10/6/17 - Week 17 - Ode to Corn, Jack-O-Lanterns,

A huge thank you to everyone who made it out Saturday to help bring in the potatoes (1,000lbs!) and the Painted Mountain Corn! It was such a joy working with you all. If you missed it, or didn't get enough corn shucking, join us tomorrow for a...

• Floriani Red Flint Corn Harvest & Squash Haul Party
• When: This Saturday, October 7th at 10:30 am
• Where: Out in the main fields
• What now? A harvest party wherein we'll harvest the Floriani Red Flint Polenta Corn and, time permitting, haul squash out of the field to cure in the greenhouses.
• What-to-bring: Clothes you don't mind getting very dirty. Water, sunhat, snacks, and a brunchy-lunchy snack or drink to share if it's easy (not required).

We planted two heirloom corn varieties this year. Many of you met the Painted Mountain on Saturday. This gorgeous variety was developed in Montana by Dave Christensen, a farmer who dedicated his life to breeding corn that could survive the harsh conditions and high altitudes. He did this by gathering heirloom seeds from Northern Native Americans tribes and homesteaders, planting them together, letting them naturally cross pollinate, and carefully selecting for hardiness and nutrition. The result was Painted Mountain.

We’ll let this years cobs completely dry down in the greenhouse for about a week, so that the kernels readily thrashes off the cob. We’ll then distribute whole cobs to you all for decoration and a seed saving challenge (stay tuned!) and the rest we’ll take to our friend Wayne James’ place in Windsor, where we’ll thrash it and clean it, and then distribute it to the CSA as kernels. Painted Mountain makes great hominy.

The Painted Mountain corn drying in the greenhouse

Our second variety, drying out there in the fields, is Floriani Red Flint, which we will be harvesting tomorrow. It is an Italian heirloom, bread for the exceptional polenta it makes. Kayta and I have verified this over many hot winter meals. We’ll grind this corn into a coarse flour and distribute it late in the season.

Flint corns — hard as flint, hence the name — lack the “soft starch” of dent corns. They have a dense outer layers protecting the nutritious germ within. This shell, combined with a low water content, make flint corns resistant to freezing and excellent for storage. Flints were the staff of life for Native Americans in harsher climates on both hemispheres.

Indeed, since domestication in southern Mexico some 10,000 years ago, maize has been the staff of life for much of human civilization as we know it, from the ancient Mississipian and Mayan civilizations of old to the supermarket aisles of today, maize has reigned king.

Who better to pen ode to this miraculous plant, than the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda:

Ode to Maize

America, from a grain

of maize you grew

to crown

with spacious lands

the ocean foam.

A grain of maize was your geography.

From the grain

a green lance rose,

was covered with gold,

to grace the heights

of Peru with its yellow tassels.

But, poet, let

history rest in its shroud;

praise with your lyre

the grain in its granaries:

sing to the simple maize in

the kitchen.

First, a fine beard

fluttered in the field

above the tender teeth

of the young ear.

Then the husks parted

and fruitfulness burst its veils

of pale papyrus

that grains of laughter

might fall upon the earth.

To the stone,

in your journey,

you returned.

Not to the terrible stone,

the bloody

triangle of Mexican death,

but to the grinding stone

sacred

stone of your kitchens.

There, milk and matter,

strength-giving, nutritious

cornmeal pulp,

you were worked and patted

by the wondrous hands

of women.

Wherever you fall, maize,

whether into the

splendid pot of porridge, or among

country beans, you light up

the meal and lend it

your virginal flavor.

Oh, to bite into

the steaming ear beside the sea

of distant song and deepest waltz.

To boil you

as your aroma

spreads through

blue sierras.

But is there

no end

to your treasure?

In chalky, barren lands

bordered

by the sea, along

the rocky Chilean coast,

at times

only your radiance

reaches the empty

table of the miner.

Your light, your cornmeal,

your hope

pervades America’s solitudes,

and to hunger

your lances

are enemy legions.

Within your husks,

like gentle kernels,

our sober provincial

children’s hearts were

nurtured,

until life began

to shuck us from the ear.

– Pablo Neruda

See you in the fields, 

David and Kayta

THIS WEEKS HARVEST: Sunshine Kabocha Squash, Yukon Gold Potatoes, Cured Cabernet Red Onions, Fresh Torpedo Onions, Heirloom and New Girl Tomatoes, Tomatillos, Summer Squash, Hakurei Turnips, Striped Armenian & Lemon Cucumbers (last week!), Green Magic Broccoli & Bishop Cauliflower, Napa Cabbage, Celery, Carrots, Red Russian Kale, Dino Kale, Tatsoi Leafy Greens, Spicy Mustard Mix, Cherokee Summercrisp & Assorted Head Lettuces

U-PICK in the GARDEN: 

• Pesto Basil - this might be the last week, as temperatures have approached frosting the last few nights.
• Shishito and Black Hungarian Frying Peppers (still a few left), Padrones, Jalapeños 
• Husk Cherries
• All herbs and flowers.

U-PICK on the FARM:

• Cherry tomatoes: Sungolds, Black Cherry, and Super Sweet 100's in three Rows marked with the blue flags in the main fields.
• Jack O' Lanterns! These 40 Jack O's are looking for a home out in the main fields! Pay a visit to the pumpkin patch by finding the pink flag and take one home! Limit is 1 per share. For households with two or more children, limit is 2 per share. 

9/29/17 - Week 16 - Ode to Potatoes

This Saturday morning, we'll come together as a community to perform a quintessential agricultural ritual: We'll harvest potatoes together. As we kneel down, on the Earth, digging through the soil, packing dirt into our skin and bagging the cool bulbous tubers, we will join, in concert, tens of thousands around the world performing the same act and untold millions of ancestors who, every Fall, knelt together and harvested. We will be joined by the real living breathing chain of seed potatoes, to hundreds seasons and hundreds of harvests in Europe and Asia and to ten thousand ancestral harvests in the Andes and Northeastern Bolivia and to those people who first knelt, harvested, and saved their seed potatoes.

There is nothing quite like a potato harvest. And the feeling, then, of tucking them away; of storing them in a cool dry place, a hole, a cellar, or a cave; in boxes, in sand, in the dark; the potatoes themselves breathing slowly, living, promising food, promising life, as Fall turns to Winter.

Many have known the feeling and, sadly, many have known it's opposite. In 1845, due to limited potato genetics in the region and the cold shoulder of men, a million people starved in poorer parts of western Ireland and the Scottish highlands, the blighted potato crop rotting in the fields.

The potato has been a powerful, joyful, painful link between us and Mother Earth, in feast and in famine, for millennia. The highest caloric food crop per-acre in the world (more than corn, wheat, and rice) it is the only of these four that forms (the food part, at least) in the Earth -- shrouded in soil and darkness until we dig it up, together, in the Fall. 

The poet Seamus Heaney spoke to this bond and this history beautifully in his poem, At a Potato Digging.

I.

A mechanical digger wrecks the drill,
Spins up a dark shower of roots and mould. 
Labourers swarm in behind, stoop to fill
Wicker creels. Fingers go dead in the cold. 

Like crows attacking crow-black fields, they stretch
A higgledy line from hedge to headland; 
Some pairs keep breaking ragged ranks to fetch
A full creel to the pit and straighten, stand

Tall for a moment but soon stumble back
To fish a new load from the crumbled surf. 
Heads bow, trucks bend, hands fumble towards the black
Mother. Processional stooping through the turf

Turns work to ritual. Centuries
Of fear and homage to the famine god
Toughen the muscles behind their humbled knees, 
Make a seasonal altar of the sod. 

II.

Flint-white, purple. They lie scattered
Like inflated pebbles. Native
to the blank hutch of clay
where the halved seed shot and clotted
these knobbed and slit-eyed tubers seem
the petrified hearts of drills. Split
by the spade, they show white as cream.

  
Good smells exude from crumbled earth. 
The rough bark of humus erupts
knots of potatoes (a clean birth) 
whose solid feel, whose wet inside
promises taste of ground and root. 
To be piled in pits; live skulls, blind-eyed. 

III.

Live skulls, blind-eyed, balanced on
wild higgledy skeletons
scoured the land in 'forty-five,' 
wolfed the blighted root and died. 

The new potato, sound as stone, 
putrified when it had lain
three days in the long clay pit. 
Millions rotted along with it. 

Mouths tightened in, eyes died hard, 
faces chilled to a plucked bird. 
In a million wicker huts
beaks of famine snipped at guts. 

A people hungering from birth, 
grubbing, like plants, in the bitch earth, 
were grafted with a great sorrow. 
Hope rotted like a marrow. 

Stinking potatoes fouled the land, 
pits turned pus in filthy mounds: 
and where potato diggers are
you still smell the running sore. 

IV.

Under a white flotilla of gulls
The rhythm deadens, the workers stop. 
White bread and tea in bright canfuls
Are served for lunch. Dead-beat, they flop

Down in the ditch and take their fill,
Thankfully breaking timeless fasts;
Then, stretched on the faithless ground, spill
Libations of cold tea, scatter crusts.

******
Join us as we "shower" up the living roots and scatter libations in thanks and remembrance at our first potato harvest this Saturday!

See you in the potato field,

David and Kayta

THIS WEEKS HARVEST: Honey Bear Acorn Squash, New Yukon Gold & Bodega Red Potatoes, Cured Yellow Onions, Heirloom and New Girl Tomatoes, Tomatillos, Sweet Peppers, Summer Squash, French Breakfast Radishes, Striped Armenian & Lemon Cucumbers, Green Magic Broccoli, Farao Green and Ruby Perfection Purple Cabbage, Celery Root, Rainbow Carrots, Red Russian Kale, Dino Kale, Spinach, Fall Braising Mix (Baby Kale, Ethiopian Mustard, Tatsoi, Frisee, and Chard), Red Butter & assorted Head Lettuces

U-PICK in the GARDEN: Pesto Basil, Shishito and Black Hungarian Frying Peppers (still going, omg), Padrones, Jalapeños, Husk Cherries, all Herbs and Flowers.

U-PICK on the FARM:

Cherry tomatoes: Sungolds, Black Cherry, and Super Sweet 100's in three Rows marked with the blue flags in the main fields.

PRESERVING OPPORTUNITIES:

Pesto: There is a bunch of flowering Genovese Italian Basil marked with a red flag in the Eastern half of the garden. If you haven't made pesto this summer yet, or if you'd like to make a second batch, feel free to harvest up entire plants into a large bag.

9/22/17 - Week 15 - Fall Changes

Happy Equinox everyone and Hello, Fall!  

At 1:05 PM PST today the Earth wobbled it's middle straight in line with the sun... and at that moment a loud collective "WOOHOO!" could be heard emanating from the Northern Hemisphere. That would be the farmers. 

The coming of Fall is a special time on a farm for so many reasons. For a farmer in a place as hot as California, the coming of Fall could be likened to the breaking of winter and the coming of spring in a place like Maine. The soft Fall light feels like balm on sun-scorched skin. The Fall also brings with it the big field harvests -- the joy and satisfaction of reaping a season's worth of work in the form of food (onions, potatoes, corn, winter squash) that will sustain and nourish friends and loved ones throughout the winter. (We hope you can make it to one of the most celebratory of these harvests, the potato, on the 30th!) Fall also signifies rest! While there are big pushes to be made bringing in these harvests and putting the fields to bed, some much needed farmer R&R is on the horizon.

A monarch u-picking some zinnia nectar

Change is afoot in the plant and animal worlds as well. This past week, a mysterious internal switch seems to have been flipped in our summer crops; Eggplant, tomatoes, cucumbers, summer and winter squash all have slowed their growth markedly. So it begins; one by one the sweet, tangy, cacophonic flavors and colors of the summer share will be replaced by the rich earthy tones of Fall. In the animal kingdom, the baby Turkeys we first glimpsed as tiny fluff balls in the grass in June have matured into birds nearly indistinguishable from their parents -- with a corresponding appetite for our lettuce. Indeed, Turkey, Deer, and Hare all seemed to have developed a voracious appetite for farm fare lately as they forage for sustenance in this, the driest, hungriest season in the wild between late summer and the first rains. If these signs of Fall weren't enough... we've been spotting many a Monarch butterfly in the u-pick garden; that Autumnal traveler who, fleeing Winter, migrates South to warmer abodes in Mexico and Southern California. Keep your eyes open next time you're up there. They love zinnias.

We're so glad we'll get to share this Fall, and the special magic it will bring, with each of you this year.

See you in the fields, D&K

THIS WEEKS HARVEST: 

Yukon Gold Potatoes, Cured Cabernet Onions, Heirloom and New Girl Tomatoes, Krimzon Lee Hot Peppers, Sweet Peppers, Summer Squash, Easter Egg Radishes, Striped Armenian Cucumbers, Italian Eggplant (still going!), Broccoli and Broccolini, Murdoch Cabbage, Mixed Beets, Celery, Rainbow Carrots, Red Russian Kale, Dino Kale,"Space" Baby Spinach, Fall Braising Mix with Baby Kale and Ethiopian Mustard Greens, Tatsoi and Baby Chard, Red Butter / Trout Back / and Rouxai Head Lettuce

U-PICK in the GARDEN: Pesto Basil, Dragon Tongue Romano Beans (still a good amount near the middle and back of the row), Frying Peppers, Padrones, Jalapeños, Husk Cherries, all herbs and flowers. No limit on Dahlias.

PRESERVING OPPORTUNITIES:

Pesto: We have a ton of Genovese Italian Basil in the garden. The second succession (in the Eastern half of the garden by the new flower beds) is flowering and needs to be turned into pesto. If you haven't made pesto this summer yet, or if you'd like to make a second batch, you are welcome to harvest entire plants into a large bag. We'll mark the location of this flowering bed with a colored flag and note in on the chalkboard so you can find it.

Cabbages: Cabbages will be no-limit and they do not have to fit in your bag... you may take as many as you'll use to make a preserve! Check out Week 10's newsletter for our favorite simple kraut recipe.

GOODIES FOR SALE:

In our barn: 

-Hawk Hill Homemade Sourdough Bread: Fresh Country loaves will be available this Saturday. Frozen loaves are available the white freezer in our barn on Tuesdays. $8/loaf, self-serve cash box.

In the creamery:

• Eggs: The hens at Hands Full Farm have resumed laying and you can find eggs for sale again in the creamery (silver) fridge on your right as you enter.
• Dairy: to pick-up milk and cheese raised and crafted right here on the land, join the Bramble Tail Herdshare program. For details, email Aubrie at brambletailhomestead@gmail.com
• Beef: The creamery freezer is now stocked with ground and stew beef from steers raised on the pastures surrounding the farm.
• Whole Chickens: Raised by Parade the Land just down the road in Graton, also in the creamery freezer.
• Firefly Chocolates
• Herbal Remedies by Aubrie

POTATO HARVEST 2017! We'd like to invite you to a treasure hunt wherein you'll dig, sort, and bag up the best buried treasure there is -- potatoes!

• When: Next Saturday, September 30th at 10:30 am (we'll run harvest pick-up simultaneously)
• Where: On the farm just next to the cherry tomatoes
• What now? A potato harvest! We'll bust the potatoes up out of the ground with a tractor implement and then need all the hands we can get to help us bag them up, sort them, dig for any still buried, and bring 'em on home (into the cooler). If there is time, will harvest the Painted Mountain Corn as well.
• What-to-bring: Clothes you don't mind getting dirty. Water, sunhat, snacks, and a brunchy-lunhcy treat to share if it's easy (not required).