Harvest Week 15 - Equinox Musings

POTATO HARVEST PARTY!
SATURDAY, SePTEMBER 26th, 9:00 am - 11:30 am

Join us for our 9th annual potato harvest party! There’s nothing like watching potatoes shower up out of the ground in the wake of the tractor and then bagging them, fresh from the soil, with friends. It’s an unforgettable experience and a blast for kids. All ages and abilities welcome. Come prepared to get dirty!

THIS WEEK’S HARVEST

Mustard Mix, Pink Volcana Little Gem Lettuce, Assorted Head Lettuce, Rainbow Chard, Bunched Chioggia Beets, Assorted Zucchini & Summer Squash, Carrots, Fresh Yellow Onions, Huckleberry Gold Potatoes, Sweet Peppers, Poblano Peppers, Bulk Tomatoes, Farao Cabbage

U-PICK

Check the u-pick board in the barn for weekly u-pick limits.

• Albion Strawberries: ✨2 pints per share✨

• Cherry Tomatoes: No limit — take what you’ll eat!

• Dragon Tongue Beans: Gleanings | Gleanings are available when the plants’ main production is done, but there’s still a bit to be had if you’re willing to search (especially at the back)!

• Frying Peppers:

  • Padrons: No limit — take what you’ll eat!

  • Shishitos: No limit — take what you’ll eat!

• Hot Peppers:

  • Jalapeños: No limit — take what you’ll eat!

  • Thai Chilis: 10 peppers per share

  • Habaneros: 3 peppers per share | Look for the orange peppers hiding low down under the plant. Habaneros make an incredible fresh salsa chopped with lime and salt!

  • Ot Hiem: 10 peppers per share | Ot Hiem are Vietnamese peppers whose name means Danger Chili. We got our seeds from True Love Seeds, and they’re ripening to both red and yellow. Brightly fragrant and spicy, they’re delicious in chili pastes, jams, or eaten fresh chopped into citrusy fish sauce! 

• Herbs & Edible Flowers: Husk Cherries, Lemon Bergamot, Dill, Cilantro, Purple Basil, Thai Basil, Lemon Basil, Italian Basil, Tulsi, Parsley, Chamomile, Calendula, Nasturtium, Pansies/Viola, Garlic Chives, Tarragon, Thyme, Oregano, Marjoram, Lemon Balm, Lemon Verbena, Vietnamese Coriander, Shiso/Perilla, Catnip, French & Culinary Lavender, Sorrel, & Assorted Mints

• Flowers galore!

Lost in the marigolds.

HARVEST NOTES

• Bunched Chioggia Beets: Also known as Candystripe Beets, these gorgeous pink beets have a bullseye inside and can be eaten raw to highlight their beauty and mild flavor. When cooked, the colors meld and soften into a delicate pink that is enlivened by the presence of acid like vinegar or lemon juice. While often overlooked, beet greens are delicious too — just like Swiss chard but with a thinner stem.

• Huckleberry Gold Potatoes: These beauties are purple on the outside and gold on the inside, with a creamy, buttery texture. A Harvest Moon replacement for the potato aficionados.

SHAKSHUKA

Recipe adapted from The Mediterranean Dish

In this staple North African and Middle Eastern dish, eggs are poached in a richly spiced tomato and pepper sauce. Eaten with pita or crusty bread, it makes a hearty breakfast or satisfying dinner. Thanks to Matt for reminding us of this perfect dish for the current abundance of peppers and tomatoes!

INGREDIENTS

• 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

• 1 large yellow onion chopped

• 3 sweet peppers chopped

• 2 garlic cloves, chopped

• 1 teaspoon ground coriander

• 1 teaspoon sweet paprika

• 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

• pinch red pepper flakes optional

• kosher salt

• black pepper

• 6 medium tomatoes (about 6 cups chopped tomatoes)

• 1/2 cup tomato sauce (or blended tomatoes)

• 6 large eggs

• 1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley leaves

• 1/4 cup chopped fresh mint leaves

DIRECTIONS

1. Sauté the aromatics. Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Once the oil begins to shimmer, add the onions, peppers, garlic, spices, and a pinch of salt and pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables have softened, about 5 minutes.

2. Finish the sauce. Add the tomatoes and tomato sauce. Cover and let simmer for about 15 minutes. Uncover and cook a bit longer to allow the mixture to reduce and thicken. Taste and adjust the seasoning to your liking.

3. Add the eggs. Using a wooden spoon, make 6 indentations, or "wells," in the tomato mixture. Make sure the indentations are spaced out. Gently crack an egg into each indentation.

4. Finish the eggs. Reduce the heat to medium-low, cover the skillet, and cook on low until the egg whites are set.

5. Garnish and serve. Uncover and add the fresh parsley and mint. You can add more black pepper or crushed red pepper flakes, if you like. Serve with warm pita, challah, or crusty bread of your choice. Also delicious with feta!

WHERE DOES THE EXTRA FOOD GO?

Our members sometimes wonder, where does extra produce from WCCF go?

For produce that’s still yummy but not reserved for a CSA pick-up, we’re so lucky to have a long-standing relationship with Food for Thought Food Bank. Since 1988, Food for Thought has provided life-sustaining groceries, meals, and loving support for people living with serious medical conditions in Sonoma County — all free of charge. A volunteer from Food for Thought pulls up to the back of our cooler every Thursday and takes any food that we harvested and wasn’t taken, for this worthy cause. Thank you Food for Thought!

FARMER’S LOG

Equinox Musings

An oldie-but-goodie Farmer’s Log that sums up what this time of year feels like to us farmers…

This coming Tuesday, at 5:05 PM PDT, the Earth will wobble its midline straight in line with our sun — the Autumnal Equinox. At that moment, if you listen closely, you might hear a big “yipeee!” from thousands of Northern hemisphere farmers.

It’s not that we begrudge the summer. We just love the changes.

It struck me today how the tasks of a growing season harmonize — with each other and with the seasons themselves — so that somehow there's always just enough time to do what needs doing, by the hair on our chinny-chin-chins.

The Byrds were right: To everything, there is a season. 

In the spring, we aren’t harvesting yet, so we have all the lengthening-day to prep the canvas; to tune-up the equipment, build irrigation systems; to seed 200 trays a week in the greenhouse; to pot up, stake, and trellis tomatoes; to mow cover crop, turn soil, and plant, plant, plant!

Then harvest seasons comes and two, three, then four days a week are consumed by harvest. We put down the shovel and the hammer and take up the harvest knife. Projects cease. Planting and harvest become our lives (and maybe some weeding if we’re lucky). The days are at their longest. If there is ever a time to harvest hundreds of pounds of cucumbers, tomatoes and squash in the morning and then seed a mile of carrots in the afternoon, it’s summer.

Before we know it, it’s late-summer. The tomatoes start exploding, the cucumbers already are, we’re still planting like crazy and then the melons come in — and just when we think we’ll break, that there isn’t enough time in the long hot days, we scroll through our crop plan and see that the plantings are nearly done. No more bed shaping. Greenhouse seedings slow down. We plant the last Fall brassicas and the tractor sits quiet for a minute and we can spend all day amongst the vines and in the cooler playing Tetris with boxes of summer fruit. 

Then comes the Autumn Equinox.

A happy Garter snake one foot up in the peppers this morning

The tomatoes are still pumping and the onions and potatoes are calling to be harvested; the winter squash and corn are crisping up. Fall harvests are here. Space needs to be cleared, fields mowed and turned into cover crop, new strawberry beds prepped and planted — and just when we think we’ll break, that there isn’t enough time in the shortening days, the heat starts to ebb and the tomatoes show signs of slowing down. Soon, a light frost will roll through the farm and nip the summer fruits. Smiling friends will come to help with the potato harvest. The chill morning air goes down like a draught of ambrosia. We plant the last lettuce bed of the season and have a moment to sit and seed cover crop.

All this is why you’ll rarely hear a farmer say, “Shucks! Summer is over.”

We are greedy for the turnings.

We love nothing more than a first harvest. But the glory of the first tomato fades under the weight of hundreds of tomato crates and then we crave cold hands and cozy coats and the crisp stem snap of winter radicchio.

Change is our tonic — and one of the great sustaining elixirs of farm life.

Soon, winter will arrive. The rains will come and we will turn in — to rest, rejuvenation, and internality. We’ll clean up the farm, look back on the year, plan, sit, think, fix things, and sleep. 

But ample sleep turns into insomnia; too much internality into angst. Our harvest muscles will atrophy and we will get pudgy. We will forget why we are out puttering in the wet and the cold.

And just when we think we’ll break, that there is too much open-endedness in the too-short days, the sun will start creeping back and we will hear the Red-winged Blackbirds calling us out to the fields, beckoning us, “Build it up again! Plant again! Turn! Turn! Turn!”

See you in the fields,
David

---

CSA BASICS

Check out our Brief Membership Guide: A quick-reference on the essentials of being a member.

Harvest pick-up times:

• Friday harvest pick-ups run from 1:00 pm - 6:00 pm

• Saturday harvest pick-ups run from 9:00 am - 2:00 pm

• Tuesday harvest pick-ups will run from 1:00 pm - 6:00 pm

U-pick hours: Oriented members can come to the farm any time, 7 days a week, sunrise to sunset, to u-pick and enjoy the farm.

2026 CSA program dates: This year’s harvest season will run from Friday, June 12th through Tuesday, December 8th this year.

Where is the farm? The member parking lot is located at 1720 Cooper Rd., Sebastopol, CA 95472.

Slow on Cooper Rd. Please drive slowly on Cooper Road — 20 mph. It's a neighborhood with lots of kids and animals who generously share the road with us.

Harvest Week 14 - The Season of Reckoning

THIS WEEK’S HARVEST

Arugula, Flashy Trout Back Lettuce, Salanova Little Gem Lettuce, Dino Kale, Shanghai Green Bok Choi, Green Magic Broccoli, Assorted Zucchini & Summer Squash, Carrots, Cured Cipollini Onions, Sweet Peppers, Poblano Peppers, Bulk Tomatoes, Eggplant, Assorted Melons

U-PICK

Check the u-pick board in the barn for weekly u-pick limits.

• Albion Strawberries: ✨2 pints per share✨

• Cherry Tomatoes: No limit — take what you’ll eat!

• Dragon Tongue Beans: No limit — take what you’ll eat! |

• Frying Peppers:

  • Padrons: No limit — take what you’ll eat! Did you know that padrons make an incredible component of hot sauce, especially as they ripen to red and are reliably very hot.

  • Shishitos: No limit — take what you’ll eat!

• Hot Peppers:

  • Jalapeños: 10 peppers per share

  • Thai Chilis: 5 peppers per share

  • 🌟 Habaneros: 3 peppers per share | Look for the orange peppers hiding low down under the plant. Habaneros make an incredible fresh salsa chopped with lime and salt!

  • 🌟 Ot Hiem: 10 peppers per share | Ot Hiem are Vietnamese peppers whose name means Danger Chili. We got our seeds from True Love Seeds, and they’re ripening to both red and yellow. Brightly fragrant and spicy, they’re delicious in chili pastes, jams, or eaten fresh chopped into citrusy fish sauce! 

• Herbs & Edible Flowers: Husk Cherries, Lemon Bergamot, Dill, Cilantro, Purple Basil, Thai Basil, Lemon Basil, Italian Basil, Tulsi, Parsley, Chamomile, Calendula, Nasturtium, Pansies/Viola, Garlic Chives, Tarragon, Thyme, Oregano, Marjoram, Lemon Balm, Lemon Verbena, Vietnamese Coriander, Shiso/Perilla, Catnip, French & Culinary Lavender, Sorrel, & Assorted Mints

• Flowers galore!

Hot pepper lineup! top left: Thai chilis / Top right: Jalapeños / Bottom left: Ot Hiem / Bottom right: Habanero.

HARVEST NOTES

• Sweet Peppers: We’re excited to finally be welcoming sweet peppers to the party this week!

  • Cornitos: We’ll have three colors of these delicious Italian peppers whose name means “little horns” after the Italian Corno di Toro “bull’s horn” peppers. They make excellent snacks eaten out of hand, sliced into salads, fried, and roasted.

  • Jimmy Nardello: A beloved Italian heirloom, which the Nardello family preserved and named after their son Jimmy after their immigration to the U.S. These peppers look spicy, but are incredibly sweet. Their thin walls make them perfect for pan-frying and roasting.

The herbs in north garden are truly exceptional right now. We recommend visiting and collecting some Dill, Cilantro, Basil (of many kinds!) and Parsley.

SAUCY CHERRY TOMATO PASTA

Adapted from Alex Weibel

This perfect peak-of-tomato-season recipe comes from CSA member Jenny Ramaswamy, whose family enjoys it so much they’ve nicknamed it “Mama’s Pasta.” It’s delicious, simple and perfect for a weeknight dinner. Check out the original recipe (linked above) for a version that includes pan-fried capers if that’s up your alley.

INGREDIENTS

• Kosher salt and black pepper

• 4 tablespoons olive oil

• 3 tablespoons tomato paste (or half a tube if you don’t want to measure)

• 3 large garlic cloves, thinly sliced

• 1-3 teaspoons red pepper flakes (if you want a spicey sauce)

• 1 pound of pasta

• 1½ -2 pounds cherry tomatoes, halved (if you want it saucier, make it closer to 2lbs)

• ½ packed cup thinly sliced fresh basil, plus small whole leaves, for garnish (optional)

• Fresh ricotta, shaved ricotta salata, burrata or grated pecorino or Parmesan, for topping each serving (optional)

DIRECTIONS

1. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat.

2. In a nonstick, deep-sided skillet, heat 2 tablespoons oil over medium-high. Add the tomato paste to the skillet and cook over medium-high, stirring frequently, until the tomato paste darkens in color and deepens in flavor, about 1-2 minutes. 

3. Reduce the heat to medium, add the remaining 2 tablespoons olive oil, the garlic and red-pepper flakes, if using, and cook, stirring frequently, until garlic is softened and fragrant, about 1-2 minutes.

4. Add the cherry tomatoes to the skillet, season with salt and pepper and cook over medium-high, stirring, 5 minutes. 

5. Add the pasta to the boiling water.  Cook according to package instructions until al dente. Sauce may still be cooking, but be sure to drain the pasta when it is done to avoid over-cooking.

6. AFTER the pasta has boiled for a few minutes, add ⅔ cup pasta cooking water from the pot and cook, stirring occasionally, until the tomatoes start to fall apart and the liquid becomes saucy, about 10 minutes.

7. Transfer the drained pasta to the skillet with the sauce to combine. Stir in half the basil and season to taste with salt and pepper.

8. Divide among plates or bowls and top with capers and remaining basil, plus cheese and whole basil leaves. Serve immediately

We were feeling fall vibes this morning as we picked the last of the Sarah’s Choice Cantaloupe, with a special cameo by one of the neighborhood cats.

VENDOR UPDATES:

SONOMA MOUNTAIN BREADS ON FRIDAYS!

We’re excited to share that Sonoma Mountain Breads will be offering fresh baked, whole grain breads at the Friday CSA pickup starting next Friday, the 18th. SMB has recently transitioned to baking sourdough breads with one hundred percent whole wheat flours grown in and around Northern California. SMB's signature Hillside loaf is baked with Hard White wheat grown and milled by Farmer Mai at WCCF’s old site off Green Valley Rd. outside of Graton. Offerings will include three to four kinds of rustic, hearty sourdough bread, baguettes, and chocolate chunk cookies. Sonoma Mountain Breads will also continue to be at the Saturday CSA pickups as well!

FIELD NOTES COFFEE

We’re lucky to welcome CSA member George Kuhn’s Field Notes Coffee to the pick-up barn. George will be tabling and offering samples of his delicious beans for a while. Field Notes Coffee sources the top 4-8% of coffee in the world through trusted, local, importers. Guided by a farm-to-cup philosophy, they roast their specialty-grade coffee to order, locking in freshness to celebrate each bean’s journey from remote origins to the hands of true coffee adventurers like you. They sell by the ounce so you have enough for a week or two. Bring your favorite container for the beans to reduce waste, however, if you don't have one, they can provide packaging.

FARMER’S LOG

THE SEASON OF RECKONING

The following is a bit of a nerdy ag report on how our growing season has shaped up in the fields so far this year.

As the tomato and pepper avalanche start raining down into our harvests, the tasks are starting to feel autumnal on the farm’s production side. Leaves are crisping up. Crops are being taken out. Cover crop seed is ordered. The storage harvests are beginning.

Our storage crop harvest season officially began this Tuesday and Wednesday as we brought in the big, beautiful, red Monastrell onions. They are now laid out curing on our greenhouse tables, like schools of beautiful jelly-fish. If they cure correctly it was a great year in the Monastrells.

Over the next six weeks the harvest train will roll on: Next stop, early winter squash varieties, then our yellow Calibra storage onions, potatoes, celery root, late winter squash, popcorn, and finally, storage carrots.

Late August and September is when we, as farmers, begin to be able to talk about how the growing season went — the ink isn’t dry yet, but we know what did well, what struggled, what our challenges and successes have been…

It is the Season of Reckoning.

2026’s growing season has been relatively good — abundant, we feel, but only because we plant very diversely and because we buffer (meaning we plant more than we need). Because ultimately 2026 was one of the stranger and more difficult years in our fields.

2026 was the year of fungal disease like we’ve never seen: The mild and relatively warm Winter we had (no hard frosts?) followed by a warm, wet Spring, followed by a foggy, cool summer was an ideal climate for fungi. On an organic farm, fungus is just a natural part of the biome for our crops and they usually fight it off. But the weather we’ve had can tip the scales. Heightened fungal diseases played out painfully in numerous crops this year: We had our first outright garlic crop failure due to rust — the first in our 10 year history. Downy mildew plagued our melons and late plantings of cucumbers, killing our Striped Armenian cucumbers and diminishing our watermelon harvests. A late blight fungus is even striking at our tomatoes right now, but the bulk of the crop should be harvestable.

Behold the fate of lettuce (via turkeys) if the row cover slips off.

Second, and related, it’s was a dang cool summer! A lot of our fruiting crops (like tomatoes, melons, winter squash, peppers) require a certain amount of “heat units” (time spent being warm) to ripen their sweet fruits. The compounds lycopene in tomatoes and capsanthin in peppers, responsible for their fruit’s flavor and complexity, need temperatures in the upper 70’s and 80’s to biosynthesize. Similarly, watermelon need 3,600–5,400°F “heat units” to grow a big sweet fruit. We spent so much of this summer under a blanket of dripping fog that it delayed the harvests of tomatoes and sweet peppers until September (we’ve harvested them in bulk in mid August before).

This year we were also really confronted with the limits of certain soils in certain spots on the farm. WCCF is blessed with a mixed topography of rich growing ground, but scattered across our fields are blobs of shallow, magnesium-clay-heavy topsoil that follow their own logic — shaped by the land's natural contours. Magnesium and clay are stingy characters — they bind to essential plant nutrients and don’t give them up without a fight. These soils also hold onto water to a much greater degree than the sandier soils 20 ft away, This makes irrigation and field planning at our scale difficult. Some treasured crops had to be put in fields to face those blobs this year. It was a battle but things did alright.

And what of the successes?!

Those we cannot talk about right now. That would be to tempt fate. I can feel the Farm Gods stirring even as I type this.

We cannot talk about how amazing plants are. We cannot talk about the storage onions who seemed to take the excess water and the mag heavy clay on the chin and found what they needed to create softball sized bulbs. Or about the stacked potato crop curing out in Farfield. We cannot talk about the hard work of our whole team keeping the fresh veg fields on time, flowing, and protected from the voracious turkey colonies we have this year. (Like how Asa has physically covered every succession of lettuce so that the turkeys leave some for you.) We cannot talk about how the strawberries cranked.

The Farm Gods go to sleep in December. We can talk about those things then.

See you in the fields,
David

---

CSA BASICS

Check out our Brief Membership Guide: A quick-reference on the essentials of being a member.

Harvest pick-up times:

• Friday harvest pick-ups run from 1:00 pm - 6:00 pm

• Saturday harvest pick-ups run from 9:00 am - 2:00 pm

• Tuesday harvest pick-ups will run from 1:00 pm - 6:00 pm

U-pick hours: Oriented members can come to the farm any time, 7 days a week, sunrise to sunset, to u-pick and enjoy the farm.

2026 CSA program dates: This year’s harvest season will run from Friday, June 12th through Tuesday, December 8th this year.

Where is the farm? The member parking lot is located at 1720 Cooper Rd., Sebastopol, CA 95472.

Slow on Cooper Rd. Please drive slowly on Cooper Road — 20 mph. It's a neighborhood with lots of kids and animals who generously share the road with us.

Harvest Week 13 - Farewell, Wendell

THIS WEEK’S HARVEST

Green Butter Lettuce, Green Little Gem Lettuce, Dino Kale, Assorted Zucchini & Summer Squash, Assorted Slicing Cucumbers, Rainbow Carrots, Assorted Fresh Onions, Celery, Poblano Peppers, Bulk Tomatoes, Pink Crimson Sweet Watermelon, Sarah’s Choice Cantaloupe, Assorted Cabbage, Popcorn

U-PICK

Check the u-pick board in the barn for weekly u-pick limits.

• Albion Strawberries: ✨3 pints per share✨

• Cherry Tomatoes: No limit — take what you’ll eat!

• Dragon Tongue Beans: No limit — take what you’ll eat! |

• Frying Peppers:

  • Padrons: No limit — take what you’ll eat! Did you know that padrons make an incredible component of hot sauce, especially as they ripen to red and are reliably very hot.

  • Shishitos: No limit — take what you’ll eat!

• Hot Peppers:

  • Jalapeños: 10 peppers per share

  • 🌟 Thai Chilis: 3 peppers per share

• Herbs & Edible Flowers: Husk Cherries, Lemon Bergamot, Dill, Cilantro, Purple Basil, Thai Basil, Lemon Basil, Italian Basil, Tulsi, Parsley, Chamomile, Calendula, Nasturtium, Pansies/Viola, Garlic Chives, Tarragon, Thyme, Oregano, Marjoram, Lemon Balm, Lemon Verbena, Vietnamese Coriander, Shiso/Perilla, Catnip, French & Culinary Lavender, Sorrel, & Assorted Mints

• Flowers galore!

HARVEST NOTES

• Pink Crimson Sweet Watermelon: Our small, slightly less sweet than usual watermelon we’re harvesting this year are a casualty of this foggy, cool, fungal summer we’ve had. Pray for more heat!

Riley, Shanga, Arabella and Melinda after harvesting all morning in the rain.

PRESERVING THE HARVEST: BULK TOMATOES!

From now until the end of tomato season, bulk quantities of tomatoes, including sauce varieties and seconds (tomatoes that are blemished or overripe but still tasty) will be available — in addition to the perfect ones!

There will be a 15 lb season limit on bulk tomatoes, meaning that each share will be able to take up to 15 pounds, out-of-bag, over the course of the season, in addition to whatever weekly tomatoes you’d like to put in your bag. Just like with the pickling cucumbers, the season limit applies to each share, meaning that members who are alternating weeks should coordinate as to how you want to divide your allotted 15 lb. You’re welcome to take them all at once or a little bit here and there, whichever you like! However, this year in particular, we recommend taking your allotted quantity as soon as you’re able. The tomatoes do not like this rainy summer weather we’ve been having, and it’s looking like it will probably be a short tomato season. As we approach the end of the season, the tomatoes available as bulk will include more seconds than early on.

PRESERVING YOUR TOMATOES

While canning and drying are also options, we’ve found that the easiest way to put up tomatoes is freezing. The quickest method is to simply pop them in the freezer without processing first, but we love halving them, drizzling with olive oil and roasting in a low-temp oven to concentrate the flavors. Or, if you have the time now and want to make a sauce that truly bottles the taste of summer, consider making fresh tomato sauce!

FRESH TOMATO SAUCE

For the simplest and most satisfying tomato sauce, we recommend sautéing onions and garlic in more olive oil than you might think you need. Then add tomatoes and salt to taste and cook down for 45 minutes to an hour until your sauce has reached the desired consistency and flavor. Depending on your preferred consistency, tomatoes can be peeled and de-seeded before cooking, or if you prefer a more rustic sauce, chop and them throw them in the pot seeds and all, or blend partially with an immersion blender. Heirlooms and cherry tomatoes will impart a notable sweetness to sauce, but will also require more cooking as they have a higher water concentration than sauce tomatoes.

For more detailed instructions, and some good ideas for variations on tomato sauces, check out this Smitten Kitchen post on Fresh Tomato Sauce.

WATERMELON GRANITA

This granita recipe makes for an easy, and delightfully fancy-feeling dessert. It’s perfect for using up any odd watermelon leftovers that you might find languishing in your fridge, and the addition of lime and a bit of sugar really make the flavor shine. If you haven’t had granita before, it’s a bit like handmade shaved ice. The delicate ice crystals feel like they’re sparkling as they melt on your tongue.

Recipe by Mark Bittman

Total Time: 2 hr 30 min | Servings: 6 to 8 servings

INGREDIENTS

• 1 pound watermelon

• 2 tablespoons sugar

• 2 tablespoons lemon juice

DIRECTIONS

Cut about 1 pound watermelon into small chunks (discarding the rind), and freeze them. When they’re frozen, put them in a blender with 2 tablespoons sugar and 2 tablespoons lemon juice, and blend until the mixture liquefies. Pour the mixture into a shallow glass or ceramic pan, and freeze for about 2 hours, breaking up the ice crystals with a fork every 30 minutes or so. It should be slushy and crunchy.

FIELD NOTES COFFEE

We’re lucky and excited to welcome CSA member George Kuhn’s Field Notes Coffee to the pick-up barn. George will be tabling and offering samples of his delicious beans for a while. Field Notes Coffee, George says, “Sources the top 4-8% of coffee in the world through trusted, local, importers who share our spirit of adventure. Guided by a farm-to-cup philosophy, we roast our specialty-grade coffee to order, locking in freshness to celebrate each bean’s journey from remote origins to the hands of true coffee adventurers like you.  We'll sell by the ounce so you have enough for a week or two.  We encourage you to bring your favorite container for the beans to reduce waste, however, if you don't have one, we can provide packaging.”

BAKERY POP-UP THIS FRIDAY!

We’re delighted to be welcoming Monty’s Sweetheart Bakery to the Friday CSA pickup this week: Friday, September 4th.

Here’s a note from them: “Hi, I’m Montana! The proud owner and baker behind Montys Sweetheart Bakery, as well as a wife and mama to two adorable little taste-testers who inspire so much of what I create! I started my sourdough business that doesn’t just make loaves but everything from savory to sweet treats! I love getting creative and making things that my littles get excited about—and I think you will too! I’m so excited to bring Monty’s Sweetheart Bakery to this lovely farm and share some fun, delicious sourdough creations with you. Come try something new, and see what sweet (or savory!) surprise I’ve baked up!”

FARMER’S LOG

Farewell, Wendell

This week we mourn the loss of Wendell Berry — American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic and Kentucky based grass farmer — a guiding light of the modern agrarian movement. His essays started Kayta, myself, and countless farmer friends and peers on the agrarian path.

His influence on my life is hard to overstate.

I first read his words in a cabin on a small farm in Patagonia, Argentina in 2011 and was shook. I followed that thread to Caretaker Farm in Massachusetts, partly because they had a picture of him visiting the farm on their website. There I met Kayta. West County Community Farm is essentially our answer to his vision and his call: that farms and soil are a proving ground for our relationship to creation and our neighbors, human an non-human.

He was also hilarious. Kayta and I saw him speak with Gary Snyder at the SRJC in 2014 and he had the crowded hall in stitches. Here is a recording of an interview from that tour.

We’d like to honor Wendell on this warm, misty, September night by just leaving you with some of his words, because, as Barbara Kingsolver said of his passing, “All I can do with my grief tonight is go to my shelves and put my hands on his books. Our world will go on needing him, and the words will be here, even as his soul rests with the day blind stars.”

1985, VII.

The sky bright after summer-ending rain,
I sat against an oak half up the climb.
The sun was low; the woods was hushed in shadow;
Now the long shimmer of the crickets' song
Had stopped. I looked up to the westward ridge
And saw the ripe October light again,
Shining through leaves still green yet turning gold.
Those glowing leaves made of the light a place
That time and leaf would leave. The wind came cool,
And then I knew that I was present in
The long age of the passing world, in which
I once was not, now am, and will not be,
And in that time, beneath the changing tree,
I rested in a keeping not my own.

From A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979–1997.

* * * * *

Enriching the Earth

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die; I have plowed the seeds
of winter grains and various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past seasons
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.

All this serves the dark. Against the shadow
of veiled possibility my workdays stand
in a most asking light. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things.

And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.

After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song.

From Farming: A Hand Book (1970)

* * * * *

A Meeting

In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: "How you been?"
He grins and looks at me.
"I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees."

From A Part (1980)

* * * * *

”The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”

From, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977)

* * * * *

See you in the fields, Wendell
David

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CSA BASICS

Check out our Brief Membership Guide: A quick-reference on the essentials of being a member.

Harvest pick-up times:

• Friday harvest pick-ups run from 1:00 pm - 6:00 pm

• Saturday harvest pick-ups run from 9:00 am - 2:00 pm

• Tuesday harvest pick-ups will run from 1:00 pm - 6:00 pm

U-pick hours: Oriented members can come to the farm any time, 7 days a week, sunrise to sunset, to u-pick and enjoy the farm.

2026 CSA program dates: This year’s harvest season will run from Friday, June 12th through Tuesday, December 8th this year.

Where is the farm? The member parking lot is located at 1720 Cooper Rd., Sebastopol, CA 95472.

Slow on Cooper Rd. Please drive slowly on Cooper Road — 20 mph. It's a neighborhood with lots of kids and animals who generously share the road with us.