Harvest Week 12 - My Dad Vs. Interstellar

THIS WEEK’S HARVEST

Romaine Lettuce, Green Little Gem Lettuce, Rainbow Chard, Assorted Zucchini & Summer Squash, Green Slicing Cucumbers, Silver Slicing Cucumbers, Rainbow Carrots, Fresh Candy Sweet Onions, Fennel, Celery, Italian & Asian Eggplant, Poblano Peppers, Early Tomatoes, Mini Watermelon, Sarah’s Choice Cantaloupe, Purple Cabbage

U-PICK

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

• Albion Strawberries: ✨4 pints per share✨

• Cherry Tomatoes: 4 pints per share

• Dragon Tongue Beans: No limit — take what you’ll eat! | These flat beans are cream-colored with purple speckles, which fade when they’re cooked. Please be mindful not to walk on the base of the plants as you pick so that they can keep producing!

• 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!

• Jalapeños: 10 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!

Shanga, Kayta, Riley and Henry on melon harvest this morning. Photo by Melinda.

HARVEST NOTES

• Mini Watermelon: These beautiful tiny watermelon are a Japanese variety with crisp red flesh and a thin, delicate rind. They toughed it out in a very challenging part of the field and we’re glad to be able to share their tiny treats with you.

• Green & Silver Slicing Cucumbers: The cucumbers in the share this week are coming from our final cucumber planting of the year. It’s always a challenging slot to fill as they’re typically facing intense fog, and shoulder to shoulder with older plants. We’re very happy with how the two varieties are performing right now, but we’re seeing signs of disease creeping in and wanted to give you a heads up that they likely won’t be with us for long, so enjoy this temporary cucumber deluge while it lasts!

• When will bulk tomatoes be here? After this remarkably cool summer, we’re still waiting on our beautiful plum canning tomatoes to join the party, so we’ll have to wait another week to open up bulk tomatoes quantities. Hopefully this warm weather spurs them on.

SMASHED ASIAN CUCUMBER SALAD

From The Woks of Life

This refreshing salad is perfect for the last hurrah of cucumbers that we’re experiencing right now (and a great use for the gorgeous new succession of cilantro in the garden). It would be great served alongside a cold noodle salad or teriyaki tofu or chicken.

INGREDIENTS

• 1-1.5 pounds seedless cucumbers (about 3-4 slicing cucumbers)

• 1 teaspoon salt

• 2 1/2 teaspoons sugar

• 2 teaspoons sesame oil

• 3 teaspoons light soy sauce

• 1 1/2 tablespoons rice vinegar

• 2-4 cloves garlic (finely chopped)

• 1-2 teaspoons chili oil (optional)

• 2 teaspoons toasted sesame seeds

• 1/4 cup chopped cilantro

DIRECTIONS

• Wash the cucumbers and pat them dry with a clean towel. Make the salad dressing by combining the salt, sugar, sesame oil, light soy sauce, and rice vinegar. Stir until the sugar and salt are completely dissolved. Set aside.

• On a cutting board, lay a large knife flat against the cucumber, and smash it lightly with your other hand. The cucumber should crack open and smash into four sections. Repeat along its full length. Once the whole cucumber is completely open (usually into 4 long sectional pieces), cut it at a 45-degree angle into bite-sized pieces.

• Right before serving, mix the cut cucumber with the prepared dressing, garlic and chili oil. Toss it well. Serve, garnished with sesame seeds and cilantro.

BAKERY POP-UP NEXT FRIDAY!

We’re delighted to be welcoming Monty’s Sweetheart Bakery to the Friday CSA pickup next 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

MY DAD VS. INTERSTELLAR

My dad turns 81 today. This week, coincidentally, after putting Alice to bed and turning off the last irrigation lines, I re-watched the movie Interstellar in installments. The movie made me think of my dad a lot.

My dad had a long career as an aerospace engineer — a "rocket scientist" we'd say to tease him. I'm a farmer, obviously. I don't think my dad has ever seen Interstellar but I think that movie would infuriate him even more than it infuriated me.

Let me explain.

My dad grew up poor in a small town, the middle of 5 kids, exploring and hunting the swamps and bayous of Louisiana. He excelled in math and physics in school as the Space Race of the 1960's was picking up steam. At 21, he interned on the Apollo 11 booster — the rocket that would take man to the moon. My mom's first memory of him is in a dorm common room, his back turned, hunched over a radio telling people to "sshhh!" as he tried to make out the crackling mission control commands of the Apollo 16 launch. He provided for our family working for a communications satellite company, working in and eventually leading the guidance, navigation & control systems group. In other words, he spent 40 years making sure clunky, fragile, $300 million objects pointed true and didn't incinerate like tissue paper in the Earth's atmosphere or drift off helplessly into the abyss. My dad understands the uncompromising math of space viscerally.

The aurora captured over the farm in October 2024. Photo by Azul.

He enjoyed his work but my dad's heart is a naturalist. His astrodynamics books collect dust on the top of the shelves and his most cherished books are about grizzly bears and snow-shoe hares in Alaska. His church is wild places: The granite slopes, alpine meadows and lakes of the High Sierra and the old growth madrone, oaks and Ponderosa pines of the Ventana Wilderness. When we were kids, he taught my brother and me how to be out there — how to read topo maps and hang food the proper way. Sleeping out with him in the Sierra, we'd gaze up at the blanket of stars and pepper him with questions about the planets, the stars, and the satellites drifting above. He'd quell our Star Trek TNG tinged romance and say, with a slight Louisiana drawl, "We ain't going anywhere," and tell us what a wasteland Mars was.

Interstellar is a 2014 epic sci-fi film directed by Christopher Nolan. It has become a classic of the genre. To recap (spoiler alert): In the not-so-distant future, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is all-American former top gun test pilot, forced to become a corn farmer by a global environmental and social collapse akin to the Dustbowl. An insidious dust coats the dinner plates in his farmhouse and his kids have concerning coughs. "We used to look up at our place in the stars," Cooper laments to his father in law, "Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.” The action starts when NASA, now an underground operation, recruits Cooper to pilot one last species-saving mission to find a new planet for the human race. In the adventure that ensues, Cooper gallops through worm-holes, galaxies, and space-time like a cowboy marauding through the frontier country. (At one point his sleek landing ship hits a floating ice cloud at what must be Mach 25 as if it bumped into the door of the saloon. No problem.) The movie ends triumphantly with Cooper and his relativity-aged daughter reuniting in an Arc-like space station drifting with all of humanity toward a new home.

In my opinion it's a masterfully rendered film — but not, I would say, a good one. It presses American thematic nerve buttons  — leaving home, individual heroism, innovation, colonization. And grounds them into the emotional gravity of a powerfully acted father-daughter relationship that slingshots us, ultimately, toward the most depressing thing I can possibly imagine… leaving our Earth.

Yeehaw!

But so what? Why pick on a 12 year old sci-fi movie in a farm newsletter?

Farming aint so bad, Coop!

Because art is powerful. Interstellar wouldn't get the side-eye if it weren't so relevant to our moment. In the news we see ancient forests vanishing in intensifying wildfires (the Ventana Wilderness is burning again as we speak); the strongest El Niño ever recorded brews in the Eastern Pacific, poised to upend farms world-wide. Meanwhile, a couple months ago, SpaceX essentially copy-pasted the plot of Interstellar, a story about leaving, into an IPO prospectus and it briefly became one of the most valuable companies — the most valuable stories — in the world. We think of art as a passive actor — entertainment when the kids are down — but the stories we celebrate shape our world and our future. They shape what we think is heroic, what we invest in, and what we build for our grandkids.

It's time to start celebrating other stories.

What disturbed me so much about Interstellar, and what I think would disturb my dad, was not the bogus physics — the Plescia family loves a good Star Trek TNG episode — it was the blitheness of it. How triumphantly Cooper and humanity push off from our one blue planet. How blithely we, as a society, seem to be entertaining the same idea despite the sheer impossibility of it. That's not how you treat something you love.

"We ain't going anywhere," said the man who spent 40 years on the math of leaving this planet. "But why would you want to?" he'd add with a smile, as we gazed up at the stars.

That was hard to argue with the next day, feeling the clear air in our lungs on top of the mountain pass, staring down at crystalline lakes and hyper-green Sierra meadows, and then driving home through the San Joaquin valley, sun-warmed plum juice dripping down our chins.

"Why would you want to?"

See you in the fields,
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.

Harvest Week 11 - Field Poem

The farm is in need of pint baskets! If you have an abundance at home, please bring some back to the farm so that they can be reused throughout the season.

THIS WEEK’S HARVEST

Rouxai Red Oakleaf Lettuces, Escarole, Assorted Zucchini & Summer Squash, Assorted Slicing Cucumbers, Rainbow Carrots, Fresh Candy Sweet Onions, Fennel, Celery, Italian & Asian Eggplant, Poblano Peppers, Early Tomatoes, Bicolor Sweet Corn, Assorted Melons, Caraflex Cabbage

U-PICK

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

• Albion Strawberries: ✨5 pints per share✨ There are still beautiful berries languishing in the back right side of the patch. We recommend making the journey out there!

• Cherry Tomatoes: 3 pints per share

• 🌟 Dragon Tongue Beans: No limit — take what you’ll eat! | These flat beans are cream-colored with purple speckles, which fade when they’re cooked. Please be mindful not to walk on the base of the plants as you pick so that they can keep producing!

• Frying Peppers:

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

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

• 🌟 Jalapeños: 5 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

• Fresh Candy Sweet Onions: Fresh out of the soil, these sweet, fresh-eating onions are a delicacy. Similar to the famous Walla-Walla sweets, try them in a way that you can show them off: lightly grilled on a good burger, raw in a salad with a delicate dressing, or as onion rings. They are so sweet and mild, some people even eat them raw like an apple! (We haven’t tried that yet! If you do, let us know how it goes!)

All hands Caraflex cabbage harvest this morning

roasted eggplant pasta with parmesan breadcrumbs

By Alison Roman

Serves 4–6

The genius of this recipe is that the eggplant is roasted to achieve a rich color and umami flavor, and then mixed with roasted cherry tomatoes and pasta water to create a perfectly creamy sauce with the most decadent eggplant flavor.

INGREDIENTS

• 1 ½–2 pounds globe eggplant (about 2), sliced ¼–½”  thick

• ½ cup plus 4 tablespoons olive oil, divided

• 1 cup panko breadcrumbs

• ¼ cup Parmesan or Pecorino, plus more for grating 

• ½ cup chopped parsley, chives, oregano, or a combo of all

• Kosher salt 

• Freshly ground black pepper 

• 4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

• 8 oz. sungolds or cherry tomatoes, halved if large

• 1–2 tablespoons tomato paste, harissa paste, or gochujang

• Crushed red pepper flakes (optional) 

• 12–16 oz. dried pasta such as calamarata, rigatoni, ziti, paccheri, or any short, tubular shape

In August, our most abundant and newest flowers are mostly in the Northeast section of the garden.

DIRECTIONS

1. Preheat your oven to 425°F. Arrange eggplant in an even layer on a sheet tray (two if you have them), season with salt and pepper, and drizzle with ½ cup of the olive oil. Flip the eggplant, and season with salt and pepper on the other side. Roast eggplant for 30–45 minutes, flipping the eggplant halfway through cooking, until everything is deeply browned on both sides.*

*Roasting eggplant isn’t hard, but it is inconsistent—more so than any other vegetable maybe. Depending on your oven, the eggplant itself, and what your definition of ½-inch is, it could take anywhere from 40 to even 60 minutes. I’ve roasted eggplant at “425°F” in several different ovens and somehow, it is never the same. The only tip I have is to really roast it until it’s very, very browned, adding more oil if you think it needs it (this will help it brown vs. look white and dehydrated). Well-roasted eggplant is the single most important, make-or-break part of this recipe. 

2. Meanwhile, heat 2 tablespoons olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add breadcrumbs and season with salt and pepper. Toast, tossing occasionally, until the breadcrumbs are golden brown, like individual little pieces of toast, about 5–7 minutes. Add ¼ cup cheese of your choosing and toss to coat, letting it melt into the crumbs (don’t worry if it clumps up) and toss another minute or two. Remove from heat and transfer to a small bowl. Add two or three tablespoons of chopped herbs, toss and set aside.

3. Wipe out the pot or skillet of any crumbs and add remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Add the garlic and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened and nicely toasted, 3-5 minutes. Add tomatoes, tomato paste and crushed red pepper flakes, if using. Season with salt and pepper and cook, stirring occasionally, until the tomatoes burst and the tomato paste turns dark brick red, another 3–5 minutes. Remove from heat and wait for your eggplant to finish roasting. 

4. Once your eggplant is where you want it, add it all to the skillet, stirring it in so it melts into the tomatoes. It will look a little dry at first, but know you’re going to add a bunch of pasta water which will give you more of a “sauce.” 

5. Meanwhile, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Cook pasta of your choosing until just before al dente. Save 2 cups of pasta water and drain the rest.

6. Add the pasta and 1½ cups pasta water to your pot or skillet and cook over medium heat. Keep tossing and stirring, until the sauce goes from watery to thick and almost creamy (it happens quickly), 3–5 minutes. Each piece of pasta should be beautifully coated and perfectly cooked. Add more pasta water if you need it, seasoning with salt and pepper as you go. 

7. Divide pasta among bowls and top with breadcrumbs, more herbs, and more cheese to serve. 

FARMER’S LOG

FIELD POEM

I think we develope friendships with the plants we live and work with.

It can be hard to notice. It’s quieter than the din of modern life and the volume of human speech and it can catch you by surprise.

Farmers might feel it when they haven’t been in a certain field in a long time and then they return — the smell; the feel of the leaves on their skin; the sound of the leaves; a vibration, dare I say, of their intangible personalities.

You feel a certain way — maybe a little more calm, maybe a little cocky.

Or you might you feel a certain way leaving a field after a long day in it.

I love this poem by Gary Soto, I think it speaks to that moment abruptly and clearly…

* * * * *

FIELD POEM
By Gary Soto from Selected Poems

When the foreman whistled
My brother and I
Shouldered our hoes,
Leaving the field.
We returned to the bus
Speaking
In broken English, in broken Spanish
The restaurant food,
The tickets to a dance
We wouldn’t buy with our pay.

From the smashed bus window,
I saw the leaves of cotton plants
Like small hands waving good-bye.

* * * * *

Plant friendships go deeper than we often realize. They can be healing. They’re often unconditional.

Try and close your eyes in the garden this week next to your favorite flowers. Take in the smell, feel their leaves… and say hello to an old friend.

See you in the fields,
David & Kayta

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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.

Harvest Week 10 - Plenty in a Drying Land

THIS WEEK’S HARVEST

Kolibri Little Gem Lettuces, Albachiara Lettuce, Escarole, Dazzling Blue Dino Kale, Assorted Zucchini & Summer Squash, Assorted Cucumbers, Rainbow Carrots, Fresh Red Onions, Fennel, Italian & Asian Eggplant, Poblano Peppers, Early Tomatoes, Bicolor Sweet Corn, Assorted Melons

U-PICK

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

• Albion Strawberries: ✨5 pints per share✨ There are still beautiful berries languishing in the back right side of the patch. We recommend making the journey out there!

• Cherry Tomatoes: 2 pints per share

• Amethyst Beans: Gleanings | Gleanings are how we indicate that a crop’s main production is winding down, but that you are welcome to forage for the small amount that remains.

• Frying Peppers:

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

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

• 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

• Assorted Melons: This week we find ourselves between two successions of melons, so depending on when you come you may find the green-fleshed Galia Melons that have been coming on slowly over the last couple weeks, or the new Sarah’s Choice Cantaloupe that we look forward to every year. Galia are yellow on the outside when ripe, and Sarah’s choice are a cream color. With both varieties, you can choose a good melon by smelling the small scar where the stem was attached, but don’t worry — we only grow varieties that “slip from the vine” to show that they’re ripe, which makes it easy to pick a winner.

• Escarole: One of our favorite members of the chicory family, escarole looks like hearty lettuce. While it can be eaten raw in salad for those who aren’t afraid of a little bitterness, escarole really shines when sautéed, braised or in soup, as cooking highlights its velvety texture and savory depth. For the most simple preparation, try sautéing it in olive oil with plenty of garlic, Parmesan and lemon. It’s also delicious in Italian Wedding Soup, beans with sausage and escarole and Utica Greens — all of which would be delicious this chilly summer week!

• Poblano Peppers: The poblano chili pepper is the beloved mild chili, originating in the state of Puebla, México that when dried it is called “ancho” or chili ancho and when roasted and stuffed with cheese becomes the magnificent chili relleno. This week will be offering the first taste of these wonderful peppers. For an easy, incredibly satisfying combo, try adding them to this Esquites (Mexican Street Corn) recipe!

ZUCCHINI, HAZELNUT & BASIL SALAD

Adapted from Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi

This perfect salad is just the thing to renew one’s enthusiasm for zucchini as we start harvesting our final succession for the season. It’s bright, herby, just slightly sweet and very satisfying. The use of a grill pan or very hot skillet allows you to sear the outside while keeping the inside texture from getting at all soggy.

INGREDIENTS

• 1/3 cup hazelnuts or other nuts (if it’s all you have a bag of roasted, salted mixed nuts works perfectly well)

• 7 small zucchini (about 1 3/4 lbs in total)

• 4 tbsp olive oil

• salt and black pepper to taste

• 1 tsp balsamic vinegar — we like to increase this until it brings a more marked sweetness to the dish

• 1 1/2 cups basil leaves — straight Genovese is delicious, or you could experiment with the other basil varieties in the garden: purple, sweet Thai, and lemon would all be excellent and very different

• 3 oz. Parmesan, broken up, very thinly-sliced or shaved

• 2 tsp hazelnut or walnut oil

PREPARATION

Preheat oven to 300 degrees F. Scatter the hazelnuts over a baking sheet and roast 12-15 minutes or until nicely browned and toasted. Let them cool down (remove skins if needed) before chopping roughly or just crushing lightly with the side of a large knife.

Place a ridged grill pan on high heat and leave it there until it is almost red hot—at least 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, trim the ends off of zucchini and cut on an angle into about 3/8-inch-thick slices. Place zucchini slices in a bowl and toss with half the olive oil, salt and black pepper. Place the slices on the hot grill pan and cook about 2 minutes on each side, turning them over using tongs. You want to get distinct char marks without cooking the zucchini through. Transfer to a mixing bowl, drizzle balsamic vinegar over and toss to combine. Set aside to cool slightly.

Once zucchini has cooled down, add the remaining olive oil, basil and hazelnuts. Mix lightly and taste for seasoning. Place salad on plates, incorporating the Parmesan, and drizzle over the hazelnut oil.     

Swallowtail on some zinnias

FARMER’S LOG

Plenty in a Drying Land: THE DOG DAYS OF SUMMER

The sun bleaches the hills gold, the fruits of summer rain down… the dog days of summer are here.

The term "dog days" comes from ancient Greece and the Mediterranean, where people tied the return of Sirius — the brightest star in the night sky, and the eye of Canis Major, the Dog that follows Orion across the heavens — to the hottest and sultriest stretch of summer. The days when, as Virgil put it, "the Dog-star cleaves the thirsty ground." The ancients associated the dog days of summer with bad luck, foul tempers, illness and heat. (Did anyone else just get hit with that scourge of a fever + cold sickness recently?)

As the West Marin based naturalist Richard Vacha observes of our own Mediterranean climate in his book The Heart of Tracking, the dog days are an abundant, raucous, frolicking time for wild canines like coyotes, as they feast on fattened prey and the ripening fruit of late summer and as canine pups leave the den and come into their own.

The dog days are also scarce, spent time in our ecosystem. It is the beginning of the great dry-down in California and the great dormant period of our year.

“For a wild animal,” Vacha writes, the late summer and early fall “can be as tough to endure as an East Coast winter. Food is scarce, water is scarce, and green vegetation is crowded into riparian corridors, drawing the animals that depend on these resources closer together. The animals who prey upon them have shifted correspondingly. Territorial patterns are all in great flux as the expansive cycle of the summer season slowly winds down.”

On the farm, this shift into the dog days — their abundance and scarcity — is clear.

Wild chicories and the sweet corn field feeling the return of Sirius

Our harvests are more and more heavy with fruit — melons tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, sweet corn. The wild blackberries are finishing their last fruit. The wild buckeyes are dropping their leaves and turning to their nuts. In our garden, the first rounds of flowers and herbs are following the lead of the wild grasses, tapping out, and throwing seed.

So it goes in our staple field crops: If July was an outward explosion of verdant vegetation, the dog days are the beginning of the hunkering down, the drawing in, the focused inward stare toward the next generation. Our verdant green acre of winter squash is yellowing as the sun battered canopy turns its attention to the precious orbs below. Our flowering potato field is now droopy and pale, the plants senescing and focusing all they have on swelling their final tubers.

And as the wild land surrounding the farm dries out, our wild neighbors turn more and more to the farm — an irrigated green oasis — for drink and meals. The wild turkeys visit the fields every morning and evening, snipping off hydrating bits of lettuce (their favorite is green romaine lettuce!) Gophers and voles take thirsty bites out of our drip irrigation lines. Raccoons visit the melons and the sweet corn patches nightly for midnight snacks. Good choice.

But the sweet relief of the first fall rains will come soon enough.

Until then, keep cool, move slow, remember to be nice, and enjoy the fruitful abundance of the dog days of summer.

See you in the fields,
David

Nerdy fun fact #1: Athens, Greece and Sebastopol are virtually the same latitude (Athens sits at about 37.98°N, and Sonoma County runs from roughly 38.0°N to about 38.85°N, with Sebastopol at ~38.4°N.

Nerdy fun fact #2: 2,500 years ago, in Greece, Sirius reappeared in the dawn sky in July; but Earth's slow axial wobble has pushed that return later over the millennia, and here in West County it now happens in the second week of August. Step outside about an hour before sunrise on a clear morning, and if you have a very clear view low to the southeast, you can watch the Dog Star climb back into the dawn just before the sun.

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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.