7/17/2020 - Week 6 - Ode to the Onion

THIS WEEK’S HARVEST

Bunched Rainbow Carrots, Fresh Cabernet Onions, Purple Daikon, Red Russian Kale, Celery, Summer Squash, Olympian Cucumbers, Persian or Lemon Cucumbers, Arugula, Salad Mix (Mustard Greens, Frisee and Radicchio), Mixed Little Gems, Romaine Lettuce, Greenhouse Tomatoes, Eggplant

U-PICK

Check the u-pick board for updated weekly limits

• Albion Strawberries

• Purple Snow Peas

• Sugar Snap Peas

• Frying Peppers (see below for harvest tips)

• Jalapeños

• Herbs: Rosemary, Thyme, Dill, Tulsi Basil, Italian Basil, Thai Basil, Purple Basil, Oregano, Marjoram, Parsley (last legs), Tarragon, Onion Chives, Garlic Chives, Vietnamese Coriander, Culinary Lavender, Culinary Sage, French Sorrel, Lemon Verbena, Lemon Balm, Shiso, Chamomile, Cilantro & Mints

HARVEST NOTES

• Fresh Cabernet Onions: “Round roses of water.” Fresh, turgid, a summer treat. The innocent, uncured form of the onion.

• Purple Snow Peas: These Beauregarde purple snow peas are an open-pollinated, recently-bred variety from Row 7 Seed Company. As they say, Beauregarde was "bred to bring more flavor (and more purple) to purple peas, these high-anthocyanin, wavy-podded snow peas hold their vibrant color when cooked. Wait for small peas to develop in the pod to reach full flavor potential." Snow peas are delicious raw, stir-fried, steamed or braised.

• Nigella: The Nigella (aka Love-in-the-Mist") flowers are particularly special in the garden this week. Make sure to check them out above the snapdragons above the picnic table.

• Green Coriander: Green Coriander is the green flowering seeds of cilantro. It is delicious and used often in Asian dishes. It can also be infused into vinegar.

• Frying Peppers: Frying peppers are little peppers commonly eaten pan-fried. A little olive oil, a little salt, a little seared til black, and voila, an amazing hors d'oeuvre!

  • Shishitos: A wonderfully mild (no heat), green frying pepper. Popular in Japan where its thin walls make it particularly suitable for tempura. Also very good in stir fries or sautés, or just seared in oil and salt. Ideally harvest at 2 to 4 inches, but bigger is fine. Older peppers turn red but are 99% mild.

  • Padróns: The famous Spanish heirloom, named after their town of origin. Padróns are served sautéed in olive oil with a little sea salt, and eaten as tapas in Spain. Ideally harvest when they are 1" to 1 1/2" long. About 1 out of 10 fruits will be hot. All the fruits become hot if allowed to grow 2-3" long.

  ADD-ONS

• Revolution Bread: Our baker Eli is dealing with some (non-COVID) health challenges. Fresh bread and cookies are on hold for the time being. Get well soon, Eli!

• Moonfruit Mushrooms: Cory and Ryath report that there will be no shiitakes this week but they see a flush coming for next week! Moonfruit Mushrooms, will now be sold self-serve from a fridge next to the bread freezer. Cash only.

• Bramble Tail Homestead Creamery: Stocked with Bramble Tail frozen yogurt, 100% grass-fed beef, Green Star chicken, eggs, Oz Family Farm heritage rabbit and more. Become a member of the weekly dairy herdshare by emailing Aubrie at brambletailhomestead@gmail.com.

• The Marketplace: New products this week include bone broth and gluten free breads! Also stocked art, soaps, honey, coffee, Moonfruit Mushroom dressing and seasoning, beverages, and much more. Across from the Bramble Tail Creamery.

VOLUNTEER WEDNESDAYS, 9:00 am

A biiiig thanks to everyone who came out this Wednesday to tackle the weeds in our storage onion patch! For anyone who’d like a little farm-work therapy, come one, come all to our weekly Volunteer Wednesday! Come find us in the garden or the fields anytime from 9:00am-11:00am. Depending on your interest and ability we can find a nice socially distant something for you to help keep this ship afloat and nice and tidy.

OUR MASK POLICY

There has been some confusion around our policy surrounding masks on the farm and as we are underway we wanted to refine it and flesh it out. Generally people are doing a great job! Thank you! And thank for for your patience as we navigate creating our policies.

MASKS ARE REQUIRED ON THE FARM WHEN…

• You are inside any enclosed space on the farm: the CSA barn, the Marketplace and Creamery, the bathroom, etc.

• U-picking any crop, including flowers

• Near u-pick areas or other high-traffic areas (so that you don’t prevent others from entering safely)

• Traversing high traffic outdoor spaces like the staircase or main pathways, where you will likely come close to other members.

YOU CAN REMOVE YOUR MASK WHEN….

• You are in an outdoor area of the farm where it is easy to be socially distant from other members and you are away from u-pick areas and other high-traffic zones.

PINT BASKET SIZES

One more piece of housekeeping: I don’t think we ever explained what a pint actually looked like. The clear clamshell pictured below is 2 pints. The little green netted baskets are 1 pint. Thanks everyone for being so careful about u-pick limits each week. This makes sure everyone gets a share of the harvest!

FARMER’S LOG

This week on the farm, in between the harvests, we tackled some messes! We enjoyed spending time with a great volunteer crew Wednesday morning cleaning up our storage onion patch that had grown thick with emerging bindweed, purslane and some grasses. You all made quick work of it! Thanks everyone! We then transitioned to cleaning up the Purple Snow Pea patch and the cherry tomatoes.

We also got around to mowing the beds that hosted the first crops of the year, which had become overgrown with bolting lettuce and bolting bok-choi and bolting weeds (oh, my!). The heat of last weekend really made all the weeds that we thought were safely still in vegetation mode turn the corner into seed creation. Nothing like a few thousand packets of purslane seed to motivate you to clean house!

Today was a fun harvest. Lots of new things to share with you all.

It is always a happy day the day we harvest the first fully formed onion bulbs of the year, their bellies “grown round with dew”. So this week, in honor of our amazing onion weeding team and the year’s first Cabernet Onions, we'll leave you with the one-and-only, Pablo Neruda.

* * * * * * *

Ode to the Onion
by Pablo Neruda

Onion,
luminous flask,
your beauty formed
petal by petal,
crystal scales expanded you
and in the secrecy of the dark earth
your belly grew round with dew.
Under the earth
the miracle
happened
and when your clumsy
green stem appeared,
and your leaves were born
like swords
in the garden,
the earth heaped up her power
showing your naked transparency,
and as the remote sea
in lifting the breasts of Aphrodite
duplicating the magnolia,
so did the earth
make you,
onion
clear as a planet
and destined
to shine,
constant constellation,
round rose of water,
upon
the table
of the poor.

You make us cry without hurting us.
I have praised everything that exists,
but to me, onion, you are
more beautiful than a bird
of dazzling feathers,
heavenly globe, platinum goblet,
unmoving dance
of the snowy anemone

and the fragrance of the earth lives
in your crystalline nature.

* * * * * * *

See you in the fields,
David & Kayta

7/10/2020 - Week 5 - Farm Choreography

U-PICK COVID-19 REMINDER

In order to u-pick all members are required to:

• Wear a mask

• Abstain from eating

• Have washed or sanitized hands

• Maintain social distance

Children must be able to follow these rules in order to u-pick. Thanks for helping keep the farm safe, everyone!

THIS WEEK’S HARVEST

Bunched Rainbow Carrots, Scallions, Easter Egg Radishes, Green Curly Kale, Rainbow Chard, Red, Gold & Chioggia Beets, Summer Squash, Olympian Cucumbers, Arugula, Braising Mix, Spinach, Mixed Little Gems, Romaine Lettuce, Garlic, Greenhouse Tomatoes

U-PICK

Check the u-pick board for updated weekly limits

• Albion Strawberries

• Sugar Snap Peas

• Frying Peppers (see below for harvest tips)

• Jalapeños

• Herbs: Rosemary, Thyme, Dill, Tulsi Basil, Italian Basil, Thai Basil, Purple Basil, Oregano, Marjoram, Parsley (last legs), Tarragon, Onion Chives, Garlic Chives, Vietnamese Coriander, Culinary Lavender, Culinary Sage, French Sorrel, Lemon Verbena, Lemon Balm, Shiso, Chamomile, Cilantro & Mints

HARVEST NOTES

• Frying Peppers: Frying peppers are little peppers commonly pan fried. A little olive oil, a little salt, a little seared til black, and wallah, an amazing hors d'oeuvre!

  • Shishitos: A wonderfully mild (no heat), green frying pepper. Popular in Japan where its thin walls make it particularly suitable for tempura. Also very good in stir fries or sautés, or just seared in oil and salt. Ideally harvest at 2 to 4 inches, but bigger is fine. Older peppers turn red but are 99% mild.

  • Padróns: The famous Spanish heirloom, named after their town of origin. Padróns are served sautéed in olive oil with a little sea salt, and eaten as tapas in Spain. Ideally harvest when they are 1" to 1 1/2" long. About 1 out of 10 fruits will be hot. All the fruits become hot if allowed to grow 2-3" long.

• Braising Mix: A mix of young chard, Red Russian kale, and Amara (Ethiopian Kale) that is delicious lightly sautéed or braised.

  ADD-ONS

• Revolution Bread: Our baker Eli is dealing with some (non-COVID) health challenges. Fresh bread and cookies are on hold for the time being. Get well soon, Eli!

• Moonfruit Mushrooms: Cory and Ryath just harvested 25 lbs of fresh shiitakes. Will now be sold self-serve from a fridge next to the bread freezer. First come first serve while supplies last.

• Bramble Tail Homestead Creamery: Stocked with Bramble Tail frozen yogurt, 100% grass-fed beef, Green Star chicken, eggs, Oz Family Farm heritage rabbit and more. Become a member of the weekly dairy herdshare by emailing Aubrie at brambletailhomestead@gmail.com.

• The Marketplace: An ode to our local foodshed stocked with art, soaps, honey, coffee, Moonfruit Mushroom creations, beverages, and more. Across from the Bramble Tail Creamery.

You can plant it, but then you gotta weed it….

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

People sometimes asks what happens to leftover GVCFarm food at the end of pick-ups. We’re so happy that for the last couple years it has gone to Food For Thought via a relationship setup and facilitated by CSA member Helen Myers. Food For Thought is a non-profit food bank that provides meals to people with serious illness in Sonoma County.

Thank you Helen, Melissa Tarzia, and everyone at Food For Thought!

FARMER’S LOG

A DANCE WITH THE TIME-SCALES OF PLANTS

We had a great, productive week out here. We weeded the pathways of the potatoes and gave them their first hilling with the electric tractor. Kayta and Kate did a large greenhouse sowing (almost 5,000 compound beet seeds!) We spent the majority of Wednesday giving the garden a tune-up — weeding, prepping beds, and planting new successions of sunflowers, snapdragons and basil. On Thursday we planted our 3rd and final Fall cabbage succession, prepped ground for our 5th of 13 arugula and mustard sowings and prepped beds for our 3rd and final Fall bunched and storage carrots patch.

Sometimes people ask, "How do you know what to plant when?"

Crop planning, as we call it, looks slightly different on every farm. Here’s a little rundown of how it works on ours…

Working Backwards

Every Winter since our first year, Kayta and I sketch examples of the harvest shares we want to have for people in the Spring, Summer, and Fall. That sketch process goes something like, “Well, we gotta have alliums every week. What’s life without alliums?” “Yeah, and gotta have snack crops! The kiddos gotta have snacks!” “Lettuce and carrots = always.” “And fancy salad greens too” “Yeah, and some sort of hearty brassica for braising and sides.” “And novelties to keep it fun: Corn, scapes, fennel, kohlrabi…” “What flowers are possible in early June?” “What are the most epic 9 Winter Squash varieties to dole out in the Fall?” Etc, etc….

From these envisioned ideal harvests, we work backwards, pouring over the seed catalogues, crop by crop, going through memories of seasons past, picking favorite varieties and considering their “days to maturity", heat and frost sensitivities, yield expectations, etc. The yield, maturity, and almanac-esque numbers give us the basic idea of how many seeds to sow in the greenhouse and fields and when.

A Dance of Time Scales

When things are sown is super dependent on each crops days to maturity. For example, we like to have nice arugula and mustard greens every week from June-December. Arugula and mustards are a super fast maturing (~25 days from germination to harvest) so we sow 130 ft of 4 rows of arugula every other week from May 8th until September 25th. Carrots, on the other hand, take 75-90 days to mature. They also have a large harvest window (meaning we can harvest off the same patch for over a month). So for carrots we’ll sow 3 large patches, the first on April 24th, and the last in mid-July, and that will give us fresh bunched and Fall storage carrots all the way until mid-December. On the longest end of the spectrum are crops like Hopi Blue Corn, Pumpkins and Winter Squash. These crops we plant once, as they take all season to mature, and we enjoy them throughout the Fall.

And so it goes that each Spring we embark with neat greenhouse sowing and field planting schedules — musical scores to a carefully choreographed dance with the time-scales of plants. These schedules become the drum-beat of our weeks and eventually become the harvests.

Late May was a little cray cray.

Rubber Hits the Road

On our farm, greenhouse sowings begin in early February with slow maturing flowers, alliums, nightshades, and apiaceae and they continue with the last lettuce sowing in October; field seedings begin with the first Carrot sowing, April 24th and the last arugula and mustards sowing late September.

Harvest is when the real work — namely the note taking and record keeping — begins. What actually happened? How many bedfeet of cabbage were transplanted? How much cabbage did we harvest, how much did people take home? Was it enough? Was it too much? How much too much? How did that variety hold up to the heat of July? Some things we don’t need to take notes on, like Sarah’s Choice cantaloupe being the best melon of all time. We remember that one.

Record keeping, planting, harvest and CSA pickup logs are the name of the game for us now. Every Thursday Kayta and I take a walk through the fields looking to see what we can offer in the harvest that week. Kayta looks at how much people took home of various crops in the previous week (even the previous year) to estimate how many lugs to harvest. We also look at crops we’ve just finished harvesting from. This year, for example, it seems we are uber rich in lettuce — lettuce billionaires. We will adjust our future plantings down a notch. 

Indeed, the most sacred objects on the farm are the famous scrumpled “Harvest Log” composition notebook and a dirty old binder that lives in the truck labeled “Planting Log”. These are outward symbols of our slowly amassing memory of successes and failures that will help us, each winter, to create a planting plan ever more refined and custom tailored to this soil and this micro-climate and this CSA membership.

Painting with Seeds

But the “art” and the heart of crop planning for us is in taking all of this bizniss and planting for harvests that harmonize with the seasons, surprise, delight, and help CSA members fall in love with food and flowers every week.

If everything goes to plan this year, for example, you should experience a seasonal arc of alliums. The fresh garlic, scapes, scallions, and cipollini onions of Spring will soon give way to the full sized, rich Cabernet Red, Walla Walla Sweet, and Torpedo bulbs of Summer which will in turn give way to the solid, crispy-paper cured orbs of late Summer and Fall. In this way we hope our allium crop plan, and our whole crop plan, is a love song to seasons and the soil.

They say, "If you want to make God laugh, make a plan." But, with some elbow grease and a little bit of luck, I think we are we're well on our way to pulling off Kayta's 400 row, 60 column “2020 Crop Plan.xlsx”! Thanks to a little help from our friends...

See you in the fields,

David and Kayta

It all starts with a spreadsheet.

7/3/2020 - Week 4 - The Flower Garden

THIS WEEK’S HARVEST

Bunched Rainbow Carrots, Fresh Cipollini Onions, Easter Egg Radishes, Dino Kale, Rainbow Chard, Mei Qing Bok Choi, Summer Squash, Olympian Cucumbers, Arugula, Tasty Town Salad Mix, Spinach, Cegolaine Little Gems, Iceberg Lettuce, Garlic Scapes

U-PICK

• Albion Strawberries

• Sugar Snap Peas

• Frying Peppers (see below for harvest tips)

• Herbs: Rosemary, Thyme, Dill, Italian Basil, Thai Basil, Purple Basil, Oregano, Marjoram, Parsley, Tarragon, Onion Chives, Garlic Chives, Vietnamese Coriander, Culinary Lavender, Culinary Sage, French Sorrel, Lemon Verbena, Lemon Balm, Shiso (limited), Chamomile, Cilantro, Tulsi, Mints!

• Flowers galore!

Frying peppers are here! Shishitos at left and in the pint basket, and a Padrón at right.

HARVEST NOTES

• Tasty Town Salad Mix: All aboard the Tasty Train to Tasty Town! This week’s ready-to-eat salad mix is a totally tasty mix of baby Chard, baby Red Russian Kale, three different type of lettuce, and Amara Ethiopian Kale. Ethiopian Kale is an exceptionally tasty relative of Mustard Greens that tastes like it’s been infused with rich garlic. Choo-choo!

• Frying Peppers: So it begins: The summer gift that keeps on giving — frying peppers. Frying peppers are little peppers commonly cooked. A little olive oil, a little salt, a little pan sear, and wallah, an incredible hors d'oeuvre!

  • Shishitos: A wonderfully mild (no heat), green frying pepper. Popular in Japan where its thin walls make it particularly suitable for tempura. Also very good in stir fries or sautés, or just seared in oil and salt. Ideally harvest at 2 to 4 inches, but bigger is fine. Older peppers turn red but are 99% mild.

  • Padróns: The famous Spanish heirloom, named after their town of origin. Padróns are served sautéed in olive oil with a little sea salt, and eaten as tapas in Spain. Ideally harvest when they are 1" to 1 1/2" long. About 1 out of 10 fruits will be hot. All the fruits become hot if allowed to grow 2-3" long.

• Fresh Cipollini Onions: A sweet, freshly harvested delicate onion that is so mild you can cut it thin and eat in on pizza, salad, or straight up! Or trying grilling them until translucent and slightly charred.

  THE MARKETPLACE

As you all have certainly discovered by now, our humble little Mill site is now home to the sweetest Marketplace in town. Our friend and neighbor Kim LaVere and everyone at Green Valley Farm + Mill did such a good job transforming a room of the Mill office building into the most incredible ode to our local foodshed, stocking it with art, soaps, mushroom concoctions, beverages, and other pantry items. If you haven’t checked it out already, do yourself a favor! Well done all!

TIPS FOR HARVESTING FLOWERS

• If possible, harvest when it’s cooler out.

• Get the stems in water immediately

• Strip leaves that are going to be under water (avoids rotting, bad smells, and disease)

• Cut low on the plant while ensuring there are lot of healthy leaves below where you are harvesting.

• Ideally cut above a branching point to encourage new growth

• Deadhead! If you have the time, clip off any dead / spent blooms on the plant to encourage more flowers next week!

FARMER’S LOG

ON THE Flower Garden

As the flowers in the garden really start to flourish, we thought we’d lift the curtain a little on our beloved blooming hillside.

While we are primarily a food farm we often feel like the symbolic heart of what we do is in the flower garden — little laughing gifts from us to you, from the land to you — the sole purpose of which is to enchant and uplift the soul.

Kayta is the mother of the flower garden. She researches, trials and chooses what we plant; designs the plantings and successions; propagates the flowers and cares for their sometimes complicated needs. In the evenings, you can usually find her up in the flowers at Golden Hour, trying to get close to Meeko the shy garden cat, or saying goodnight to a sleeping bumble bee. It is a pet project of hers, a source of joy and a living art installation whose mission is to provide cut flowers en masse while being relatively low maintenance (while we focus on the food farming) and giving back to the ecology around us.

We’ve learned some things and met some amazing flower friends along the way…

INCEPTION

The original idea for coupling a u-pick cut flower garden with a CSA pick-up comes from Caretaker Farm in Williamstown, MA, where Kayta and I apprenticed in 2012. It seemed to us a natural match, taking home a beautiful little bouquet with a bag full of produce. The flower and herb garden at Caretaker was just outside the door of their big old barn and overlooked the beautiful cultivated valley below. If we had time at the end of the day us apprentices were sent to weed the flowers. It was a modest flower garden: a few zinnias, gomphrena, celosia and other tidbits.

We moved to Sebastopol in 2013, and in 2014 Kayta started a small farm at Russian River Vineyards in Forestville. There, Kayta began experimenting with flowers, inspired by the horticultural bounty, the natural environment, and the incredible Slow Flower movement of Sonoma County (spearheaded by people like Hedda Brostrom of Fullbloom Flower Farm in Graton and Auna Fisher of Beija Flora Botanicals).

When we started GVCFarm in 2016, a friend gifted us with 50 lbs of dahlia tubers from her garden. Whether or not those tubers were devoured by gophers is beside the point — the idea of an epic u-pick flower garden was planted.

THE WORKHORSES AND THE UNICORNS

One way we conceptualize our flower garden crop plan to ourselves is by dividing it into the “workhorses” and the “unicorns”.

The “workhorses” are flowers that have proven themselves: Beautiful, hearty and reliable, super productive. Zinnias and Cosmos. We plant those twice each year so that if a meteor hit Sonoma County, we could all still make bouquets. We are always on the lookout for workhorses. Last year, Strawflower was a workhorse for us and we hope this year is the same. Snapdragons, while shorter blooming than others, are usually a sure bet. Rudbeckia, which has perennialized itself in the upper-most West bed, is worth more than its salt. Celosia, Gomphrena, and Marigolds come to mind. It seems as though Lavatera, the crazy loaded pink and white flower blooming just above the garden strawberries seems like it might be the new-to-us workhorse of 2020.

The unicorns are our little pets — delicate, special, rare, experiments, trials, and hunches. Kayta has us plant these for a number of reasons. Reason #1: Just ‘cuz. Reason #2: As a gift to the pollinators (like the Phacelia aka Bee’s Friend, rather quick to peter out, was a vision of beauty at its peak in early June humming with countless pollinators) Reason #3: They are so unique and shapely and we can’t not plant them and they make bouquets pop (hello, ornamental Amaranth!) Reason #4: Experiments to find the next workhorses or the next natives & cultivated natives.

In this way the flower garden is a living game of trial and error, the results of which we can take home to decorate with!

Some members of the Unicorn / Native Category L to R, Top to Bottom: Blue Penstemon (with Lavatera behind it), Hollyhock, cultivated California poppy, Nicotiana, Amaranth and Dahlia, Veronica (or Speedwell).

ADAPTING TO PLACE

A long term goal of the flower garden is to find more and more natives or cultivated native varieties to use and to transition more beds into perennial zones.

This year we are experimenting with a cultivated California poppy variety (just below the ornamental Amaranth) and a cultivated Verbascum, a domesticated version of the wild Verbascum, the Dr. Suesse-esque, long-spired, yellow-flowered tower blooming everywhere around the farm.

We also have a very special Blue Springs Penstemon blooming secretly on the upper-most bed above the garden strawberries. You’ll find it tucked in between the masses of blooming Nicotiana.

The upper-most beds (2 on the West side and one long one on the East side) are all experiments in perennials. These are great because they are low maintenance for us, provide more year around blooms for pollinators, and year ‘round habitat for other insects.

THE SLEEPING BUMBLEBEES

But really, we do it all for the sleepy bumblebees.

If you don’t already know, the best time in the garden is sunrise or the Golden Hour of late evening. These are the liminal times — the magic times.

The low light highlights the color of the flowers and they shine as if glowing from within. The plants themselves breathe easy — soaking up the first light of day, or sighing from relief from the mid-day sun. All the pollinators are out, eating their first, or their last meals of the day. Even Hummingbird Moth aka Shrimp Bee is there!

And in the evening, when the light is almost extinguished, if you tread softly, you will see them — Bumble Bees falling asleep on the Nicotiana or tucked into a Cosmo — snoring imperceptible snores. And out of the corner of your eye the red and blue flash of Nuthenroy the Gnome scurrying into the hedges…

See you in the flower garden,

David for Kayta, Anna & Kate