Rivershed Farm

Fully enjoying the last of these beauties.
‘Til next year. 💚

Summer squash, beans, and fresh corn— part of this week’s CSA share!

PYO Strawberries now available for our CSA members! 🍓🍓🍓

The season’s first strawberries are starting to appear.

Rivershed Farm is honored to receive a 2024 Local Farmer Award from the for infrastructure enhancements! Thanks to this recognition, we’ve invested in a top-notch Berta flail mower from .ky which will help us better manage cover crops and keep the farm neat and tidy for our dozens of weekly visitors. 🌱🏆

Meet Mark & Shauna of Rivershed Farm - maybe your CSA farmers this summer? 👀🥕👉🏼 buylocalfood.org/nepm-rivershed-farm/

It’s sign up time for CSA (community supported agriculture) farm shares. Mark joined us on the last week to talk about that and look back at their first year farming in Amherst (what a year to move the farm here 🌧️).

Hear their story and see easy ways to sign up for your next CSA share at the link above.

🥕🥒🍓It's National CSA Week!🍅🌽🥦 -

🥕🥒🍓It's National CSA Week!🍅🌽🥦 February 20th to 26th is National CSA Week—a time dedicated to celebrating the vibrant community of local farmers like us! We're thrilled to be part of this special occasion aimed at not only highlighting the work of farmers across the country but also encouraging you to consider joining us by sig...

Yesterday we planted the bulk of our tulips and heirloom daffodils (and realized we still had some on back order 🤞🏻). It was a much smaller planting than we’ve done in the past two years. We decided to scale back a bit this year for a handful of reasons. Spring flowers are incredibly demanding and with our farm so far from our home and Shauna’s full time teaching job, last spring was an incredible challenge and meant we started and stayed behind on summer flower crop planting. Top that off with some cooler issues that don’t allow us to properly refrigerate our spring flowers for long term storage, and the expense of bulbs without a guaranteed, reliable sales outlet, and we decided to take a year to reassess our spring flower crop strategy. That said, we HAD to plant some. The promise of their early spring beauty helps us through the long, cold winter, and sparks joy every spring. We’ve focused on late blooming varieties in the hopes that the weather works in our favor and we have loads of gorgeous, colorful spring blooms right in time for Mother’s Day. We’re also hoping that with a smaller number of tulips and daffodils this year, we’ll have more time and energy to focus on building our skill at growing late spring/early summer crops like Iceland Poppies and Ranunculus. 💐 ❤️

We get asked a lot at the market about what we do with our dahlias at the farm, so here are some snapshots of the process we use for dividing. We cut back and dig all of the plants at the farm, then we shuttle them to our front room while we work through cleaning, dividing, and storing them in layers of vermiculite after work each day and on weekends. The later frost this year is making the process a lot colder and darker, but good tunes and good views help us power through. Thanks to wonderful parents, we dug all of our dahlias in the field and made a significant dent in division this weekend. We’ll keep chipping away at cleaning, dividing, and storage throughout the week and then start the process again this Friday with our dahlias that we’re grown in a high tunnel. It’s a labor of love and certainly reinforces the preciousness of these prized flower plants, but is one of our favorite fall farm jobs.