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Summer is Busy

Even if you are not a farmer, summer has got to be one of the busiest times of the year! From September to June the routine is fairly stable, but when school gets out – ALL BETS ARE OFF. Moms everywhere go from chauffeurs to program directors. Maybe the year ‘round school concept would make more sense in our post agrarian society?

Why do we send our children to school from September to June? Primarily because summer break was once needed to grow food, put up food, mend fences and cut firewood. A productive summer meant a comfortable winter! With the shift to a non-agrarian based calendar, maybe school should shift as well – just a thought. As a local farmer, a year round schedule would open more markets and more locally grown food could find its way into the school system. And that would definitely be a good thing for our children, local farmers and the health of our nation. Since that isn’t happening anytime soon, Klesick Farms and their band of local growers can save you some time by letting you skip at least one trip a week to the grocery store. This time of year, when the kids are running the asylum, time is definitely high on my families list.

Next on my list is eating well. I know you would think that eating well is more important, but truth be told, most moms (& dads) wouldn’t mind a little “me” time (just a little). Your box of good is almost as fresh as a garden (even I can’t beat a garden for freshness), and even if you have a garden, it probably wouldn’t hurt to supplement with peaches, melons, beans, cherries or other family favorites you aren’t growing.

For those of you who have chosen to skip the garden, Summer arrives every delivery day with your box of good. We make eating healthy – simple, fun and affordable. We do it all year long, and especially during the summer when we are showcasing the bounty of our local growers. A box of good is also convenient! If you love watermelon or grapes or basil, you can add that to your delivery every week and it will arrive at your door. Imagine, the next time you “go shopping” you simply pull out your phone, order what you like at klesickfarms.com and then we hand pick it, hand pack it and hand deliver it to your door.

I have been working with the same growers for almost 20 years, we know what we are doing and we like to do it. We like farming and helping you feed your family well is about as satisfying as seeing plump, juicy sugar snap peas or ripe red raspberries ready to harvest.

Enjoy your box of good, we enjoy getting it to you!

 

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Please help me preserve local food options and farmland in Snohomish County

Dear Friends,

This is Tristan Klesick of Klesick Farms writing you today with Kristin Kelly, Smart Growth Executive Director of Pilchuck Audubon Society and Snohomish/Skagit Program Director for Futurewise, asking for your help with an important issue that will preserve our local food options and farmland, both today and in the future. 

We know, and I believe you will agree, that protecting farmland and helping farmers will ensure a healthy, local, and safe food supply for our county and region, as well as maintain a quality of life we all are thankful for and enjoy.

A few years ago our Snohomish County Council members made a very wise decision about the future of our growing county.  Growth is inevitable, but wise growth is the goal.  The County Council adopted a countywide Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) Program, which will give the development community the ability to increase densities in our urban growth areas to accommodate the future growth.  The developers would need to purchase a development certificate from our county farmers in order to get increased densities in parts of the county that are better equipped to handle more growth. 

Even though the TDR program was put together with an array of stakeholder consensus from farmers, the development community, environmental community and businesses, the development community no longer wants use the TDR program (to preserve farmland) for the increased housing density.

This is why we need your help!

We believe the current TDR program is a win-win for local citizens, developers, and farmers!   We (Tristan and Kristin) have spent years working on an equitable solution to preserve farmland.  We have shared our views on the proposed changes to the current TDR program, but sadly it is becoming apparent that we will need local voters to help us convince the County Council to not cave into the desires of the development community.

Help us convince the County Council that any change in our current TDR program is unacceptable.

Kristin and I have written an email to the Council and now is your chance to share your voice.  Please Click Here to add your voice to the discussion by sending an email the County Council before June 10th, when they reconvene for a public hearing.  You can add your story and your own thoughts to the email, urging the County Council to protect our local food options and farmland today and into the future.  

Also, calling your council member will help as well.  Just leave a message on their voice mail… call 425-388-3494.

Snohomish County Council District 1–Ken Klein

Snohomish County Council District 2–Brian Sullivan

Snohomish County Council District 3–Stephanie Wright

Snohomish County Council District 4–Terry Ryan

Snohomish County Council District 5–Dave Somers

Together we can ensure a bright future for our children. Click Here to send an email to the County Council today

Tristan Klesick, Klesick Family Farms

Kristin Kelly, Futurewise and Pilchuck Audubon Society

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People Matter II

A few weeks ago, our family took a vacation/work trip to San Diego. I attended the Dave Ramsey business conference called The Summit while Joelle and kiddos hit the beach. For me, it was three powerful days of intense business encouragement. Of course, Dave and his team taught several sessions, but I also got to learn from John Maxwell, Dr. Henry Cloud, Patrick Lencioni and Rabbi Daniel Lapin. Oh my word!

If I could be so bold as to sum up three full days of sessions, I would have to say the theme was “Build Culture.” What a commission! I am pretty sure that every business owner there left with the encouragement to build their team’s culture. Why focus on culture? Because as a small business it is your competitive advantage and it is the right thing to do.  Most businesses focus on measurables like productivity, mistakes, sales per hour, etc. These are necessary, but they absorb a far greater percentage of the company’s focus. And quite frankly, it is easier to focus on something you can measure.

The benefits to building culture make the measureables more easily attainable. Why? Because it is your culture that accomplishes the goals of your company, when your team is treated with respect and valued, it spills over into how your customers are treated.

The other day I was talking with a friend, a local business that we both frequent came up and the conversation turned “south” quickly.  He had received poor and indifferent customer service, not once, but twice and now he won’t shop there and went as far as to say, “I don’t think the owner (he used his name) cares anymore.” I tried to defend the owner, but the lack of care extended not once, but twice, has turned my usually mild mannered, care free friend into a negative advertisement. Heart break .

From my friend’s perspective, the culture of that business has shifted. Building culture and maintaining culture is vital to the success of any business – it spills over into every area.

At Klesick Farms, our team is important and you are important. Our team can always accomplish more working together, so whether we are packing your boxes of good or delivering them, we are focused on making your experience with us friendly, efficient and enjoyable. We know you are busy and our goal is to help you and your family eat well and live well.

One of the best ways that I can serve your family well is to continue to build our team culture; to do that I have to get better as a leader (which is why I made the investment to go to this conference). I have to lead by example, continue learning, and also train and inspire my team to serve you well.

Thankfully for me, my team already wants to serve your family well!

 

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People Matter

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Last week we sent an email to each of you asking for you to partner with us in our Neighbor Helping Neighbor program. Thanksgiving and Christmas are the big traditional pushes to rally around homelessness and hunger, but just because the calendar has changed doesn’t mean the need has changed. The volunteers who serve at the food banks are a part of the equation to solve this issue, but so are you. Your generosity in caring for local neighbors is also a part of equation. When we as people care for the physical needs of other people, what we are saying is that we want our neighbors to be whole.

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It is so humbling to get to serve the Klesick Farms community because “you get it”. You get that blessing others, caring for others is the right thing to do, and in the process, you too are blessed. Last week we sent 46 high-quality nutrient-rich boxes of good to eight different food banks. Your tangible generosity provided hope and nutrition to those less fortunate and inspiration to those who are on the front lines extending that hope and nutrition. Thank you.

 

Two weeks ago we were working double time on the farm to get potatoes, sweet corn, winter squash, and Maleah’s flower garden planted so that we could head off to San Diego for a Dave Ramsey EntreSummit business conference the following week. While in San Diego, I mostly sat in the conference and the kiddos enjoyed the sights and sounds of Southern California.

This conference was incredible: three days of practical business teaching perfused with a customer focus. Being in business is about serving people, about meeting a real need in your life, about partnering together to do something bigger than ourselves, and about building community. You and Klesick’s are doing this together through your support of our box of good.

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I used to farm with the Gentle Giants: Belgian draft horses, which are big, beautiful, and powerful animals. One Belgian horse can move 12,000 pounds – more than 5 times its weight – and two Belgians that are just randomly put in harness together are able to move up to 30,000 pounds. However, by working together they can pull and additional 6,000 pounds! That synergy is impressive. What is even more impressive is when you take a matched pair of Belgians that know each other, have worked together, and trust each other; this team, when it “leans” into the harness can move not 24,000, not 30,000, not 36,000, but they can move 48,000 pounds!

Together, you and Klesick Farms are like a matched pair of Belgian draft horses. Our synergy, created by a desire to feed our families good food and extend tangible compassion to others is as equally impressive. By working together, we are making a bigger impact in our local communities, in the lives of our less fortunate neighbors and the lives of the local organic farmers.

Together, we are creating something special!

 

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The Story of Bandit and the Cows

Week of May 10, 2015

It never fails! No matter how much I plan, farming never seems to happen at a leisurely pace!  You spend all winter preparing, all spring dodging rain storms and waiting for the ground to dry out, and then when it does, inevitably it is either Easter or Mother’s day weekend! The nerve! One would think that “mother nature” could time the farming season to be a little more hospitable.

Actually, nature has a lot more things going on than farming. Spring time is an amazingly long season from crocuses to daffodils to lilac and apple blossoms. Nature has to provide a lot of food and shelter for all the other critters in our local communities and the Klesick Farm is as a welcome and hospitable place as they come. One of our friends just told me he saw a river otter traveling across the road by our farm! I’m thinking that this could explain why Bandit, our collie/lab puppy, has been hanging around the river more lately.

The other day when I was coming out of the house I about tripped over Chungo, the older lab, and Sapphire, the kitten, who were lounging around in the sun on the front porch! Now I always make the mental note of how many animals are out in the yard, so I start counting: 1, 2…where is Bandit? I start my usual whistle and call and wait. No Bandit. Usually, no Bandit means only one thing: MISCHIEF! A little more whistling and a little more calling and walking and as I turn the corner around the house, 3 football fields away I saw him!  He was running in circles around all 30 COWS! The cows had been here for a few weeks and today he finally discovered them.

Stephen and I head out to the cows to get Bandit. Oh boy was he ever happy to see us: tail a-wagging and tongue a-flopping. The next day I turned Bandit out in the morning and headed out myself an hour later. I started counting: Chungo, Sapphire, and…where’s Bandit? This time I skipped the whistling and calling and walked to the back of the house (Bandit is not the only one learning new tricks around here). As sure as my name is Tristan, I saw him 300 yards away. This time all the cows had moved to the upper part of the pasture; Bandit had 29 all balled up and there was one rogue noncompliant cow about 40 yards off the herd. Bandit was equally positioned between them with his head switching back and forth, back and forth looking from the 29 to the one.

All of the sudden, he bolted towards the noncompliant cow, moved him toward the herd, and then moved them all back to where they were the last night! That is some serious natural instincts. This time I get the breakfast bowls and start clanging them together. And Bandit comes bounding home, tail a-wagging and tongue a-flopping.

 

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The Orchard, the Rain, and the Race

Week of April 26, 2015

I really enjoy being involved in my kiddo’s activities, so whether one is playing ball, running track, or at play practice I am “moving mountains” to make it to their events! And this time of year, when farming is pressing it literally feels like moving a mountain! I am sure most of you can relate! Who isn’t busy?! I find myself farming between games and practices and at night! I am hoping to get more peas in the ground next week in between rain events this and get a good chunk of potatoes planted. I remember thinking “Who needs headlights on their tractors?” A farmer who has active kids, that’s who needs headlights on their tractor!

Well the other night, Stephen and I had just returned from little league practice and as is our nightly custom, we wandered out to the orchard to check on the mason bees, blossoms, gold finches, sparrows and tent caterpillars.

I love the orchard this time of year; the trees are waking up and the blossoms smell incredible and look amazing. I love all the activity from the birds to bees. Stephen at the ripe old age of 8 has a good eye for the orchard and often beats me to our usual check points. Bandit our new lab/collie puppy (being a collie and being a puppy) is usually out ahead looking for moles, voles, or field mice while Chungo, our old timer lab, takes his time to get out with us. In fact more often than not, Chungo and I are traveling together and Stephen and Bandit are out in front J.

For this mission, the clouds were foretelling a wet adventure and we knew it. As the clouds were getting darker and filling with water, and as night was encroaching, the natural progression looked to be a downpour! We were busy hunting hard for those defoliating caterpillars, working to remove them from the trees, when one big drop hit, followed by another big drop and another until it was going to be a soaker of an event. Before us in the branches, there was one last caterpillar nest to pull off the trees, and then another and another! At last Stephen says, “My sweatshirt isn’t very good in the rain” and in an instant, he takes off for the house!

Since I have an equally strong desire to not get any wetter and also have longer legs, I was able to catch up and get back to the house first. Now, if truth be told, I had a little help here:  as soon as Stephen took off running, so did Bandit our mostly collie puppy, who quickly caught up to Stephen and then began to herd him towards the barn and not the house. VICTORY was mine as I arrived at the house first – marginally drier than Stephen, Bandit and Chungo!

 

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Apple Blossoms

I love seeing blossoms on my fruit trees. It means that I have a chance to harvest fruit this fall. It means that there will be food for a whole bunch of pollinators like Honey bees, Mason bees, Bumble bees. Now, I just need them to show up! Of course if they do show up in droves, I will be thinning fruit like crazy because there are a bazillion flowers this year, and if all of them set fruit –WOW!

Ideally, from a farmer’s perspective, about 50% pollination would be great. It would take less time to hand thin and the fruit would be able to “size” up quicker! Hand thinning takes a ton of time and is very monotonous; however, thinning translates to larger fruit because there is less competition for the nutrients!

This year our neighbor is no longer raising Honeybees and so I am trying Mason bees. Mason bees (from all the information I have been reading) are excellent pollinators. The challenge with this spring is that it has been really erratic and the blossoms on the trees are out in front of the pollinators. It will be interesting to see how much fruit actually sets, based on the earlier bloom time this season.

In our pear block, the Kosui Asian pears were way out in front of the Conference pears. Normally, they are supposed to cross pollinate each other. It looks like the Bosc Pears will be blooming with the Conference pears though – something else that normally doesn’t happen. These last two might cross pollinate each other which rarely happens.  Farming!?!?!?!

It is the most beautiful and disheartening thing to see all the blossoms but not have pollinators out in force. As a farmer, I really have very little control of the environment. I can prune on time, I can fertilize, I can even plan for my neighbors exit from beekeeping, but in the larger picture, I humbly submit to you that my part is very small. I tend to roll with what nature brings me, I do plan and I will mitigate, but for the most part I am working with nature and its natural laws.

Really, no matter what I do and probably what you do, we shouldn’t put too much emphasis on our part, but do the best we can with what we got and leave the rest to the Lord.

May there be fruit to harvest this fall!

 

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Healthy Choices

Klesick Farms customer, Nancy, sent us a fun project that her 1st. grade daughter, Anna did on healthy food options. We love hearing how our Klesick boxes of good impact and inspire the families we serve for good, and wanted to share this with you!

Nancy writes:

“Every March our homeschool co-op on Camano Island has a “SHOWCASE NIGHT” where kids can show off talents on stage, projects they’ve completed or share knowledge they’ve acquired.

This year my 1st grader, Anna, did a project on “Healthy Choices”. We talked about foods as we shopped, we watched documentaries, she helped make some healthy meals, we learned some cooking basics, learned about what sugar does to your body and how it makes you feel, etc. We recorded all of this by taking photos and putting them on a display board. We also wanted to talk about the cost of healthy choices versus ‘junk food and fast food choices’ because some people argue it’s too expensive to eat healthy.

We gathered a number of unhealthy choices as well as ‘a box of good’ from Klesick Family Farm to show people two options. The junk food actually ended up costing more and we had to drive somewhere to get all of it. Anna had fun having people guess which was more expensive, the box of good, or the box of junk food. For those who guessed correctly, she gave them a fruit kabob which she enjoyed making – a yummy healthy choice, rather than a candy prize.

Each week, Klesick’s ‘box of good’ just shows up on our door step! It’s a healthy choice, because you can choose it when you aren’t rushed. When our life is harried and crazy running to sports, ballet, and various classes, we often make bad food choices. But, this beautiful ‘box of good choices’ arrives and helps you make a healthy choice without really even thinking. We included some of the other healthy choices that we love on her picture board display, like hiking, walking, spending time with people you love, serving others, etc. We’re glad that Klesick Farms is part of the healthy choices in our lives! My 8 year old son actually prefers vegetables to some sweets and I think the weekly routine of being delivered a ‘present’ of produce on our doorstep has really influenced this! It’s always so EXCITING to see what’s inside :)”

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Molly The Green Sea Turtle

Maleah Klesick wanted to contribute to the newsletter this week, and give Farmer Tristan a break! Here’s a story she wrote after learning about sea turtles and the impact our environment has on their life cycle.

Hi I’m Molly, a green sea turtle from Florida. I will tell you a little bit about myself. From the start I had to fight to survive, I think that many of my brothers and sisters got eaten by foxes or raccoons before they hatched. After I hatched I had minutes to get to the sea before I was eaten by birds and crabs. When I reached the sea the waves greeted me, in a not so friendly way. I will always remember this beach, in a couple of years I will come back to lay my eggs.

About 4 years later, I am full grown, being a curious turtle, I saw a fishing boat and floated a little too close. By that I mean got caught in the fishing line. I washed up on shore, my heart was in my ears, but luckily a lady saw me and called Clearwater Marine Aquarium. (C.M.A.) the volunteers got there a couple minutes later. They untangled me, put me in a stretcher and drove to C.M.A. I got my name after the lady who found me.

My cuts and gashes weren’t life threatening injuries so I was able to be released into the wild. My diet was mostly squid, capelin, and leafy greens, honestly though I preferred the greens. After fixing my injuries the C.M.A. staff set a date for me to be released. On July 26, 2014 I was put on a stretcher and was driven to the beach where I had been rescued three months ago and I was released back into the wild.

Maleah Klesick

 

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Democracy in the Grocery Isle?

One of the more interesting takeaways from the state-based battle to enact GMO food ingredient labeling has been the deluge of money that Monsanto, their biotech allies, and Big Food corporate interests have been willing to spend to drown out your right-to-know about what you are putting in your mouth. Cornucopia’s research reveals that these supporters of ignorance have collectively showered more than $100 million on the four state referendums to date, in California, Washington, Colorado and Oregon.

Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Citizens United, whatever constraints existed on corporate spending in elections have evaporated. Although state referendums are a different electoral animal, the willingness of corporate power to spend all that they need to prevail has been fully demonstrated. They have juiced the system and tilted electoral power in their direction.

While Monsanto and their allies have thus far proven successful—albeit narrowly in three of the four states—the handwriting may be on the wall. Good food activists are growing increasingly aware that they hold power in the marketplace that even the corporate behemoths must respect.

It is somewhat ironic that democracy may break out in the marketplace while it is being squelched at the ballot box. Clearly, the biotech forces and Big Food need us to buy their products in our consumer society. Yet in spite of their sophisticated, expensive advertising and packaging, increasing numbers of conscious consumers are doing their own food and product research (fueled by help from organizations like Cornucopia).

Using their heightened awareness and their focused purchasing power, these savvy eaters are forcing companies like Kashi (owned by Kellogg), WhiteWave, Organic Valley, Kraft, and Stonyfield to make healthier changes to products. Why? For the most part, these companies are terrified of how their investors and/or Wall Street will react and punish them for unresponsive arrogance and diminished sales.

Amplify your power as a conscious eater. Investigate our various food and commodity product scorecards (visit www.cornucopia.org), and then share this information and the related web links with your social network. This research is regularly updated so that you and your friends can make the best “vote” in the marketplace.

This story originally appeared in the spring issue of The Cultivator, The Cornucopia Institute’s quarterly print publication. Used by permission.