crop, for instance all the snap beans. I used this number then to decide how much of which variety of bean to grow. If I am starting plants in the hoophouse and transplanting them out, that info goes in the plants per foot and plants needed columns. If it is something I am direct seeding in the field, the info goes into the seeds per foot and seeds needed column. Again, the person who put this together gathered recommendations/combined with what he does for this information, and the weight of seeds per needed (number of seeds per ounce). Then it calculates how much seed I need, subtracts how much seed I have, and calculates how much seed I need to order. Sweet. I primarily order from Johnnys, High Mowing, and Fedco because they are longtime supporters of organic production. I also ordered from E&R because they had a white acorn squash that has been highly recommended but wasn’t available from my regular sources. The damage? About $1600.
Next, I have planned out how many plants I need to start, when, for transplants. “Cell size” relates to how many plants in a 10 x 20 flat. The 288s are tiny but good for germinating seeds on the limited heat mat space. Using them also lets me choose the most vigorous plants to put in the large flats and grow out.
This is as far as I have gotten. I have literaly spent months getting this far. Hard to believe I could describe it in a half hour.
The next worksheet lays out what goes in each row in the field, the date planted, date harvested, etc. I am still agonizing over which cultivation equipment to get, on what spacing, before I can fill that out. I’ve been putting off the decision until I got other time urgent things, like ordering seed, done, but now it is at the top of the list of to dos.
