PARTY TIME!
We hope you’ll join us for two unforgettable autumn events on the farm!
POTATO HARVEST PARTY
SATURDAY, October 4th, 9:00 am - 11:30 am
Join us for our 8th 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 out of the ground, with friends. It’s an unforgettable experience. All ages and abilities welcome. Come prepared to get dirty!
HARVEST POTLUCK CELEBRATION
SATURDAY, October 11th, 4:00 PM - 6:00 am
Feast and toast with fellow members and farmers and taste the abundance of fall at our annual Harvest Potluck Celebration! We’ll gather under the oaks and let the kids run wild and eat what will probably be the best potluck food ever assembled. (We know you all can cook!) Click here for more details and to sign up for a dish!
THIS WEEK’S HARVEST
Harvest Moon Potatoes, Green Magic Broccoli, Sweet Peppers, Poblano Peppers, Eggplant, Tomatoes, Rainbow Carrots, Leeks, Bunched Chioggia Beets, Fennel, Celery, Dazzling Blue Dino Kale, Volcana Little Gem Lettuces, Assorted Romaine Lettuces, Spinach
Riley, Arabella, Meg & Henry harvesting leeks in Farfield this morning.
U-PICK
Check the u-pick board in the barn for weekly u-pick limits.
NOTE*: Our u-pick Jack-O-Lantern pumpkin patch will open Saturday, October 11th.
Goldilocks Beans | No Limit - Take what you’ll eat or preserve this week! | There are so many of these beautiful beans right now and they make the best dilly beans!
Albion Strawberries | 1 pint per share
Cherry Tomatoes | No Limit
Frying Peppers:
Shishitos | No Limit
Padróns | No Limit
Hot Peppers:
Jalapeños | No limit | Red jalapenos are sweet & hot and used in making Chipotle.
Habanero | 5 peppers per share | Citrusy & mildly hot. Pick when orange. (These are past the Vietnamese Devil Peppers.)
Thai Chilis | 2 peppers per share | Spicy! Pick when red.
Wilson’s Vietnamese Devil Pepper | 2 peppers per share | A super-spicy Vietnamese heirloom. Pick when red.
Herbs & Edible Flowers: (Note: Most new annual herbs are now in the north west section of the garden.) Husk Cherries, Italian Basil, Purple Basil, Lemon Basil, Purple Basil, Dill, Tulsi, Parsley, Cilantro, Chamomile, Calendula, Nasturtium, Lemon Bergamot Bee Balm, Garlic Chives, Tarragon, Thyme, Oregano, Marjoram, Culinary Sage, Lemon Balm, Lemon Verbena, Vietnamese Coriander, Shiso/Perilla, Catnip, Pineapple Sage, Sorrel, Assorted Mints
Flowers! (Note: Most of the new flowers, like big new marigolds, are in the western beds and north section.) Too many to list!
Freshly dug Harvest Moon potatoes on Monday morning! Come experience a bumper potato harvest with us next Saturday!
HARVEST NOTES
The end of Tomato season is approaching! If you’ve been holding off on taking home your bulk tomatoes for preserving, don’t wait any longer! With rain in the forecast and cooler weather on its way, our tomatoes won’t be around much longer. As we get to the end of the season, we’ll start to offer seconds (blemished, split, or very ripe) as a way to hold on a bit longer to this emblem of summer. We’re also expecting to say goodbye to the other nightshades soon as well —cherry tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers.
WINTER SISTER FARM CSA SIGN-UPS NOW OPEN!
Want to keep getting abundant weekly veggies through the winter? Winter Sister Farm, located right next door, is open for signups for their 2025-2026 Winter-Spring CSA! They have a range of share options and sizes, including both free-choice and box shares, all of which include access to their u-pick herb and flower garden. Visit www.wintersisterfarm.com/csa for more details!
A LITTLE EGGPLANT PARM
Recipe by Alison Roman
This is an easy (no salting of the eggplant, no frying!) recipe that Alison says “does basically taste like eggplant parmesan but lighter, fresher, tangier, crunchier.
If you’d like to serve 4 people or are eager for leftovers, you can easily double this (you would then use all of the sauce and just bake it in a 2-quart vessel).
This is ideal eaten out of the oven, but it’s also really great as leftovers (cold, room temperature, or reheated in a 400° oven till bubbling again, 25–30 minutes).
The only thing this needs is an acidic salad with lots of shallot or garlic in the dressing. “
INGREDIENTS
1 large globe eggplant (about 2 pounds), sliced about ½”-¾” thick
1/2 cup olive oil, divided
Kosher salt, freshly ground black pepper
1 small onion (yellow, white, or red), thinly sliced
4 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
Crushed red pepper flakes (optional)
4 anchovy fillets (optional), plus more if you want
1 28 oz. can whole San Marzano tomatoes, crushed
¾ cup panko bread crumbs
1/3 cup (about) grated parmesan
2–3 tablespoons capers, coarsely chopped
2 tablespoons chopped fresh oregano or marjoram (you can skip, or use half the amount of dried)
⅓ cup coarsely chopped parsley, divided
8 oz. fresh mozzarella, thinly sliced or torn
INSTRUCTIONS
Roast the eggplant. Preheat oven to 450°. Drizzle eggplant with about half the olive oil and season with salt and pepper and roast, turning eggplant halfway through (I use tongs or a fork), until it’s as tender as custard and both sides are as brown as if they were fried (they weren’t), 25–30 minutes. A lot of the flavor in this dish will come from the eggplant being very very browned, so please don’t be scared to “take it there” so to speak. Please take it there. Take it very there.
While that happens, make the sauce. Heat two tablespoons of olive oil in a medium pot over medium-high heat. Add onion and garlic, season with salt and pepper. Cook, stirring every now and then until the onions and garlic are tender and starting to brown around the edges, 8–10 minutes. Add crushed red pepper flakes and anchovies, if using, and stir, letting both things melt into the onions. Pour the juices from the tomatoes into the pot and one by one, crush the tomatoes with your hands into the pot (I like to keep the tomatoes on the chunkier side for more texture in the finished dish). Season again with salt and pepper and let it simmer gently for 15–30 minutes (you want to evaporate some but not all of the liquid). Once it tastes very good and feels nicely thickened, remove from heat. Set half aside and freeze or refrigerate the rest.
The last annoying thing to do here is to toast the bread crumbs (less annoying than frying though, right?). Heat the remaining 2 tablespoons olive oil in a small to medium skillet over medium heat. Add the bread crumbs and season with salt and pepper. Stir them to coat evenly in the oil and toast, tossing frequently, until all the bread crumbs are the color of your morning toast, 5–7 minutes. Remove from heat.
Okay, it’s time to assemble this thing! How thrilling. There’s not a ton of technique here, but here’s how I do it to most closely mimic the classique eggplant parm.
Spoon about half of the tomato sauce on the bottom of a 1 qt. baking dish or 6” skillet (both hold about 4 cups volume, that’s the size you want. Doesn’t matter the shape, as long as its heatproof).
Top with half the eggplant (a little overlap is fine, so are gaps- don’t fuss!). Top with half the parmesan, parsley, capers, and oregano. Scatter half the bread crumbs in a nice even layer on top of all that, followed by half the mozzarella. Repeat this, ending with the mozzarella. Add a little more parmesan if you feel like it, maybe some black pepper. I feel that this is truly perfect as-is, but if you love anchovies as much as my friend Chris, you can use more to layer in (I’d add a few fillets with the capers/herbs).
Now, bake it. Pop it into the oven until the cheese is browned and everything is bubbling around the edges, 15–20 minutes. Remove from the oven, maybe finish with some more parsley if you’ve got it stuck to your cutting board, and let it cool ever so slightly before eating. I like to just serve it by scooping with a spoon—it’s not really meant to be sliced.
FARMER’S LOG
THE BIG HARVESTS
This week we checked off the first big harvest of the season — the onions.
We have a big, beautiful onion crop now curing in the greenhouse (take a peek!) and it was a smooth and satisfying beginning to our bulk harvest season.
Next up it’s potatoes, then celery root, winter squash, popcorn and flour corn, and fall storage carrots. (You’ll harvest the Jack-O-Lantern pumpkins for us.)
It’s the time of year when we farmers put our heads down and reverse all the hard work and planting we did in the spring. Instead of planting thousands of tiny plants from the greenhouse into fresh beds, we haul in thousands of pounds of their bounty back to the greenhouse or cooler for storage and then seed those beds into cover crop.
We probably shouldn’t jinx ourselves, but all the crops are looking exceptionally happy this year — the potatoes are coming up round, sound, and smooth skinned; the winter squash are abundant; and the onions, like we said, are humongous.
This is the result of many things. We had a really mellow summer — no wicked heat waves like last year. We’ve learned our land better (like where not to plant potatoes). Our crew has been exceptionally skilled and awesome. And we made some tweaks to our weeding equipment and irrigation planning so our plants were more properly irrigated and better weeded than ever before.
Our reward for that is… a lot of muscle-building work!
The bumper fall harvests ahead will pose some challenges for the farm — like figuring out how to store what should be a very abundant potato crop.
But that’s a good problem to have.
See you in the fields,
David
CSA BASICS
Slow on Cooper Road! Out of respect for our neighbors and the many kids and animals that live on Cooper Rd., please drive slow (20 mph)!
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.
