Have you ever noticed that winter in Maine is a very dark time of year?  Our vegetable crops have noticed, too!  While I’m sure you’ve also noticed the cold temperatures of Maine winters, the reduction of daylight hours is really what “kills” the growing season.  At ten hours or less of daylight, or after the beginning of November every year, the days are too short for the vegetable plants to make any growth at all.  Wow, does this sound like seasonal affective disorder to you?

But we have a Winter CSA and sell produce all winter through March!  How do we do it?  Well, let me tell you the story of the storage season at Ripley Farm…

At Ripley Farm we spend the spring, summer and fall growing vegetables for our CSA farm share program.  Everybody is familiar with the term “growing season”.  Because in November the crops stop growing, at Ripley Farm we refer to winter time as the “storage season”. 

From our root cellar to the soil in the greenhouse, we are actually storing vegetables (not growing them) for use all winter long.  We plant our fall and winter greens in the greenhouse in the late summer and early fall so that they have time to grow while there is still enough sunlight.  Once November comes, the greens in our greenhouse are actually simply being stored in a “ready to harvest” state and are no longer actually putting on more leaves. 

Leaves like the spinach on the right are actually being stored right in the ground and are ready to be harvested when we need them, unless they are completely frozen.  This is why in the deep winter months of January and February, the winter greens are often not available because either they are frozen or we’ve already picked them all or they’re not replenishing themselves yet.  In February, the daylight increases to above 10 hours and things start to grow again.  By the end of March, the spinach should be big enough to harvest for the last Winter CSA boxes!  What a treat to see green at that time of year!

The other key part of the story of the storage season here at the farm is our root cellar.  Ripley Farm is your Winter Root Seller!  In the fall we harvest and store thousands of pounds of root crops, onions, cabbage, and winter squashes.  We store most of these crops in our two root cellars here on the farm, keeping them cold, but not below 32 degrees.  Here’s a photo of Gene getting carrots ready for the root cellar by weighing and bagging them into 25 lb perforated bags.  The second photo is of the stored bounty all piled up at our farm.  A very satisfying sight!

And so the story of the storage season at Ripley Farm goes….Until the growing season starts again in May!  My dad’s old saying is never more true than on a farm:

“What goes around, comes around!”