8/26/2021 - Work Song

Can you feel it? Fall is in the misty morning air this week.

IN THE FLOWERS

This Week’s Flower Challenge: We just can’t get enough of dried flowers. This week’s challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to make a garlic braid filled to the brim with color from the garden. Garlic braids are quite simple to make (check out this tutorial if you’d like a little guidance) and adding dried flowers turns them into a swoon-worthy gift.

Start by making a collection of drying flowers in the garden. Consider your color scheme: all yellows, all pinks, a funfetti free for all, or a rainbow working from top to bottom? Want your braid to turn into a full-fledged bouquet at the top? Awesome. Then assemble your supplies. We’ll be selling cleaned garlic with its tops intact for a slightly reduced price in the barn right next to our usual, ready-for-use garlic. You’ll want a little bit of biodegradable jute twine, or, if you’re feeling brave, long stringy weeds for tying your braid at the beginning and end (fun fact: the arrangement on the left below is held together by dead bindweed). Then go to town! We find garlic braid making to be a wonderful group activity. Have a party and send everyone home with their very own garlic braid!

On the left: a bouquet for drying in a color-scheme we can get over. On the right: a garlic braid featuring Celosia, Gomphrena, Statice and Strawflower.

IN THE HERBS

• Oregano, Marjoram, Thyme, Chives & Garlic Chives, Lemon Balm, Lemon Verbena, Chamomile, Tulsi Basil, Purple & Green & Bi-color Shiso (aka Perilla), Mints, Italian Basil, Purple Basil, Thai Basil, Cilantro Flowers, Dill Flowers, Anise Hyssop, Sage, Tarragon, and Vietnamese Cilantro, Culinary Sage, Sorrel, Husk Cherries, Lemongrass.

Herb Spotlight: Have you noticed the lush green grass sprouting between the lemon balm and the garlic chives? If you did you could be forgiven for thinking it was a weed. But all this season it’s been secretly transforming sunlight into fragrant green stalks of Lemongrass! And now the moment has come to harvest it. To harvest, cut or snap off a thick stalk at its base like in the picture below. If you’re unfamiliar with lemongrass, check out this helpful primer on cooking with it that includes links to several Thai and Vietnamese recipes. After using the thick, more tender base, the tops can be made into a delicious tea.

FAQ

• When does the CSA end? Exact dates are TBD, depending on the weather. The flower and herb garden will starting winding down in October and we’ll put her to bed in November. But expect some good blooms all the way til then. The strawberries will usually wrap up a little earlier, producing through the end of September.

• If I go away can a friend use my share? Yes! If you’ll be out of town or unable to come pick strawbs and flowers, feel free to send a friend or relative in your stead. Please verbally orient them as to the directions and how things work as we are not always around.

FARMER’S LOG

Work Song Part II - A Vision (Epilogue)
by Wendell Berry

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it…
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
there, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides…

The river will run
clear, as we will never know it…
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.

The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields…
Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom

and indwelling light.

This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its reality.

————

See you in the fields,
David & Kayta

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8/20/2021 - Goldenrod

IN THE FLOWERS

This Week’s Flower Challenge: This week in addition to your usual bouquet consider picking a bunch of drying flowers! Check them all out in the picture below! The garden is currently bursting with them.

Pro-tip: Pick a single-type of drying flower to display all together, or to arrange in bouquets or wreaths later, or pick a varied bouquet of drying flowers that you can dry all together. For the best color, and to keep those stems straight, make a tight bunch (twist ties are great for this and can be found in the clipper basket in the barn) and hang upside down in a cool, dry place until they set.

Beautiful hand modeling by crew member Sophia.

Pictured above from left to right.

• Top row: 5 colors of Statice, Ecchinacea, Fama Scabiosa seedhead, Breadseed Poppy pod, Pincushion Scabiosa seedhead, Flamingo Feather Celosia, Temple Bells Celosia, Pampas Plume Celosia.

• Middle row: 9 colors of Strawflower, 5 colors of Yarrow, Nigella seed pods, Veronica seeds, 2 colors of Xeranthemum (Immortelle), 3 colors of Marigolds.

• Bottom row: 6 colors of Gomphrena, Monarda seedhead, Baby’s Breath, Verbena, Godetia pods, and Amaranth.

IN THE HERBS

• Oregano, Marjoram, Thyme, Chives & Garlic Chives, Lemon Balm, Lemon Verbena, Chamomile, Tulsi Basil, Purple & Green & Bi-color Shiso (aka Perilla), Mints, Italian Basil, Purple Basil, Thai Basil, Cilantro Flowers, Dill Flowers, Anise Hyssop, Sage, Tarragon, and Vietnamese Cilantro, Culinary Sage, Sorrel, Husk Cherries.

Herb Spotlight: The next time you’re in the garden, stop for a little snack at the Husk Cherry bed below the Celosia and above the thornless blackberries. These little berries go by many names including Cape Gooseberry and Ground Cherry. They are closely related to Tomatillos and have been said to taste like a tropical combination of orange and tomato. To find a ripe Husk Cherry, look for golden, papery skins. Inside the fruit should be golden yellow. Ripe fruit are usually carpeting the ground underneath the plants and are protected by their papery wrappers. Enjoy!

On the left: ripe Husk Cherries — the golden color of the berry on the bottom right is what you’re looking for. On the left: a new succession of Cupcake Cosmos! This elegant variety is reminiscent of Icelandic Poppies or the crinkled wrappers of cupcakes and make a delicious bouquet ingredient.

FARMER’S LOG

Today we’ll leave you with a poem. We hope that the garden, and the bees, and the goldenrod bursting into bloom in the hedgerow by the strawberry field has for a moment pulled you into the joyousness of sharing this earth, this moment, with all these other beings.

Goldenrod

By Mary Oliver

 On roadsides,
  in fall fields,
      in rumpy bunches,
          saffron and orange and pale gold, 

in little towers,
  soft as mash,
      sneeze-bringers and seed-bearers,
          full of bees sand yellow beads and perfect flowerlets 

and orange butterflies.
  I don’t suppose
      much notice comes of it, except for honey,
           and how it heartens the heart with its 

blank blaze.
  I don’t suppose anything loves it, except, perhaps,
      the rocky voids
          filled by its dumb dazzle. 

For myself,
  I was just passing by, when the wind flared
      and the blossoms rustled,
          and the glittering pandemonium 

leaned on me.
  I was just minding my own business
      when I found myself on their straw hillsides,
          citron and butter-colored, 

and was happy, and why not?
  Are not the difficult labors of our lives
      full of dark hours?
          And what has consciousness come to anyway, so far, 

that is better than these light-filled bodies?
  All day
       on their airy backbones
           they toss in the wind, 

they bend as though it was natural and godly to bend,
  they rise in a stiff sweetness,
      in the pure peace of giving
           one’s gold away.

See you in the fields,
David and Kayta

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8/13/2021 - The Dog Days of Summer

IN THE FLOWERS

This Week’s Flower Challenge: This week, try putting herbs in your bouquet! “You can do that!?” Yes, and they can really put a bouquet over the edge into the sublime — and then you can eat that sublimity. Check out the bouquet below which features chive flowers, purple and green basil foliage and flowers, delicate flowering cilantro, borage, and nasturtium.

A flower bouquet heavy on the herbs

IN THE HERBS

• Oregano, Marjoram, Thyme, Chives & Garlic Chives, Lemon Balm, Lemon Verbena, Chamomile, Tulsi Basil, Purple & Green & Bi-color Shiso (aka Perilla), Mints, Italian Basil, Purple Basil, Thai Basil, Cilantro Flowers, Dill Flowers, Anise Hyssop, Sage, Tarragon, and Vietnamese Cilantro, Culinary Sage, Sorrel

Herb Challenge: This would be a wonderful week to make pesto! Our first basil succession is in flower but can still be put to delicious use in pesto, and the plants would really thank us for a good cutting back. Feel free to take a significant amount (it’s great frozen!).

A beautiful evening to get lost in the flowers

FARMER’S LOG

THE DOG DAYS OF SUMMER: Reposted from early August, 2020

The sun beats down, the hills are bleached gold, and the wind blows hot… the dog days of summer are here.

The term “dog days”, for the late summer, traces back to the ancient Mediterranean, where people connected the night sky return of the brightest star, Canis Majoris (aka Sirius, aka “Orion’s Dog”), to the sultry days of late July-August when, as Virgil said, “the Dog-star cleaves the thirsty ground.” These ancient people associated the dog days with fever, bad luck, and heat.

Illustration by Kayta for Richard Vacha’s book The Heart of Tracking.

As Marin naturalist and tracker Richard Vacha brilliantly observes of our own Mediterranean climate in his book The Heart of Tracking, the dog days can be a raucous, frolicking time for wild canines as they feast on the fattened prey and tree fruit of summer and as canine pups leave the den and come into their own. (Perhaps this is the wild origin of the naming of the star?)

But, in Mediterranean climates like ours, the dog days are also a scarce time, a spent time. They are the beginning of a great dry down and a great dormancy.

“For an animal,” Vacha writes, the late-Summer-early-Fall “can be as tough to endure as an East Coast winter. Food is scarce, water is scarce, and green vegetation is crowded into riparian corridors, drawing the animals that depend on these resources closer together. The animals who prey upon them have shifted correspondingly. Territorial patterns are all in great flux as the expansive cycle of the summer season slowly winds down.”

On the farm, this shift into the dog days — their abundance and scarcity — has been clear.

Our harvests are more and more heavy with fruit: Cucumbers, squash, eggplant; the first poblanos and sweet peppers are on their way; we picked the first few field heirloom tomatoes this week; our first melons are swelling; the wild blackberries are laden. In the garden the first flowers and herbs are following the wild grasses, tapping out and throwing seed. Even our Jack-O-Lantern pumpkins are turning from green to orange.

In our staple field crops, if July was an outward explosion of verdant green growth, the dog days are the beginning of a hunkering down, a drawing nigh, a focused inward stare toward the serious work of setting fruit, forming bulbs and tubers, and setting seed. The corn is tassling. The jubilant winter squash flowers are beginning to wilt and metamorphosize — green and gold orbs now swell in the shade of sun battered leaves. The potato flowers are beginning to pop and with them the plants will now look to swelling their secret orbs in the black earth.

Field 4 in the Dog Days of summer 2020

And as the wildland plants dry out and are scorched to gold, her wild inhabitants turn more and more to the farm — an irrigated green oasis — for moisture and succulent meals. The wild turkeys and their fluffy younglings visit the fields every morning and evening, snipping off hydrating bits of lettuce and broccoli leaves. They annihilated a whole patch of Romaine in just one evening this week. Song birds are raiding the greenhouse now, right on schedule, eating juicy germinating beets and Fall chicories. Gophers take bites out of our drip irrigation lines nightly, seeking the cool water flowing within. 

The sweet relief of the first Fall rains will come to us all sooner than we think. Until then, keep cool, move slow, and enjoy the fruitful abundance of the dog days of summer.

See you in the fields,
David & Kayta

“Fox in a Coyote Bush” illustration by Kayta from The Heart of Tracking by Richard Vacha from Mount Vision Press

See you in the fields,
David and Kayta

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