10/23/20 - Week 20 - Fall Mode

THIS WEEK’S HARVEST

Mustard Greens, Arugula, Rosaine Little Gem Lettuces, Indigo Red Radicchio, Collard Greens, Poblano Peppers, Bishop Cauliflower, Romanesco, Red Ace + Chioggia + Golden Loose Beets, Eggplant, Leeks, Desiree Potatoes, Rainbow Carrots, Zoey Yellow Onions, Jester Acorn Winter Squash, Metechi Hardneck Garlic

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: 3 per share for shares with kids | Limit 1 per share for shares without kids

• Green Beans: Gleanings

• 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

Late season Agrostemma in the flower garden

HARVEST NOTES

• Jester Acorn Winter Squash: A true gem. The sweetest Acorn squash we've ever tasted. A hard ribbed shell hides pudding-sweet flesh. A good Jester can be among the sweetest of all winter squashes. David's favorite. Try halving long ways, scooping out the seeds, and roasting at 400 until you can poke a fork in the skin and the flesh is soft and creamy. Add a dash of water to the baking sheet while roasting to keep your squash moist. Eat straight out of the shell with a spoon like pudding! Try adding butter, coconut oil, and/or maple syrup to and eating out of the shell with a spoon.

We brought the last carving pumpkins into the barn so that we could transition that field into it’s Winter clothes. There are a few carving pumpkins left. Did everyone get one? Don't be shy! Season limit 1 per share, and for households with children the season limit is now 3 per share.

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.

• 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.

THANKS, VOLUNTEERS!

We’d just like to say a huge thank you to everyone who came out to help harvest all 7,000 lbs of this year’s potato crop! We rely on volunteer labor for these big harvest pushes and you all made this giant task easy and delightful.

We have one last big harvest — the Fall carrots — which we’ll let you know about, as well as our Garlic planting party. Stay tuned!

FARMER’S LOG

FALL MODE

This week was all about harvest, harvest, harvest…

After Monday and Tuesday’s share harvest, we enjoyed a sweet Wednesday morning potato harvest with about 15 volunteer members. All told, we brought in about 3,000 lbs of beautiful tubers, putting our total potato harvest for the year around 7,000 lbs — now tucked away in our trailer cooler, awaiting your belly.

On Wednesday and Thursday, we kept on harvesting: Loose Beets for storage; Napa Cabbage for storage; and today, bins and bins of beautiful Cauliflower and Romanesco for this week’s share. All this harvesting can only mean one thing….

We are smack dab in the middle of one of two major transition moments in our yearly farm cycle. You can feel it in the air (kind of?) and you can definitely see it in the fields. Almost all of the long-season crops have grown, matured, been harvested and are now dying back — their bounty curing in the greenhouses or in the cooler, or become a memory of a BLT. In the fields, the slate is being cleaned. The first frost is imminent. The farm is bare — awaiting it’s Winter cloak.

Potato harvest 2020 — part two!

Bed by bed, field by field, the farm is changing from summer attire (veggie crops) to winter clothes (cover crop). For our cover crop, we seed a nitrogen fixing, organic matter building mixture of Bell Beans, Magnus Peas, Dundale Peas, Crimson Clover, Common Vetch and Triticale on pretty much every inch we planted this year. Soon you will see a green fuzz of Triticale covering the bare beds. Come spring a waist high sea of green will wave in the wind. This crop will feed, enrich, and build the soil for 2021 and for many years to come. (Indeed, a healthy cover crop stand can generate over 8,000lbs of biomass per acre. It's like growing compost out of thin air — right where you need it.)

This Fall’s transition into cover crop makes us think of one of the ways vegetable farming in Sonoma is very different than vegetable farming in New England or colder climates Northward. In colder places, Old Man Winter mandates that you initiate this process; i.e. frost comes in early October and kills the tomatoes and peppers and other cold sensitive crops. In our climate, hot crops can sometimes limp on into November. Here, instead, we must end them in order to germinate a great stand of winter cover crop.

In Sonoma county, it is best to broadcast your cover crop seed mid to late October. Any later and you risk colder temperatures inhibiting the germination of the cover crop seed and your fields laying relatively naked through the winter. So, it is time to say farewell to the cherry tomatoes, and the frying peppers — they must now make way for a dense, lush, life-giving cover crop.

We recommend taking a moment to appreciate the changing of the guard out there if you have a moment. The first blades of cover crop will soon poke up out of the soil, reaching for the sun, and waiting for the winter rains to transform the farm into a sea of green.

See you in the fields,
David for Kayta, Anna, and Kate

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10/16/20 - Week 19 - The Potato Harvest

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

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10/9/2020 - Week 18 - Wesley

THIS WEEK’S HARVEST

German Butterball Potatoes, Green Tomatoes, Napa Cabbage, Poblano Peppers, Sweet Peppers, Brussels Sprout Tops, Indigo Radicchio, Delicata Winter Squash, Carrots, Easter Egg Radishes, Summer Squash & Zucchini, Olympian Cucumbers, Muir Summercrisp Lettuce, Fall Salad Mix (with Arugula, Ethiopian Kale, Red Russian Kale, Mustard Greens, Bel Fiore Chicory) Leeks, Cured Yellow Onions

U-PICK

Check the u-pick board for updated weekly limits. With the ash settling 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: Still plenty! 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

• Husk Cherries: Gleanings | See Week 9’s Harvest Notes for tips

• Herbs: Rosemary, Thyme, Tulsi Basil, Thai Basil, Purple Basil, Oregano, Marjoram, Onion Chives, Garlic Chives, Vietnamese Coriander, Culinary Lavender, Culinary Sage, French Sorrel, Lemon Verbena, Lemon Balm, Green Coriander

HARVEST NOTES

• Kim-Chi Week Next Week! Every year, we design our crop plan so that scallions, daikon, and Napa cabbage all line up so that members can make kim-chi! While we will be distributing beautiful Napa cabbage this week, we will also be distributing it next week along with daikon and scallions. If you want to you can save your Napa cabbage to make a big batch of Kimchi next week!

• German Butterball Potatoes: Debuting our final of four potato varieties that we will be distributing on into December, German Butterballs are aptly named. A creamy, rich, yellow-fleshed beauty with sublime flavor. These potatoes are sometimes called the gold standard of gold potatoes.

• Delicata Winter Squash: Debuting our first of 9 Winter Squash varieties harvested earlier this month, Delicata are a perennial favorite. Versatile, sweet, edible skins. This year’s Delicata harvest is half from our fields and half from our friends at New Family Farm in South Sebastopol, the fruits of a plan hatched in March. When COVID lockdown was imploding restaurant sales of so many of our farmer friends and interest in CSA was expanded, we wanted to be part of the solution, so we nixed some Delicata out of our crop plan so we could buy from them. You’ll be able to taste the love they put into their soil.

• Brussels Sprouts Tops: Each year around this time we trim the tops off of the Brussel sprouts plants to spur the sprouts to size up evenly. This annual necessity has the delicious benefit of giving us delicate bunches of cooking greens with that lovely Brussel sprout flavor. Use as you would any of your favorite cooking greens, like Kale or Collards.

• Green Tomatoes: Tomato production is dropping off for the year, but they have one last gift to give us — green fruit! We suggest fried green tomatoes (possibly with GVCF cornmeal that you might still have laying around?) or try this pork stew which includes green tomatoes to provide flavor and texture.

PRESERVING THE HARVEST

Bulk Carrots: We will be putting out bulk carrots on the back table this week for juicing or preserving. Here are a couple of our favorite quick pickle recipes for preserving the harvest:

• Pickled Carrots from Gourmet. These are quick, easy and delicious!

• Pickled Vegetables from Bon Appetite. A gorgeous mix of anything you have on hand, including onions, radishes, turnips, beets and carrots. Beautiful enough to be served as a side on any table.

Plenty of Peppers: There are plentiful red shishitos and jalapeños, and padrons in the u-pick peppers that are great for making pickled peppers.

POTATO HARVEST PARTY ~ WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14th, 9am

Join us for our last big harvest party of the year — the potatoes! There’s nothing like watching a ton of potatoes bloop up out of the ground behind the wake of the tractor. It’s a big, unforgettable experience getting dirty, finding and bagging the potatoes, especially for kids. All abilities and interest welcome. Please bring a mask. We recommend light gloves and a sunhat.

Radicchio Salad with Sour Cream Ranch 

Try this yummy recipe with this week’s Indigo Radicchio from Bon Appetit.

For the dressing: 

• ⅓ cup sour cream or dairy free sour cream 

• ⅓ cup plain whole-milk Greek yogurt or your favorite dairy free yogurt 

• 1 Tbsp. plus 1½ tsp. sherry vinegar or apple cider vinegar

• 5 garlic cloves, 1 finely grated, 4 crushed

• 1 tsp. honey

• 8 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil, divided

• Salt

• 2 scallions, thinly sliced

• ½ cup panko (Japanese breadcrumbs)

• ½ lemon

• 2 medium radicchio, leaves separated

To make: 

• Mix sour cream, yogurt, vinegar, grated garlic, honey, and 5 Tbsp. oil in a small bowl; season dressing with salt.

• Heat remaining 3 Tbsp. oil in a medium skillet over medium. Add crushed garlic and scallions and cook, stirring often, until golden brown around the edges, about 4 minutes. Add panko and season with salt. Cook, stirring often, until golden brown, about 3 minutes. Finely grate lemon zest directly into the pan and toss a few times to incorporate. Transfer breadcrumbs to paper towels to drain; let cool. Taste and season with more salt if needed.

  Place radicchio in a large bowl. Drizzle with dressing; toss gently to coat. Season with salt and scatter breadcrumbs over.

  Do Ahead: Dressing and breadcrumbs can be made 2 days ahead. Cover and chill dressing. Store breadcrumbs airtight at room temperature.

REMINDERS

1. Please write you name on your farm tote bag and make sure don’t accidentally grab someone else’s when you head to your car.

2. 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

3. 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

WESLEY

A month or so ago, as we were wheeling some totes of carrots out of Field 3, Kayta saw, out of the corner of her eye, a flash of red-brown, like nothing she had seen before, streaking into the melons. A hallucination? A gnome? A magical animal?

A couple of week’s after that, the two of us were sitting at our picnic table in the shed, hunched over the harvest notebook, when she saw it again: A red-brown streak bounding into the Pumpkins. “There it is again!” she gasped and grabbed my arm.

Kayta guided my eyes and we fixed our gaze between the two pumpkins where the flash had disappeared, and held our breath. After a few seconds, out popped a cute little inquisitive head, with a black and white mask.

A long-tailed weasel.

He scanned the ground ahead, checked us out, decided we were safe, and bounded under a pallet right in front of us. A few moments later he emerged — with a gopher in his mouth half the size of his body! We watched in disbelief as the little pirate scanned the open ground between him and the pumpkins, a plump, limp gopher jiggling in his mouth. In two lightning fast leaps, he bounded back into pumpkins patch and disappeared. Dinner time.

Wesley the Weasel, bounding home with dinner.

We walkie-talkied Anna and Kate directly to report what we had seen. Kate named him Wesley. Wesley the Weasel.

Yesterday, as I was parking the tractor, I saw the unmistakable, streaking from under the mower into the shed. “Wesley!”, I yelled into my walkie-talkie. Kate, who was hoeing in the collards, walked slowly over to the shed. She stood patiently by a pallet when, lo-and-behold, out popped Wesley, just 10 feet away.

He looked up at Kate with his beady, black, inquisitive black eyes — unafraid, curious, comfortable — and Kate looked back in breathless glee. Wesley took a few steps toward her out from under the pallet, and cocked his head up and her. Soul touched soul.  Time froze. And then the bubble burst, and Wesley popped back under the pallet.

For the next 5 or 10 minutes, Kate and I watched as Wesley bounded, from one corner of the shed to the other, from under one pallet and under another, surveying his domain, and checking us out.

He was so comfortable with us watching him that it occurred to us, “Perhaps this little guy knows us better than we think. He listens to us blabbing away in this shed and in his fields everyday!”

Finally, Wesley bounded away in one, two, THREEeee olympic leaps, over the frying peppers, into the cherry tomatoes, and out of sight, leaving us with a soft glow in our hearts. Being checked out by a pirate as cute as Wesley will do that to you.

The encounter with Wesley reminded me how blessed we are to farm in a place as wild as this — and it made me think back on some of the other wild encounters we’ve had here on the farm. There were the Baby Owlets; the Fox in the Rain; the Golden Eagle attack; and of course Ingrid, sweet Ingrid, the Great White Egret who graced our fields, and terrorized our gopher population, for 6 months in 2018.

Aside from giving us glowy hearts, these encounters give us hope and fuel a purpose.

Top row Left: Sneezeweed and California Fuchsia in the hedgerow by the creek funded by a California HSI grant and managed by Aubrie and Green Valley Farm + Mill | Top row Right: A Valley Oak sapling and Goldenrod in our member-supported hedgerow | Bottom Row Left: A Live Oak sapling in the same hedgerow. | Bottom row Right: A Valley Oak sapling along our back fence line, planted by Weaving Earth Wild Tenders kiddos.

They give us hope that the dream is real — that it is possible to grow food in a way that doesn’t exclude our wild relations but invites them in to weave their lives and catch their dinner in the same landscape. And these encounters fuel a purpose to use all tools and powerful means at our disposal to restore and rebuild the homes and the habitats that two centuries of forgetfulness and callousness have destroyed.

Leaving shed for home that evening, we passed the hedgerow lining the path — the baby Oak Trees, the Manzanitas, the Milkweed — and we thought of Wesley’s grand-babies raising their babies someday in a hole under a sprawling Valley Oak tree next to the shed.

Or, if they prefer, the pallets will be there too.

See you in the fields,
David for Kayta, Kate, and Anna

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