Farm and baby minutiae

I knew, going into my first postpartum growing season in 2024, that I would have to exercise some serious restraint. I put a limit on the number of sign-ups for CSA, effectively halving my membership, and consequently, halving the amount of produce I’d be growing (and also halving my income, heh heh). I amended the farm motto to “anything worth doing is worth overdoing, including trying to get away with doing as little as possible”, and under this new vision, reassessed every single process and workflow on the farm that I could think of. My family and friends helped as often as they could – truly, the farm season could not have happened without them.

I also shifted the CSA season later by six weeks, running the season from late-July to late-November (instead of mid-June to mid-October). This might sound counterproductive, given our short growing season in Ontario, but this decision may have contributed almost as much to easing my workload as halving the CSA did (and without the loss of income). Where halving the CSA halved the crops that I had to grow but not the amount of work I had to do (economies of scale!), shifting the CSA season spread my workload out over time, allowing me to complete each task properly and on time, forestalling more complicated catch-up work down the line. A lot of additional work gets created by not getting to urgent tasks quickly enough – for example, a garden bed that takes ten minutes to weed in late spring could take several hours to weed if deferred for just one more week. And at certain times of the year, there just isn’t enough time to avoid this kind of cascading failure in task management. 

I usually think of my busyness over the season as a curve that maps closely to the changing hours of daylight over the year – slow and sporadic in early February, peaking in the weeks before and after Summer Solstice, plateauing through the weeks of late summer, and gradually receding in the fall. 

I have heard other growers joke about the July/August ban on contemplating quitting (unless you’re very sure you want to quit farming). July, in particular, is a tough month for a number of reasons. The plants that I planted back in the spring are growing at a frenetic rate, soaking in the long, long hours of sunlight. I am probably falling behind on trellising and pruning my tomatoes (they can grow >1ft a week), and this will slow me down when I go to harvest them and have to face a tangly jungle to do so – and catching up on the job after the fact takes much longer. But I can’t put in the time to trellis and prune when it matters most, because the plants I didn’t plant (weeds) are also growing at an equally frenetic pace. In fact, they are so much better adapted to being good at life, that they are usually growing faster than the plants that I did plant, and are well on their way to setting seed so that next year’s July will be even harder. I want to stay on top of weeding, but I don’t have the time because I’m not done seeding and planting yet. There are still fall crops that need to be started and if they are too delayed, I may as well not plant them at all because they probably won’t mature before it gets too cold. My storage alliums (like garlic and onions) are just reaching maturity, and I have to get them all out of the field and on drying racks before they rot. This is a big task because there are a lot of alliums – a whole year’s worth – needing attention in a few short days. July also means that the weather is also getting increasingly drier and hotter and insect populations are exploding. Plants and farmers alike are heat-stressed and itchy (farmer) or having holes bitten in their photosynthesizing surfaces (plants).

Over the years, I have put a lot of effort into smoothing the curve of work in July – trying to make each task as hyper-efficient as possible, playing with whatever timings I could control in order to spread tasks out more. But all my best efforts are essentially washed out once CSA begins in mid-June, and I have to actually get my produce to my customers. Apart from the actual growing of vegetables, a less recognized but equally large component of farming is harvesting, washing, sorting, packing, and transporting the produce to customers. Here on the farm, once CSA starts, that process takes three to four days out of each week, effectively halving the time I have to tend to the garden (and yes, a seven-day work week is assumed, see original farm motto!).

I think by now, it has become fairly obvious why delaying the CSA by six weeks made such a difference for me. For the entirety of July, when I am usually at my busiest, I had almost twice as much time to keep up with garden tasks. Instead of spending half the week on harvest/delivery, and then with the remaining time, conducting triage on a myriad of pressing tasks, I could comfortably stay on top of the planting schedule. I had the time to properly deal with weeds in their nascence before they bloomed into much bigger and time-consuming issues. I also gained an unexpected side effect from planting later in the season. All the insect pests (cucumber beetles, potato beetles, flea beetles, cabbage loopers, etc.) that emerged in late spring looking for some nice vegetables to munch on couldn’t find any of their host plants, and moved on. When I finally did plant my vegetables, the local populations of insect pests were much lower, and I didn’t have to spend as much time installing row cover and netting (a universally hated task – you try wrestling a hundred feet of flapping fabric in the wind!).

Shifting the CSA has been effective enough to allow me to keep farming after becoming a mother. But, looking further into the future, could this be the answer to how the farm will operate, at least until my baby gets older? I’m not entirely sure. There are definitely downsides to this strategy too. Starting the CSA late means ending the CSA late. We were incredibly fortunate in 2024 to have an abnormally warm and long fall. I was still harvesting and washing vegetables outdoors in the last week of November. November 2025 was an entirely different story, with the winter and snow coming early – harvesting and dragging produce through the snow in subzero temperatures was slow and brutal work. Additionally, I dislike the idea of having a six week delay in the spring before indulging in freshly harvested vegetables (I’m sure many of my CSA members would agree that the FOMO is real when other farmers start posting photos of beautiful spring greens and crunchy radishes). 

More importantly, even with the surprisingly effective time-savings, even with the reduced CSA membership, even with all the generous help of my family and friends, I only just managed to make the last two farm seasons work. So, if you thought this would be a blog post about how I was able to gracefully land on a solution to balance growing a new human being and run a farm (and also find inner peace, etc.), well, you might have to look elsewhere.