THIS WEEK’S HARVEST
New Masquerade Potatoes, Fresh Cipollini Onions, Lorz Softneck Garlic, Rouxai Oakleaf Lettuce, Newham Little Gem Lettuce, Collards, Baby Celery, Fennel, Bunched Chioggia Beets, Assorted Zucchini, Patty Pan & Crookneck Squash, Bulk Pickling Cucumbers, Lemon Cucumbers, Persian Cucumbers, Carrots
U-PICK
Check the u-pick board in the barn for weekly u-pick limits.
Albion Strawberries | 2 pints per share
🌟Amethyst Beans | 2 pints per share | These beautiful beans are purple on the outside and green on the inside. Eat them raw to highlight their color and sweet flavor, or cook as you would any other green beans and watch their color change to green.
Purple Sugar Snap Peas | 1/2 pint per share
Frying Peppers: check out last week’s harvest note for details.
Shishitos | 3 pints/share
Padrón | 2 pints/share
Herbs & Edible Flowers: Italian Basil, Purple Basil, Lemon Basil, Purple Basil, Dill, Tulsi, Parsley, Cilantro, Chamomile, Calendula, Borage, Nasturtium, Pansies/Viola, Stridolo, Lemon Bergamot Bee Balm, Onion Chives, Garlic Chives, Tarragon, Thyme, Oregano, Marjoram, Culinary Sage, Lemon Balm, Lemon Verbena, Vietnamese Coriander, Shiso/Perilla, Catnip, Pineapple Sage, Sorrel, Assorted Mints
Flowers! Too many to list! Feel free to pick the sunflowers along the edge of the parking area in addition to everything in the garden.
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 (as in this recipe for Crunchy Salty Lemony Salad). 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 — exactly like Swiss chard but with a thinner stem.
New Potatoes: These beautiful Masquerade potatoes are fresh and uncured — with delicate skin and an extra crisp texture, they’re more of a fresh vegetable than the starchy storage potatoes of winter. Use them like you would any potato, or, to highlight their fresh flavor, roast them in the oven with olive oil, salt and pepper (and Cipollini onions! So good in everything) or check out the herby potato salad recipe below.
Baby Celery: Farm-fresh celery is a completely different beast than the celery that comes from the store. Minerally, sweet and salty, we can’t get enough of it. To highlight this week’s pairing of celery and fennel, we’ll be making one of our longstanding favorite salads: Alison Roman’s Celery and Fennel with Walnuts and Blue Cheese. (You can find the recipe in this old newsletter.)
U-pick goodies are starting to get interesting
GREEN GODDESS POTATO SALAD
By Dan Pelosi aka GrossyPelosi
INGREDIENTS
1.5 lbs whole pee wee potatoes or halved baby potatoes, or a mix
1 cup chopped (1 inch pieces) asparagus
1/2 cup fresh or frozen peas
1 cups chopped (1/2 pieces) snap peas
2 T. of chopped fresh chives
2 T. of chopped fresh dill
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1 batch of green goddess dressing
GREEN GODDESS DRESSING
1 cup (1.5 oz container) fresh basil
1/2 cup fresh parsley
1/2 cup fresh mint
2 cloves garlic, peeled
3 whole anchovies
3/4 cup sour cream
3/4 cup mayonnaise
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
Combine all ingredients in a food processor and blend until smooth and well combined. Adjust flavors to taste. Chill for up to 5 days.
INSTRUCTIONS
Add potatoes to a pot and cover with 2 inches of water. Add a VERY generous amount of kosher salt, cover the pot and bring water to a boil. Boil potatoes for about 8ish minutes, but really until you can just get a knife through them. Add in your peas and asparagus and cook for 2 – 3 more minutes, until bright green. Your potatoes should now be perfectly knife tender. Drain everything in a colander and set aside to cool slightly. About 10 minutes.
If you haven’t made your dressing or chopped your herbs, now is a great time to do that. Or check your make up, whatev.
Toss your cooked and cooled potatoes and veg into a large bowl. Add snap peas, dressing, chives and dill. Toss everything to combine! Taste and season with more salt and pepper if needed.
Cover and place in refrigerator until ready to serve. This can be done a day ahead, flavors will only get better over time!
Give everything a nice toss before serving! Enjoy, Goddess!
Thanks to everyone who attended last week’s flower arranging workshop and especially to the farm’s flower ambassador Cassidy Blackwell for creating such an inspiring space for community creativity.
FARMER’S LOG
AN ODE TO THE ONION
We love fresh onion season. We’ve been putting the Cipollini onions on everything — pizza, salads, breakfast sandwiches...
Cipollini onions are always the first bulbing onion that we harvest — a sort of teaser for what is to come. They come at a time when the bulbs of our main storage onions start to swell and we get to watch the process as we harvest the Cipollinis. When this magical swelling starts we can start to gauge how our onion crop will turn out. Not withstanding any force majeure, we have a beautiful onion crop shaping up out there in Loaf Field. In mid September we will bust out the macro bins and haul in 10,000+ lbs of full sized orbs into our greenhouse for curing and eating throughout the fall and winter.
But now we are still in that stage of innocence — savoring, beholding our first fresh bulbing onion.
Fresh onions, for some reason, feel like an impossible food, a gift from heaven, “they make us cry without hurting us.”
Pablo Neruda managed to capture the heavenly grace of the onion. We’ll let him take it from here…
Ode to the Onion
by Pablo Neruda
Onion,
luminous flask,
your beauty formed
petal by petal,
crystal scales expanded you
and in the secrecy of the dark earth
your belly grew round with dew.
Under the earth
the miracle
happened
and when your clumsy
green stem appeared,
and your leaves were born
like swords
in the garden,
the earth heaped up her power
showing your naked transparency,
and as the remote sea
in lifting the breasts of Aphrodite
duplicating the magnolia,
so did the earth
make you,
onion
clear as a planet
and destined
to shine,
constant constellation,
round rose of water,
upon
the table
of the poor.
You make us cry without hurting us.
I have praised everything that exists,
but to me, onion, you are
more beautiful than a bird
of dazzling feathers,
heavenly globe, platinum goblet,
unmoving dance
of the snowy anemone
and the fragrance of the earth lives
in your crystalline nature.
* * * * * * *
See you in the fields,
David & Kayta
CSA BASICS
What time is harvest pick-up?:
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.
2025 CSA program dates: Our harvest season will run from Saturday, June 14th through Tuesday, December 9th this year.
Where is the farm? The member parking lot is located at 1720 Cooper Rd., Sebastopol, CA 95472.
Slow on Cooper Rd. Out of respect for our neighbors and the many kids and animals that live on Cooper Rd., please drive slow (20 mph)!