Frequently Asked Questions

We get numerous requests about our farm and almost everyone asks the same questions so we figured we ought to create a post entitled "Frequently Asked Questions". Here are our top questions.

What is a CSA? Community Supported Agriculture, or CSA, is a system where the community supports a farmer and a farmer supports the community. Members provide the funding for us to farm, and we  uses our knowledge and skills to provide the community with locally, responsibly, and sustainably grown food.

When do I pay for my share?  CSA memberships are paid in full at the start of the season. This helps to offset costs for farm maintenance, cover crops, seeds, fertilizer, tractor, and other materials to begin the season.

How much produce do I receive in a typical share?  The typical share has anywhere from 10 to 15 different vegetables, fruits, and herbs. It is dependent upon the season and growing conditions.

Is all of the produce grown on the farm? All of our produce is grown directly on our farm, organically.  Occasionally we may find items to give to our members (eg. starfruits, pineapple oranges) but we always let our members know where they came from and how they were grown.

How do you sign up for your CSA?  You can contact us via our Facebook page, Steed Farm, or you can view our listing on localharvest.org (Steed Farms).

Where are you located?  We are located in Plant City.  We are on County Road 39, 3 miles south off Hwy. 60.

How many weeks is your season?  Our season is 24 weeks and starts around Thanksgiving and ends in May. 

Are volunteer hours required to be a member of the CSA?  We do all the growing and harvesting there are no volunteer hours required.

Why should I choose a CSA?  You get to know your farmer, you see where your produce came from, and you have a personal interest in the welfare of the farm. 

What are the benefits of a CSA?

Food is harvested right before pickup and retains nutrients and vitamins longer.

Our food is organically grown.

A reduction of carbon emissions from transport and cold storage.

You are supporting your local community

Monies spent at a CSA will be spent locally

You will know where your food is grown, who is growing your food, and how your food is grown.

Week 24, 2011, Last Pick up and End of Season

Well this is the last pickup of the 2010-11 season. I think it went rather well overall. Not without complications but I feel that the amount and variety of produce over the season was pretty good. I hope that our patrons feel the same way. Things have really run their course in the field and there is very little to pick for this last week. Some things like the silver queen corn, watermelon, and the tropical pumpkins will not be ready but we will have an after-season pickup. This final pickup after the season is one that will be like a gleaning day. Anything in the field is up for grabs. There won't be a whole lot of stuff to pickup. Much like the pre-season pickup that we had before week 1. Where things are ready that falls out of the normal season and we would rather share the produce with our members than see some of it go to waste. The corn and other stragglers should be ready then. By the way, the silver queen is about a foot over my head and I have never grown corn that looks so robust and healthy. I am really looking forward to picking it, if the good Lord wills it.

I finally had to remove the rooster from the laying flock as he was causing some severe damage to some of the hens. I processed him and brought him home for dinner. The kids were really keen on eating him and seeing what he would taste like. Anna had 2.5 helpings of the bird. I was a little apprehensive, Jenn more so. But the kids lead the way with a fearless example for the grownups to follow. I must say he tasted just like chicken :) He had extremely dark meat that almost tasted like a cross of chicken and turkey. He was very good and much more tasty than store bought meat but a little tougher as well. The one thing that struck me was how sturdy his legs were. The leg bones were about 30% longer than the ones in the store. Maybe it is because he got way more exercise. He really was a very beautiful rooster with really nice plumage. If he was nicer he would still be running with the ladies. There might be a lesson for thought there.

I am turning my thoughts to covercrops, where I will plant next, and equipment repairs/maintenance over the summer. I am thinking that I will fix up one of the greenhouses for vegetable production this winter. It would be nicer to grow in there than worrying about covering up the warm season plants with freeze cloth and then taking it off each time. I think that I will try tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, and either zucchini or cucumbers. I am also working on a plan to replace my Dad who has been a tremendous asset to the farm over the season. He will be retiring after Saturday from the operation. We thank him for all the hours he puts in during the week. He is moving to Clearwater so commuting would be out of the question. We will miss him dearly around the farm. But I hope he enjoys his time away and not worry about the daily operation.

Pre-Pickup

We decided to have a pre-pickup for our members for some plants that were going down hill but I still wanted our members to partake of. The squash, and cucumbers are giving up the ghost and we did a few last harvests before I pull them out an replant something in their place. It is fun and exciting to meet everyone this season and greet our returning members after a summer hiatus. Iincluded a picture of the poor looking squash.

Things are look pretty good considering all factors in the field. We are growing the best tomatoes to date. I have found that the variety Celebrity works great for us. It is interesting to note that they responded the best to the addition of our woodchip/horse manure addition whereas the other plants seemed to have no response or a negative response as in the case with the eggplant. A picture is above. The cucumbers are all gone. They never seemed to recover after the 40 F weather we had at the farm in early Nov. The eggplants are still achingly slow and are just now starting to flower with little eggplants forming. I'm not sure that they will make it before frost. The Asian greens are growing nicely aside from the beetle pressure that is unrelenting that we are finally getting a hold of. We ha ve one freak that is growing twice as fast as the others. I included the picture above. I hope to save the seeds from that plant for next season. Herbs look nice. Mint looks better than last year at this time. Mustards, collards, turnips, are lettuce are a little late this year. I held off planting because I was a little nervous that they would have a hard time germinating and growing with the unusual heat this fall. We have bell peppers for the first time. We had germination problems in the past. I just hope that they mature to beat the colder weather up ahead. They have tiny little peppers on the bushes. They jalapenos look about the same. All in all things look pretty good.

I planted a few grain crops to see how they fare. I was surprised at how productive the rye was last year. I planted a plot of hard winter wheat, another winter rye, and a hulless oats. Each plot is about 4x4 foot square and is just to see what happens. I had the idea that we could either harvest for members or use a cover/chicken feed crop.

I think that I am going to add a few more Valencia trees this winter and will begin to add them as time permits. Here are a few pictures from the farm. Notice I also changed the main picture. It was about two seasons beyond the little trial plot we started out with. I thought that I would show how nicely things are looking. Notice how weed free we are!

We are looking forward to our first official pickup this Saturday and the start to a great season; heaven permitting.

End of Season

We wrapped up a fairly successful season. I am happy to take a breather and regroup for the fall and this summers cover crops. It is a pretty intense activity to plan 12-15 organic vegetables each week for pickup for 24 weeks.

I harvested some of the seeds from dandelion, mustards, arugula, broccoli, rye, and cosmos. I hope to get some corn and sunflowers before the season ends. I think that I will need to start over on the cucumber breeding program with so many setbacks.

I have some pumpkins ripening up nicely and I hope that they will be ready for our field gleaning day. We are going to have a final pickup for anything left in the field. We still have some herbs, scallions, onions, carrots, cukes, zukes, and tomatoes as well.

I have also added a few fruit trees to plant this weekend. A peach, nectarine, and three persimmons.

Our one olive plant is producing olives this year. I hope to add a few more of these trees to the farm.

Our peaches did great this year and we are trying to figure how to use about 60 peaches we will harvest this weekend.

Easter Break

We will be having a weekend break from our last 8th week pickup and the start of our 3rd season, 8 week pickup. Now is the time to sign up if you are interested in joining the CSA for our last 8 week pickup!

It seems like vegetables sometimes purposefully disappoint. We have some of the best looking lettuce we have grown and it seems like it will be at peak harvest during our break. It is funny how that works out.

Things are going well and it seems like we are starting to find a few core members for our CSA. We get a bunch of trial members but I think that a Saturday pick up and the mix of vegetables available during the winter is not what many people expect.

The chicks have been doing great and we are giving away eggs on a rotation basis on Saturdays. I think that maybe the Easter Bunny might bring some more chicks to add to the flock. It is really great not having to buy eggs anymore. But we have to buy feed. I haven't decided yet to go with more Buff Orppingtons or try some new birds out. I guess it will boil down to what is available at the feed store.

I have started to see a few more beetles showing up and causing some damage. It is finally starting to warm up a bit and now is when the insects start to get nasty.

I planted an olive tree this week end from a nursery that we have propagated for in the past. What is interesting about this tree is that it is flowering in our area this year. We will see what happens.

Second Season, Week 7

I was thinking about our farm and where it is going the last few weeks and it occurred to me that we are the first CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm in Plant City! We are certainly not he first farm, nor the first direct sales farm, nor the first organic farm in Plant City. But we are definitely the first CSA in Eastern Hillsborough County. I have run into a few produce buying clubs that grow a little and buy produce to supplement, but no one to my knowledge is doing what we are doing. It is nice to be a part of history and maybe a start of a legacy for the next generation.



Back at the farm, we (Jenn, Grandad, and myself) have planted about 500 transplants last Sat. ranging from kohlrabi, red cabbage, red pac choi, a few experimental Asian greens, and some tomatoes. We have more tomatoes in the greenhouse still growing. Things are running late this year due to the extended cold weather. We've got no melons to come up, as well as peppers, zukes, and a few others that failed to germinate. We planted another round in the greenhouse to see if we can get them going again.



I am watching with anticipation our trials of garlic, potatoes, winter rye, and different kinds of corn. So far the spinach trial has proven very successful. The early planting trial has proven to be a big fat disaster with all the extended frost we have had.



I have planted three more loquats and am watching the peaches start to develop. The loquat tree fruit that is there has started to ripen and size up. We will probably be picking in a few weeks. The stonefruits have had very poor pollination probably due to the lack of movement of pollinators with the cold.



I will be getting ready to propagate and plant some mulberries, grapes, and blackberries when it warms up.



And still no camera! Stay tuned...

Community Support

As part of our Community Supported Agriculture operation, we envision a community farm whereby members support our farm and how we far. We, in turn, also want to also support our community.

Here is an email from one of our member supporters:


THE PLANT CITY COMMUNITY CHOIR will be performing its 2nd Annual Christmas Concert on Thursday December 17, 2009, at Trinity United Methodist Church, 402 West English Street, Plant City, FL. (English Street is off CR 39, a few blocks South of I-4.)
This year's concert is titled "CHRISTMAS TIME IS HERE!" and will feature a harpist as well as solos from among the 30-voice choir. The concert will include traditional and contemporary holiday music, as well as pieces the PCCC is scheduled to perform as part of the invitation-only Disney Candlelight Celebration in Orlando, FL, on the 26th of December.
The performance will begin at 7:00 p.m. and should end at approximately 8:00 p.m. with one intermission.
Admission is by cash donation.
For additional information, please contact:
LARK UNDERWOOD, PCCC Secretary813-757-0212TAMPALARK@JUNO.COMPLANTCITYCHOIR@AOL.COM

We hope that we can support our community of members in their endeavors by sharing dreams and inspiring each other to build a true community.

Season progresses

Christmas is quickly approaching and I am not ready as usual. I plan on taking one whole day to do all my shopping about a week out. This mix of Christmas cheer and adrenaline rush is usually the way I take care of my gift purchasing.

The CSA is going well and we are getting lots of feed back from the members which is a great thing to make it better for the future. We are finding out that the greens are cooking down quite a bit, our supporters cannot remember what vegetable is what when they get home, and we are learning quite a few new recipes.

I am also learning how much to plant per supporter. Things like collards, mustard, kale, and dandelions need to have about 2.5 to 3 per person. Scallions you will need about 6 per person per week to harvest about 3 good plants per member. So it is great to figure these things out and adjust.

This year aphids and ants seem to be the biggest problems. We are getting a handle on the aphids but I am about to declare war on the ants.

We also broke our digital camera. We were getting a kick out of Anna discovering how to take pictures and the many shots she was taking of things like her toys, shoes, the blinds, Copper, and a number of countless items in the house. She wound up a little too over zealous in her photography and dropped the camera and now we have a black screen of death. We will be working this out shortly also.

The winter cover crop of rye grass seeds are coming up on half of the plot and is filling out nicely. This will be great for the added organic matter and weed control it will provide.

First Week Pick Up 2009-2010

We are getting ready for our first week's pick up on Saturday. We are a little bummed about how some of the cooler season veggies responded to the extreme (record breaking) heat we had during the fall growing times. We also were plagued by rouge grasshoppers that were probably coming from the fields where we were pushing the orange trees. The grasshoppers would fly in take a bite and then fly off. This really damaged our young transplants and set them back many weeks as well as caused a great disparity of size for our harvests. They ate the young growing tips off some of the brassica crops and caused a stunting of growth. I am thinking that the only way to get rid of them is to attract more birds to hang out near the fields. We will be planting some trees nearby to encourage our avian help to stop in for a tasty meal.



We also struggled with our lettuce. I have never heard of or dealt with ants eating seeds out of the trays that we planted before. But it happened twice before I figured out what was going on. I saw the ants the first time and thought that they were eating fungus gnat larvae. I have seen this before and considered them a help. I thought that we had bad seeds. So I replanted and then caught the ants in the act of making off with the seeds. I then tried to germinate the seeds at our home and then brought the three day old seedlings to the farm. The ants then ate the tops of the lettuce off. I have never seen or heard of this happening before. Another new one for the farm. We then germinated more seeds for a fourth time at our home and a clogged roof gutter overflowed onto the trays and washed some of the seedlings out. We are on the fifth attempt to grow lettuce and so far so good. But we will not have it ready for our first pick up.



The greens are finally growing well and the pak choi is doing great. We have a few other items and then hopefully new items will start coming on quickly. We are really looking forward to meeting everyone this weekend.

The Season Begins

Well another season has started. We are already underway with most of the first vegetables planted. We have about 25 different types of vegetables and the majority of them are doing well. We do have a problem with grasshoppers flying in taking a bite and then leaving. This would not be such a problem with larger plants but with seedlings that is a big setback. We have also been finding a few hungry caterpillars that are biting some of the brassica plants (cabbage, brussel spouts, broccoli). But all in all things are looking well. We should start harvesting in mid to late November. The weather has not been very cooperative with record high temperatures and then record lows a few days later. The plants are a little confused. As fun as shattering record temperatures might be, plants hate it. A nice average temperature with little bouncing around and a few gentle rains each week would be perfect. But perfect weather is seldom seen and that is the risk in farming.
Our community of supporters has signed up with us and we are very thankful. We are also as excited to see our harvest as they are.
To update you further on the farms activities, we are backing off of the ornamental nursery plants due to the slowdown of the entire industry. The Dixie Chicks are looking very big but have not started laying eggs yet. We keep checking everyday but nothing yet. We have built two half acre areas for goats. The posts are in but there is no fence yet. We are concentrating on planting the majority of the old citrus grove(that we pushed this last few months) with pine trees. This has rescued our greenbelt tax relief from the county. If we hadn’t done that it would be a $5000.00 hit to our tax bill. So for now the plan is to plant longleaf pines and revisit it in the future.

That is our current farm status, we will see how things play out this season.

Our Organic CSA Changes Lives!

I've been wanting to post this for a couple of weeks now but haven't had the chance. One of our CSA members (identity intentionally left out) has told me that she has changed her path in life partly because of our farm's produce. I thought she was joking but she was serious. I was told that due to her finding our CSA and enjoying our organic produce, having better neighbors living next door, and finding The Corner Store, she has decided not to move from our small city towards the more urban Tampa. Our tiny farm has made a genuine difference in some one's life. That is amazing! I never thought much beyond the farm in terms of just producing vegetables to sell. I mean there is the part about helping to change the world towards a better place to live by adopting sustainable practices. There is the cleaner environment by not using more chemicals and fossil fuels in delivering our produce. There could be the better health enjoyed by those who eat natural foods. There is the idea that by selecting some of our own crops we are working with natural selection to use less inputs. But I never thought that our CSA and small farm would have such a profound and concrete effect on some one's life other than our own. That is a wonderful motivator for producing great organic vegetables on our farm. It also shows that a CSA is really a Community that supports agriculture. At first it is customers that show up for produce and then, with time, it is friends that are showing up on the weekends, as we share information and stories. And then it really is a community that unites us around the theme of our daily sustenance. I hope we can continue to grow and change lives for the better with our CSA and small farm.

Catching Up

It's been a little while since I blogged. We have added a few more members to our community supported agriculture! Things are going to get busier around here. That's just fine for us.

We have had a few successes and failure this winter/spring growing season. I always think that summer starts when it warms up enough to plant the warm season vegetables. Here is a rundown

transplants for sale: failed
lettuce during winter: poor
broccoli raab: failed, but the few we did harvest tasted good.
potatoes: failed, again. Those ants got them again. Next year I'm not fooling around with ants!
CSA: success
new lettuce trial in amended soil: success
kohlrabi: success
pak choi "summer green": success
old plot amended with horse manure, covercrop, and old potting soil: Big success

We are still learning and we are running out of room. I think that we will need to push up some more trees.

We also decided to get some chicken. We just got them in today. They are one week old and alert and scratching for food. Just a few months to go to get some eggs. We thought that since we had the room we could grow some eggs for us and our CSA members. I am going to try and build a movable pen. We got five to start with. We will see how that goes. We are going to tell Anna that the Easter Bunny brought them. Happy holidays.

Our First CSA Member!

Congratulations to Heidi and her son Donovan for becoming our first CSA customers!

A CSA or community supported agriculture is a share of a harvest of the produce that we grow. The member takes some of the risk by paying up front for the produce that will be grown and harvested at a later time. It connects produce consumers with produce growers. It helps link farmers with the home dinner table and gives people an appreciation of where their food comes from. Heidi picked up her first share this past weekend. She found out about us through our local harvest website. I asked her what made her want to sign up and she said that she thought that our produce would be better than store bought produce. She conveyed that you never really know where the produce from the store has come from and how it was produced. I am really glad that she cares so much for where her produce comes from and how it was grown. It is wonderful to meet people that want to make a difference in their lives through what they eat and appreciating who grows the food they eat. Heidi paid $80.00 for four weeks of organically grown and freshly picked produce that she will pick up at the farm on Saturdays. I am glad that the joy and efforts of growing produce in a responsible manner can be appreciated beyond the farm. Donovan also learned where his carrots come from and had a great time pulling them out of the ground.