Potato Harvest PARTY ROUND 2! THIS WEDNESDAY, October 21st: 9:00am - 11:00pm
A giant spud sized thank you to everyone who came out this Wednesday to bust and bag over 2,700 lbs of future tater-tots. Let’s do it again! We will be harvesting the second-half of our bulbous bounty this coming Wednesday — same time, same place (in the field where the corn used to be.)
All abilities and interests welcome — come even to just watch the scene of a fountain of tubers “erupting out of the humus” behind the tractor. Please bring a mask. We recommend light gloves, a sunhat and water bottle.
THIS WEEK’S HARVEST
Bonbon Buttercup Winter Squash, Harvest Moon Potatoes, Napa Cabbage, Daikon Radish, Scallions, Poblano Peppers, Sweet Peppers (last week!), Chard, Lady Murasaki Purple Bok Choi, Bunched Rainbow Carrots, New Family Farm Cauliflower, Easter Egg Radishes, Cured Cabernet Onions, Rouxai Oak Leaf Lettuce, Hearty Fall Braising Mix (with Ethiopian Kale, Red Russian Kale, Baby Chard, Baby Bok Choi, Frisee, Escarole Hearts, Bel Fiore Chicory, Arugula)
U-PICK
Check the u-pick board for updated weekly limits. With the ash that has settled on produce, we recommend washing all u-pick produce before consumption
🌟Jack-O-Lantern Pumpkins: Season limit: 2 per share for shares with kids | Limit 1 per share for shares without kids
Green Beans: Down in Field 5
Albion Strawberries: Gleanings
Cherry Tomatoes: Gleanings
Frying Peppers: Shishitos, Padróns | See week 5’s newsletter for harvest tips
Jalapeños: Winding down | Located below the Padróns
Yellow & Red Thai Hot Peppers: Winding down | Located next to the Jalapeños
Herbs: Italian Parsley, Rosemary, Thyme, Tulsi Basil, Thai Basil, Oregano, Marjoram, Onion Chives, Garlic Chives, Vietnamese Coriander, Culinary Lavender, Culinary Sage, French Sorrel, Lemon Verbena, Lemon Balm
HARVEST NOTES
Hearty Fall Braising Mix: This week’s greens mix is an amalgam of Baby Ethiopian Kale, Red Russian Kale, Baby Chard, Baby Bok Choi, Frisee, Escarole Hearts, Radicchio, and Arugula.
Eat it raw on its own drenched in your favorite dressing
Mix it up: Mix it in with the lettuce this week to add a hearty note to your lettuce salad
Broil it: Our favorite method. In a bowl, toss the Fall Braising Mix lightly with oil, coating every leaf. Lay the coated leaves out on a pan and put in the broiler just long enough to wilt the leaves and brown some of them. Watch carefully to keep from burning! Take out of the broiler and toss with raw garlic, lemon juice, perhaps more olive oil, and salt to taste. Top with shredded parmesan to take it to the next level. Bon appetite!
Braise it: in a pan with garlic and lemon, or whatever flavors call to you.
Poblano Peppers: these beauties won’t be around much longer, so may we suggest that before they go you indulge? Try roasting them and freezing for summer-time flavor in the winter, or make this super simple 4-ingredient Roasted Poblano Cream Sauce.
Bonbon Buttercup Squash: A cute little buttercup variety with a light green belly button. Thick orange, bread-like, sweet, floral tasting flesh. We cooked up our first last night and it was excellent. To roast, cut in half, scoop out the seeds, and roast cut side down at 400 degrees until you can poke a fork through the skin and the flesh is soft and creamy. Add dashes of water to the baking sheet while roasting to keep squash moist. Eat straight out of the shell with a spoon or use like you would any sweet winter squash (soups, stews, curries, pies, etc.).
New Family Cauliflower: This cauliflower is from the sweet, sandy soils of the Laguna and our friends at New Family Farm — where Kayta and I farmed for 3 years back in the day! When the COVID lockdown was imploding restaurant sales of so many of our farmer friends and interest in our CSA was expanded, we wanted to be part of the solution, so we nixed some Cauliflower out of our crop plan so we could buy this Cauliflower from them. You’ll be able to taste the way they care for their soils and the love they put into what they do. Thanks, New Family friends!
PRESERVING THE HARVEST
Kim-chi recipes: Welcome to Kim-chi week, the week when Kayta’s magical crop planning skills make Napa Cabbage, Scallions, and Daikon Radish align together on the harvest table. Try this classic spicy Kim-chi recipe and/or this more mellow, kid friendly, white Kim-chi recipe from CSA member Robin Kim. Robin made a vegan version of the white Kim-chi recipe for us last year that was one of our all-time favorite farm preserves. She substituted the salted shrimp and fish sauce with Bragg’s aminos / soy sauce and also omitted the alliums. It was mellow but still packed with flavor. For the jujubes, chestnuts, pine nuts, and rice flour, Robin recommends visiting Asiana Market in Cotati or Asia Mart in Santa Rosa.
Plenty of Peppers: Just a heads up, there are plentiful red Shishitos and Jalapeños, and padrons in the u-pick peppers which are great for making pickled peppers. Check out last week’s newsletter for simple pickle recipes.
Kate harvesting Radicchio on a glorious Tuesday morning.
LOGISTICS
Tuesday pick-ups (especially the last hour) have become hectic — likely because we had to cancel a Saturday pick-up due to the fire and everyone switched to Tuesday. Just a heads up, if you are able, a more relaxed pick-up experience can be had on Saturdays and earlier on Tuesdays.
Please write your name on your farm tote bag and make sure don’t accidentally grab someone else’s when you head to your car.
The 2020 harvest season runs from Saturday, June 13th til Tuesday, December, 8th.
Saturday pick-up runs from 9:00am - 2:00pm
Tuesday pick-up runs from 1:00 pm - 6:00 pm
The farm and u-picking are open 7-days a week, sunrise to sunset. Please close the farm gates behind you on off days.
FARMER’S LOG
THE POTATO HARVEST
This coming Wednesday morning, we'll come together again as a community to perform a quintessential agricultural ritual: Harvesting potatoes. As we kneel down, on the Earth, digging through the soil and bagging the cool, bulbous tubers, we will join in concert thousands of people around the world performing the same act. We will also join untold millions of ancestors who, every Fall, knelt together and harvested potatoes. We will also be joined, by a real living breathing chain of seed potatoes, to the hundreds of harvests in Europe and Asia and the thousands of harvests in the Andes and Northeastern Bolivia and those ancient ancestors who first knelt, harvested, and saved seed potatoes.
There is nothing quite like a potato harvest and the feeling, afterwards, of storing them away in a cool dark place — a pit, a cellar, a cave; the potatoes themselves alive, breathing slowly, promising food, promising life, as Fall turns to Winter.
The highest caloric food crop per-acre in the world (over maize, wheat, and rice) potatoes are the only of these that grow (the food part, at least) deep in the Earth — shrouded in dark and mystery until we lift them up, into light, together in the Fall.
Many have known the feeling of incredible abundance that potatoes can give. And sadly, many have known the inverse. In 1845, due to limited potato genetics in the region and the cold shoulders of powerful men, a million people starved in the poorer parts of Western Ireland and the Scottish highlands, as a blighted potato crop rotted in the fields. Aye, the potato has been a powerful, joyful, and painful bond between people and Mother Earth, in feast and in famine, for millennia.
The Nobel Prize winning Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, speaks to this history 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 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.
******
At Green Valley Community Farm this year, we are thankful: We are blessed with a vigorous, healthy potato crop. The whole potato field in flower in August was a vision to behold — the Desiree flowers jasmine-scented the foggy mornings. All that energy, all that delight, was sent down below to the tubers, which have been coming up “sound as stone” and will nourish us all through this Fall and Winter. And that is cause for celebration.
Join us this Wednesday for Part Two of our 4th annual potato harvest as we "shower" up the living roots and scatter libations in remembrance and thanks.
See you in the fields,
David for Kayta, Anna, and Kate
