THIS WEEK’S HARVEST
In a nutshell: Late summer abundance.
Assorted Sweet Peppers, Bintje Potatoes, Chioggia & Gold Beets, Bicolor Sweet Corn (last week!), Summer Squash & Zucchini, Assorted Cucumbers, Romance Carrots, Cabernet Onions, Assorted Melons, Early Girl & Heirloom Tomatoes, Salad Mix of Salanova Lettuce & Bel Fiore Chicory, Rosaine Little Gem Lettuces, Assorted Head Lettuce, Escarole, Pink Ladyslipper Radishes, Hakurei Salad Turnips
U-PICK
Albion Strawberries: 4 pints per share
Cherry Tomatoes: 4 pint per share
Shishito & Padrón Frying Peppers: 2 pints total per share | There continue to be more Shishitos than Padróns. See Week 6’s Newsletter for harvest and preparation tips.
Dragon Tongue Beans: 2 pints per share
Jalapeños: 4 peppers per share | if you like your jalapeños hot, look for peppers with checking (little cracks) on them
Buena Mulata Peppers: 2 peppers per share | see Harvest Notes for details!
Pickling Cucumbers: gleanings | Pretty much done producing but there may still be a few left if you feel like foraging.
Tomatillos: 1 pint per share
Herbs: Italian Basil, Thai Basil, Tulsi Basil, Dill, Chamomile, Parsley, Onion Chives, Garlic Chives, Tarragon, Oregano, Marjoram, Culinary Sage, Lemon Balm, Lemon Verbena, Vietnamese Coriander, Shiso (Perilla), Culinary Lavender, French Sorrel, Borage, Violas, Thyme and Mints.
Flowers!
Introducing our 2023 tomato team! From left to right, top row: Speckled Roman, Black Prince, Early Girl, Valencia | Middle row: German Johnson, Striped German, Big Beef | Bottom row: Black Krim, Aunt Ruby’s German Green, Goldie
HARVEST NOTES
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 (recipe below!).
PRESERVING THE HARVEST
Bulk Tomatoes are here! From now until the end of tomato season, bulk quantities of Speckled Roman Sauce Tomatoes and all 2nds (tomatoes that are blemished or quite ripe but still tasty) will be available! Bulk tomatoes will have a season limit, meaning the total tomatoes available per share over the course of the season. You’re welcome to take them all at once or a little bit here and there, whichever you like!
The easiest way to put up tomatoes is freezing. While you can freeze tomatoes without processing first, we particularly 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
There are a million ways to make tomato sauce, but luckily enough, the simplest really is the best. Here are rough guidelines for a foolproof and astonishingly delicious sauce that freezes well:
Sauté onions and garlic in more olive oil than you might think you need
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, for a more rustic sauce, just chop and them throw them in the pot seeds and all.
For more detailed instructions, and some good ideas for variations on tomato sauces, check out this Smitten Kitchen post on Fresh Tomato Sauce.
Paige, Aisling and Tristan rocking the transplanter and planting late season chicories.
Utica Greens recipe
— from Upstate Ramblings —
This Italian-American dish from upstate New York makes beautiful use of this week’s escarole and comes highly recommended by a long-time CSA member.
Ingredients
1 head escarole
3 Tablespoon olive oil
1/2 cup prosciutto, diced
1/2 cup onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
5 hot pickled cherry peppers, chopped
1/2 cup water
salt and pepper to taste
1/3 cup bread crumbs
1/4 cup Romano cheese, grated
Instructions
Rinse the escarole and chop into small pieces.
Bring salted water to a boil and blanch the escarole for 2 minutes. Drain in a colander and run under cold water.
Heat the olive oil in a frying pan. Add the proscuitto and onion and cook for about 5 minutes.
Add the garlic and cook for another minute.
Add the drained escarole, cherry peppers and water. Stir it all together and add a little salt and pepper if desired.
Cook until the escarole is wilted, about 7-8 minutes.
Sprinkle the top with bread crumbs and cheese, and stick under the broiler for 2 minutes to brown the top.
WINTER SISTER FARM CSA SIGN-UPS NOW OPEN!
The hottest tickets in town are now on sale — Winter Sister Farm’s 2024 Winter CSA program is now open for registration! Winter Sister Farm, right next door to us, was started by our dear friends Anna and Sarah Dozor. Their CSA runs runs from December through May and includes 24 weeks of specialty winter veggies, flowers, herbs, and more — all picked up by CSA members, free-choice market style, on their beautiful farm here on Cooper Rd! Sign-up today!
FARMERS LOG
FARMING IN THE AFTERMATH REDUX
We had another big-time September week in the fields: Nestled in between some monster harvests the crew smashed out the last big transplanting of the year out in Farfield — a huge milestone. Now, pretty much all of the plants we will consume through mid-December are out in the field dangling their root toes in the ground.
Turns out, it’s hard to find the time to write new full-length Farmer’s Log with such a cute little 4-month old dumpling in the house, so this week we wanted to revisit another newsletter from a previous season, this one from August 2020 after the Lightning Complex Fires, on what our farm might look like, and how it would have to change, in an “apocalyptic” scenario.
* * * * *
Whether evoked by current events or not, apocalyptic reveries are, it seems, a recurring obsession of human imagination across cultures. Why? Because they tell us about ourselves in the present. Imagining an extreme future holds up a mirror. What dangers are we afraid of? What is important to us? What is essential? And what luxuries do we take for granted?
Assuming we were all still here and had to eat, how would our farm have to change and adapt after the breakdown of most or all of the supply chains that sustain it now?
We tossed this fantastical subject around and the conversation was illuminating — not as exercise in science fiction or doomsday thinking, but because it taught us about the farm now.
The subjects we honed in on were seeds, manure, labor and motive power.
SEEDS
Seed saving is a beautiful task. You lovingly grow something until it matures. You select the most beautiful and store it with care. You give some to friends. The seed ties you to past seasons — to past generations — to time itself. You repeat the cycle — a cycle of love and discipline — each year.
We save some seed at Green Valley Community Farm. We’ve been saving the Hopi Blue Corn seed we plant for several years now. We’ve been saving our big Lorz Garlic seed for 5 season now — and generally they look better and better every harvest. We’ve occasionally saved seed potato. Kayta has been saving many flower seeds from the garden: Nigella, hollyhock, agrostemma, to name a few — last year, Sora, Ahn, and Tuli helped gather the celosia you see blooming today.
But we do not save most of the vegetable seed we grow. Why?
First, time management. Seed saving is a meticulous, labor intensive craft. We pay other farmers for seeds because then we can devote more of our limited space and time to the food part of farming.
Secondly, saving our own seed would mean we couldn’t offer quite the same diversity we do because of cross pollination. The cross pollination of two different varieties of the same species creates a hybrid that is often not yummy to eat. The carefully isolated genetics in open-pollinated food crops is why a lot of heirloom varieties have place names. Marina di Chioggia winter squash, for example, comes from a certain region of Italy. People from that region started to fall in love with a certain sweet pumpkin. Farmers grew fields of them in isolated patches, and slowly the region developed a fairly consistent strain of squash that became a local staple. If we saved seed from our Marina di Chioggia squash, which is currently being grown next to 8 other varieties of winter squash originating from other other regions, what we would get would end up next year would possibly be bitter, hard-skinned, and ugly!
So the vast, and relatively affordable modern seed exchange we have access to allows us to grow tremendous variety in the same field without worrying about crossing. We take advantage of our access to a world library of seeds at our fingertips to grow an extreme amount of diversity in our fields. In this way we are deeply connected to myriad regions, farms, and farm workers devoted to growing vegetable seeds for market farmers like us.
After the apocalypse we’d have to focus what we grow and spend a lot more time saving seed. We’d might have to drop sweet corn in favor of massive field of hardy Hopi Blue to feed us through the winter.
If you could only pick one squash to save in your family for generations, which seed would you start with?
The fresh veg field we’re currently harvesting from out across the creek — made with a little help from modern seed markets, easy access to fertility, and diesel.
MANURE
But before we even thought about planting seeds we’d be thinking about poop.
Similar to seeds, a functional modern supply chain gives modern farmers like us cheap and easy access to fertility. For a very reasonable price, you call up Leballister’s in Roseland and Cold Creek Compost in Mendocino, and get 24 tons of organic compost and 2000 lbs Petaluma chicken manure, dried, processed, and pelletized, delivered to your doorstep.
This is all because of cheap energy, which we will get to next.
In the olden times, or the end times as it were, the amount of energy involved in mixing that compost (Caterpillar D9’s) or processing and shipping that chicken manure, would be far from possible. Indeed, a post apocalyptic Green Valley Community Farmers would need to devote much more time and energy to manure.
In order to sustain anywhere close to the level of vegetable production we do, we would need many more human hands managing many more animals, their manures, and their rotations through our fields. In the post apocalyptic world we would have to keep the animals that fuel our plants much closer to home.
We would all miss our clothes washing machines greatly.
LABOR AND MOTIVE POWER
We never think apoco-thoughts more viscerally than during power outages. For a farm reliant on electric power to irrigate — if feels a little bit like having a knife to your throat. 100 degree heat, no electricity, and a field of baby brassicas = not comfortable.
This is where things get really interesting. Indeed, our farm — and our society — without fossil fuels would be hard to recognize.
For starters, all of our irrigation would be done with gravity, wind power, or weaker powered solar pumps if we were lucky. Without access to plastic and aluminum irrigation supplies we would likely have to flood irrigate, as so many ancestral cultures did, releasing water down careful canals shaped in the fields. Because this method of irrigation would limit the crops amenable to this arid climate, gone would be the lettuce and arugula of August, relegated now, perhaps, to a short fling of succulent greens in the early Spring. In the dry months we would forage for our greens and herbs in the creek beds and wetlands or get our vitamin C from carefully stored cabbages. Our fields would focus on the hardy, deep rooted staples amendable to flood irrigation, dry farming, and dry summers: Potatoes, corn, winter squash… some hardy roots. We would plant fruit and nut trees and look to the indigenous people and the indigenous foodways of California. We would tend oaks religiously.
When we did prep a valley field for food, we would all do it together. Gone would be the luxury of a Kubota doing a week’s worth of work in one hour. Green Valley Community Farm members would become Green Valley Community Farm farmers. The horse and mule and donkey would rule again.
The reason why 95% of humans were, before the industrial revolution, involved in agriculture is because that is how many human bodies and human hands it takes to tend landscapes without fossil power.
IN CONCLUSION
It struck us, in the carrots, tossing around this imagined future, both how close and how far we are from it.
Our modern luxuries can feel like a thick, insurmountable wall between us and both the pain, and possibly the deliverance, of a world without them.
In reality, these luxuries are only a thin veil. Perhaps, by recognizing the tenuousness of this veil, we can glean its lessons and make the choice to guide our technologies and actions toward simplicity, grace, and balance, rather than short lived extravagance.
See you in the fields.
David for Kayta
CSA BASICS
ATTENTION MEMBERS: Please make sure to drive slow (15 - 20 mph) on Cooper Rd. out of respect for our human and pet neighbors! Thank you!
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
When can I u-pick?: Oriented members can come to the farm any time, 7 days a week, sunrise to sunset, to u-pick and enjoy the farm, minding weekly u-pick limits.
2023 CSA program dates: Our harvest season will run this year from June 24th - December 19th
Where is the farm? The member parking lot is located at 1720 Cooper Rd., Sebastopol, CA 95472.
Where should I park?: Follow our sign on Cooper Rd. down a short gravel driveway. Please find a parking spot next to the solar panels or along the road further down. Please don’t park behind the solar panels.
Where’s the bathroom!: Under the big solar panels in the parking lot.
What should I bring?:
Your WCCF tote bag
Pint baskets or small containers for measuring your allotment of u-pick crops like strawberries
A vase, bucket, or water bottle to keep your flowers and herbs happy
Clippers or secateurs to cut flowers (if you have some), we also have some in the barn
Water / sun hat / picnic supplies if you plan to stay awhile!
Friends and family!
Newsletters & email communication: All our important CSA communications are through this email address, which seems to be getting spam blocked a lot. Please make sure this email address is in your address book so you get important CSA communications. All newsletters and important updates are also posted on the Newsletters page of our website weekly.
