CALIFORNIA BILINGÜE
Have you been thinking about taking your Spanish to the next level?
We wanted to give a quick shout out here to an incredible local Spanish school, California Bilingüe. Owned by CSA member Carlos Mayerstein, California Bilingüe specializes in one-on-one customized Spanish tutoring. In 2022, they gave the farm a generous scholarship to help me (David) improve my Spanish proficiency to help us connect more with the vibrant and skilled Spanish speaking agricultural community in Sonoma County. For me, California Bilingüe’s program has been joyous, fun, and transformational for my Spanish and opened so many doors personally and professionally.
Whether you’re a beginner or an advanced Spanish speaker, I can’t recommend their program highly enough! ¡Aprenda más aquí!
WHEN DOES THE CSA END?
The last pick-ups of our 2024 CSA program are as follows: The last Saturday pickup is Saturday, December 7th and the last Tuesday pickup is, Tuesday, December 10th.
AND WHEN CAN I RESERVE MY SPOT FOR 2024?
We plan to open sign-ups in mid-to-late January 2025. 2024 CSA program members will be given the first chance to reserve a spot for 2025. Please encourage family or friends who would like to join to sign-up for the waitlist on our website.
FARMER’S LOG
BELONGING
We’re having a busy holiday week, so this week we’ll repost a Farmer’s Log from November 2022 — which resonates with how we’re feeling about the farm today.
I think I speak for the whole crew when I say it brought us great joy to be a part of your food lives and weekly routines this year — and great joy to think of the farm’s food, lovingly grown and handled here, on your tables. We hope you felt nourished and grounded by it this week.
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With the frost, the time of rest, gratitude, and reflection settles on the Laguna.
It was a quiet day today on the farm. I was on the tractor, shaping next year’s garlic and strawberry beds over what was the tomatoes and u-pick peppers, when a perennial Fall question occurred to me:
“What does it mean to belong to a place?”
Big questions like this are perhaps never answerable. Or perhaps, if they are answerable, the answers are constantly changing. Or, perhaps the point is not in getting an answer, but in consistently asking the question.
So today on the tractor I wondered, “What does it mean to belong to this place?" for the first time on the new farm. I was struck by how different it felt from the last time I asked.
Though we just moved the farm a few miles across town this year, it was a big move. We uprooted from the place where we started the farm as a 30 member CSA 7 years ago and where we cut our teeth shaping fields, growing food, building soil, and trying to build community together. We made a lot of memories there. Every nook, cranny, and field in that valley was becoming a layer cake of memory for us — first harvests; getting engaged on the hill; getting married in the redwood barn; of meeting so many of you CSA members for the first time.
A palimpsest (from the Greek “scraped again”) is a writing material or surface (like a slate tablet) used again after earlier writing has been erased. It’s a surface that is being continuously renewed, but the etches and marks of the past remain and build up.
A farm is a palimpsest for a farmer: The more years you’ve lived and worked in a place, the more the marks of memory build and layer depth onto the continuously renewing fields and landscape. This is why elders are the most revered members in any agrarian or land-based culture.