Looking Ahead to 2026
A Preview Of Our 2026 Season Plans
This is the counterpart piece to my 2025 Season Reflection post from a few weeks ago. Every year we begin a reflection process in the fall that looks back at what went well and what didn’t with a goal of formulating a plan for the coming season. In just a few weeks I’ll be placing our seed order and putting the finishing touches on our 2026 crop plan. Here are some of the things we’re looking at changing or improving for 2026.
More Tomatoes! We couldn’t keep tomatoes in stock this season. We sold out quickly, routinely, week after week until mid September. We have a couple ways we’re going to address this. First, we will grow at least 2 additional beds of tunnel tomatoes. We’ve found the tunnel tomatoes are the best quality, best flavor, and most reliable when compared to their outdoor counterparts. We’re also going to plant more heirloom style tomatoes outdoors with a florida weave trellis system and light pruning. We’ve seen a number of other farms do this and we think this will be a great way to increase our tomato offerings.
Better Onions We had problems with onions this past season that I outlined in my reflection post. Here’s how we’re going to address this problem. First, we’re going to scale back the amount of onions we grow to a more realistic number. This should give us more time to take care of the onions we do have so that we reduce (eliminate?) the curing issues we had this season. Second, we’re going to grow some bunching style onions, similar to scallions but with bulbs, that will help offer more variety and more flavor to our onion offerings. We’ll also look into switching up varieties but haven’t decided yet.
Strawberries. We know when we take adequate care of our strawberries that we get good results. We’re re-prioritizing strawberry care so that the necessary jobs get done on time. This should mean more strawberries available sooner in the season.
Shallots. We really enjoyed having these in our own kitchen this season. We’ll be looking to grow a variety that gets a little bigger but shallots are here to stay!
Potatoes. We’re kind of taking the same strategy here with the potatoes as we did with the onions. Growing less potatoes but focusing on better care and quality.
Peppers. This a more behind the scenes look but we grew too many shishito, serrano and banana peppers this season so we’ll be tweaking our plan to bring it more in line with what we can sell.
Peas. We were short on snap peas this year. We had trialed a new trellis method that didn’t work very well so we’ll be moving back to our typical netting and support rod trellis. It’s more work but it results in a much easier harvest and better yield. We’ll be planting more snap peas AND if we can figure out a space inside our tunnels to squeeze some peas.
More To Come: The 2026 seed catalogs haven’t come out yet but we know we’ll probably be inspired by something in the catalogs.
Winter Tunnel Finally! As I write this we are in the process of obtaining financing and construction quotes for a fully featured winter growing structure. We hope to put it into service next season and have the first crops grown within be the tomatoes described above. We’ll see how the timing goes!
Partner Farm Products. We want to expand our partner farm product offerings for more reliable inventory and to try to get closer to a full diet farm. We’re looking for partners for baked goods, dairy, meat & poultry, maple syrup & mushrooms to really round out our offerings.
Overall, we’re looking to eliminate as much waste as possible while having more variety. The better we do at this the better our CSA is and the better our farm does as a whole!
