Dear members,
Welcome to the first newsletter of your 2026 CSA harvest season!
After a long winter we are so excited to welcome you back to the farm, where everything is growing at hyper-speed in the increasing summer sunlight (and heat!).
We have an exciting and bountiful harvest season ahead and we can’t wait to start sharing it with you.
This newsletter, which will appear in your inbox every Thursday evening, will contain a snapshot of the coming week's harvest and u-pick options, as well as recipes, tips, and stories from the farm — all to inspire you and help you make the most out of your membership over the next 6-months.
Week 1’s newsletter is always jam packed with important details for new and returning members. Read on below!
FARM ORIENTATION TOURS
FOR NEW MEMBERS AND RETURNING MEMBERS WHO COULD USE A REFRESHER!
All adult members who will be regularly visiting the farm and picking up produce are required to attend an in-person orientation. We’ll go over farm safety, rules and etiquette, give you your farm tote bags, show you the ropes in the flower and herb garden, and share the secret to finding the sweetest strawberries.
If you are new to the farm, please join us promptly for one of the orientation tours below:
Week 1:
Friday, June 12: 1:00 pm. 3:00 pm, 5:30 pm
Saturday, June 13: 9:00 am, 11:00 am, 1:00 pm
Tuesday, June 16: 1:00 pm. 3:00 pm, 5:30 pm
Week 2:
Friday, June 19: 1:00 pm. 3:00 pm, 5:30 pm
Saturday, June 20: 9:00 am, 11:00 am, 1:00 pm
Tuesday, June 23: 1:00 pm. 3:00 pm, 5:30 pm
Week 3:
Friday, June 26: 1:00 pm. 3:00 pm, 5:30 pm
Saturday, June 27: 9:00 am, 11:00 am, 1:00 pm
Tuesday, June 30: 1:00 pm. 3:00 pm, 5:30 pm
You can come get oriented and pick up your first share on any of the 3 pickup-days (Friday, Saturday or Tuesday), whichever day and time works best for your schedule. Tours last about 30 minutes.
If you are alternating weeks with another household, one household should attend an orientation Week 1 and the other an orientation on Week 2, or something to that effect.
If you can’t attend a tour time above, please reach out to us to schedule a time that works for you.
MEMBERSHIP GUIDE
When can I come u-pick? How do limits work? Are you new to the farm? Or returning and feeling rusty on how this farm works?
New and returning members alike, click here to read through our all new Brief Membership Guide: A quick-reference on the essential guidelines and tips for your enjoying your CSA membership.
For new members, here are the essentials for your first visit.
What time is harvest pick-up?:
Friday harvest pick-ups run from 1:00 pm - 6:00 pm 🌟 NEW PICK-UP DAY! 🌟
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 kids, animals, and neighbors who generously share the road with us.
Where should I park? Follow our sign on Cooper Rd. down a short gravel driveway. Please find a parking spot under the solar panels to your left, or on either side of the road in front, or below, the greenhouse.
Where is the food? The produce pick-up barn is just to the right of the solar panels and above our big greenhouse. You can’t miss it!
What should I bring?:
Former members, please bring your WCCF tote bag if you have it! You can grap a new one if you need one. (New members will be given a new one.)
Pint baskets or small containers for strawberries and herbs (if you have some, we will provide a few pint baskets to be used as measures)
A vase, bucket, or water bottle to keep your flowers and herbs happy
Clippers or secateurs to cut flowers (if you have some)
Water / sun hat / picnic supplies if you plan to stay awhile!
Newsletters & email communication: All our important CSA communications are sent through this email address, which is sometimes spam blocked. Please make sure this email address is in your address book so you get important CSA communications. All newsletters and important updates, like this one, are also posted on the Newsletterspage of our website weekly.
THIS WEEK’S HARVEST
Fresh Lorz Softneck Garlic, Multi-Color Popcorn, Spinach, Mustard Mix, Arugula, Purple Komatsuna, Curly Kale, Green & Gold Zucchini, Green Little Gem Lettuce, Panisse Oakleaf Lettuce, Red Radishes, Hakurei Salad Turnips, Scallions, Carrots from Suncatcher Farm or Zarate Family Farm
U-PICK
Check the u-pick board in the barn for weekly u-pick limits.
🌟 Albion Strawberries: 4 pint per share this week | Ripe berries are MUCH more plentiful on the right side of the patch, and to the back! Don’t get stuck right by the door where the plants are very picked over.
Herbs & Edible Flowers: Tulsi, Parsley, Cilantro, Chamomile, Calendula, Nasturtium, Pansies/Viola, Garlic Chives, Tarragon, Thyme, Oregano, Marjoram, Lemon Balm, Lemon Verbena, Vietnamese Coriander, Shiso/Perilla, Catnip, French & Culinary Lavender, Sorrel, Italian Basil & Assorted Mints
Flowers! Many perennial flowers and the first of the year’s annuals! | You are welcome to pick any flowers on the farm, including the sunflowers along the edge of the parking lot.
HARVEST NOTES
In this section of the newsletter we offer history, recipes & tips on crops in the share are particularly noteworthy or exciting this week.
Fresh Lorz Softneck Garlic: An heirloom softneck variety with a robust, spicy flavor that lingers in dishes. These bulbs are recently harvested so you will notice green stalks, silky soft inner papers and turgid, crips cloves. We’ve been saving the seed for this variety for the past 8 years.
Multi-Colored Popcorn: This week’s popcorn is a mixture of our home-grown Calico popcorn, harvested Fall of 2025 and a white popcorn from a family owned, organic grain farm in Pleasant Grove, CA. Our dear Calico variety, for some reason, was a poor popper this year (50%) so we cut it with a high-popping white variety from the amazing farmers at Pleasant Grove.
Making your popcorn: The trick to stovetop popcorn is to use a thick-bottomed pot like a dutch oven, which will distribute the heat evenly and prevent burning. Turn the stove on to medium high and pour in a generous amount of high-heat oil — enough to cover the kernels halfway up. Put three kernels into the pot. When all three have popped, it’s time to put all the kernels in! Shake the pot a bit to keep the kernels evenly hot, and turn off the heat once it’s slowed to a couple seconds between pops.
Carrots from Suncatcher Farm & Zarate Family Farm: This week we’re bringing in carrots from 2 great local farms to round out your share. Our proximity to the Laguna means that we get a late start on planting, even after a relatively dry winter like this one. We’re looking forward to having our own carrots in the share in a week or two.
EGGS & BAKED GOODS IN THE BARN!
We are so delighted to welcome back the two incredible local bakeries that we hosted last year!
On Saturdays, Sonoma Mountain Breads will be offering their artisanal croissants (and sometimes bread!) for purchase at the Saturday pickups.
Zweibel’s will be back with their delicious bagels and diverse array of pastries for purchase at the Tuesday pickups.
Both bakeries accept payment through Venmo and Zweibel’s also accepts cash.
This year we’re also offering local, free-range eggs for sale from Coastal Hill Farm. There’s a self-serve cooler in the pickup area and we’ll be accepting payment as cash, check or Venmo. Coastal Hill Farm is a member of our local farmer & worker-owned cooperative food hub, FEED Sonoma and we’re excited to bring you their eggs.
Dino Kale and Curly Kale enjoying the company of our pollinator flower rows out in Farfield.
HOW TO STORE YOUR VEGETABLES
We always get questions at CSA pickups about how to best store your produce, so we wanted to offer a few simple tips to help you get the most out of the fresh food we’re growing for you.
Keep them enclosed. Vegetables, like all plants, are mainly water, so the quickest way to lose them is to let them desiccate. We recommend keeping all of your produce (with a few exceptions, listed below) in plastic bags or airtight containers. Don’t rely on the crisper drawer in your fridge — it won’t do much to keep things turgid on its own.
Keep them cool. Put everything right in the fridge when you get it home. If you find that anything’s wilted on the way home, a brief soak in cold water will do wonders. This is particularly true for u-pick crops like green beans and snap peas that have been picked during the heat of the day. If you know you’ll have a long drive home, or be at the farm for a while, it’s a great practice to keep a cooler in your car and pop your vegetables into it as soon as you pick them up.
Take off tops and store them separately. Vegetables will continue to transpire after they’ve been picked, so for crops like radishes, beets and carrots, it’s best to remove the tops so that the roots don’t wilt as the greens do.
Use the most delicate things first. There’s a lot of variety in how long different crops will store. Loose greens tend to have a shorter shelf like than whole heads, so plan on using up loose salad mixes and arugula early in the week, and counting on heads of lettuce for later on.
Treat your herbs like flowers: While they can also be bagged and put in the fridge, u-pick herbs like basil, dill, marjoram, etc. will be most vibrant and easiest to remember to use if you put them in a jar or vase on the kitchen counter. More delicate herbs like chives would prefer to be refrigerated in a bag.
The exceptions: tomatoes, winter squash and cured onions and garlic. Everything in this list would prefer to be kept unbagged on the counter. Tomatoes tend to change texture when refrigerated, and winter squash, cured onions and garlic have all gone through a curing process that enables them to last for a long time in normal household temperatures.
FARMER’S LOG
CALLOUSED HANDS, SPRING LETTUCE
Our first harvest morning of the year (this morning!) is always a little surreal. It is quite a whiplash for us farmers as we go from a gritty, loud and unkempt planting machine into a tidy community space harvesting and handling delicate Spring produce.
It also makes us reflect…
In this wet flood plain, our first harvestable crops usually mature in time to open the CSA around the first or second week of June. And while the crops of these first shares are indeed spring-like — fresh, and innocent spring onions, green garlic, the most delicate salad greens of the year — we farmers are now like craggy potatoes. Toughened, tan, and bleary eyed from 6 weeks of pivotal field prep, planting, irrigation role out, and weed control.
By the time we cut the ribbon on the first CSA harvest, we have just finished planting, irrigating, and weeding (at least once), about 65% of the area we will tend all year: The year’s potato crop, tomatoes, onions, winter squash, peppers, sweet and dry corn, 60% of our carrots, are all in the ground. In the time it takes a Red Butter lettuce to go from seedling to salad, the farm, and ourselves, have been transformed. Our workspaces look like a tornado hit them. We might feel a little bit like that on the inside.
But the fields… the fields!
The surreal-ness is in the time delay. When we knelt down this morning to harvest our first Oakleaf Lettuce, we were taken back to when we planted those first beds, bright eyed and bushy tailed — before the planting push; before the troubleshooting and pivots; before the good laughs and conversations and the coming together as a seasoned crew.
This year we managed to get most of the amazing farmers making it all happen here in one frame! From L to R: Eve Soler, Anayeli Guzman, Jessica Jagger, David Plescia, Shanga Juckas, Brent Walker, Arabella Wood, Melinda Bower, Asa Black, Eric Bueno, Kayta & Alice Plescia, Henry Grady, and Riley Reed. Hats off to these folks for completing an epic 2026 plant-a-thon!
Harvesting this first humble springy harvest share makes us take stock of the magnitude of this year’s plant-out and the mountain of summer and fall bounty we’re about to reap.
All this is just to say that we are very tired, and very excited to start sharing this harvest season with you.
Epic-ness like this cannot be achieved without the skilled and tenacious team we have with us this year — many of whom who have been with us for many years, and some new folks we’re excited to be in the trenches with.
Please join us in raising a glass, or an Albion Strawberry, to 2026’s amazing team of farmers.
And raise a glass to yourselves, dear members, you were with us the whole way.
Here is to 26-weeks of delicious abundance ahead.
Thank you all for being with us this season. It’s an honor to be farming for you.
See you in the fields,
David & Kayta
