Hedgerow Work Party & Last Week of the Farm Stand

Hello dear members!

We hope you’re enjoying this beautiful spring.

Here on the farm, the greenhouse is fast filling up with a multitude of flowers, tiny baby tomato plants, and a sea of onions that we’ll be enjoying til this time next year. The crew is hard at work ensuring an abundant strawberry year by clipping runners in our new strawberry patch, and doing an epic revamp of the back of the barn and wash/pack area. The seeds are ordered, the fields are getting mowed, and we’re getting excited for another season.

We’re writing with a small Farm Stand update (and sale!) and an invitation to a spring work party on the farm.

A quick note: This update is going out only to returning CSA members. New members won’t be invited to the farm until CSA pickups begin in June, so that they can be oriented, but don’t worry — they’ll receive all the important spring updates, and you are welcome to bring them along with you if you’re coming out.

Bumblebee enjoying the flowering currants in the hedgerow.

HEDGEROW WORK PARTY!

Since we moved the farm here five years ago, our dear friend Laurel has been helping us plant and tend the native hedgerow along the edges of the upper fields. In spite of the gopher’s best efforts, it’s slowly becoming a lush habitat border for pollinators and birds. This time of year it needs a little extra love, so we’re inviting returning members to come out Saturday morning to help with the weeding, do a bit of chatting, some playground playing, and enjoy the sun.

SATURDAY, APRIL 18th AT 10 AM

Please RSVP to Laurel: laurelmalinanderson@gmail.com

Let’s meet at the solar panels to grab tools then head to the hedgerow north of strawberries (between WCCF and Winter Sister). Bring your favorite hand weeder! We’ll have some tools as well.

If anyone loves weedwhipping there is also a need for some of that starting at 9 am!

FARM STAND

GREEN GARLIC & A SPRING SALE

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Farm Stand this winter! You’ve helped us clear out most of our remaining storage crops, and kept the crew busy during the quietest time of the year.

We’ll be closing the Farm Stand down Monday, April 13th.

But until then we’re offering some gorgeous green garlic, and a sale on our remaining Celery Root and Winter Squash. Here’s what you can expect in the Farm Stand this final week:

• Green Garlic!

• the very last of our Onions & Shallots

• A few remaining Potatoes

• Dutch Butter Popcorn

• Floriani Red Flint Cornmeal

• Celery Root — on sale for $1/lb!

• Assorted Winter Squash — on sale for $1/lb! There’s still a few of our favorite — Bonbon — which are still as sweet as candy.

Looking forward to seeing you in the fields soon,
David & Kayta

2026 CSA Sign-ups Now Open!

Dear friends,

We’re delighted to announce that sign-ups for our 2026 CSA program are now open.

2026 is shaping up to a vibrant year. A new pick-up day (Friday) for community picnic and playground hangs; giant first-year strawberries; and as always new flowers and crop varieties to delight and inspire.

We hope you’ll let West County Community Farm be a weekly source of nourishment, connection, and beauty in the year ahead.

See you in the fields!
David & Kayta

2026 CSA Sign-ups Open this Saturday, February 14th!

Dear 2025 CSA members!

We hope this finds you all well and filled up with vitamin-D from this January we just had.

Here on the farm, the young strawberry plants in our big new strawberry patch are feeling the vitamins for sure and pushing their first sets beautiful leaves, singing to us of sweet summer farm days to come.

Read on below for our 2026 sign-up opening date and more updates!

2026 SIGN-UPS OPEN FEBRUARY 14th

Sign-ups for our 2026 CSA Program will open on February 14th. Returning member will get first dibs!

You’ll receive an email invitation the morning of February 14th. Members from 2025 will have 2-weeks to sign up before we open it up to the waitlist. Please sign-up within that period to ensure your spot.

And encourage friends or family who you’d like to enjoy the season with to sign-up for the waitlist on our website here.

This year’s 26-week CSA program will run from Friday, June 12th — Tuesday, December 15th.

Friday = NEW PICK-UP DAY!

Celebrate the end of the workweek with an evening hang-out on the farm.

This coming year, we will be adding Fridays, from 1:00 pm — 6:00 pm as a regular CSA pick-up day in addition to our usual Tuesday and Saturday harvest pickups.

As usual, members can enjoy the farm, u-pick gardens, playground and picnic areas 7 days-a-week, sunrise-to-sunset.

WINTER FARMSTAND

Members can now enjoy our bountiful stockpile of storage crops via our self-serve farm stand in the cooler.

Feel free to come by anytime that it’s light out to purchase hardy staples (and a few greens!). Currently, the farm stand is stocked with:

• Carrots

• Yellow Onions

• Jelly, Harvest Moon & Desiree Potatoes

• Red & Green Cabbage

• Dino Kale (while it lasts!)

• Celery Root

• Dutch Butter Popcorn

• Floriani Red Flint Cornmeal

• Assorted Winter Squash

WINTER UPDATE

In the early days of WCCF, January was a relatively slow month. Not anymore! This farm train seldom stops and January was as full as can be with planning for a bounteous season ahead and repairing and improving tools and infrastructure for ultimate smoothness during the planting and harvest crunch.

January tasks this year have included:

• Brooding over and tending to our precious new strawberry and garlic plants

• Completing our 2025 year review and budgeting for 2026

• Starting work on a major overhaul of wash-pack tables and systems

• Lots of paper work for our CCOF organic cert application

• Replacing a leaky old 500 ft section of mainline irrigation pipe

• Tractor repairs and tractor spa-days

• …. and hopefully some farmer spa-days and sleep-ins thrown in there

Winter is a very projecty time of year for us, but at about this time of year — when the acacia and the wild mustards start blooming, “yellow season” as our friend Kate calls it — we start to get a little antsy for the field.

It is still a little fuzzy, but we can start to make out the season ahead emerging from the winter mist — the potatoes flowering over there in Centerfield; the Jack-O-Lanterns in Creekfield; cherry tomatoes and hot peppers in the loamy soil of Highgarden South; lazy Friday evenings chomping strawberries with friends under the oaks.

Surely we’ll have a few more good rainy, fireside, cups-of-tea type days before then, but bright days of summer on the farm are right around the corner.

Can’t wait to see you in the fields in 2026,
David & Kayta