IN THE FLOWERS
This Week’s Flower Challenge: This week’s challenge comes to you from crew member Sophia Pruden!
Sophia has blessed us his year with her incredible enthusiasm, company and hard work. If you have eaten our garlic, you have her to thank for cleaning it. Her weekly care has kept the water flowing to our flowers and strawberries, as she patches the leaks constantly being chewed in the drip-tape by thirsty critters. Her help is the reason the garden is so lush and abundant even now as we head into the end of the season. In addition to working at Green Valley, she is a student at Sonoma State, where she manages their organic garden.
Sophia’s challenge: Make a bouquet based on a favorite painting. Sophia’s inspiration is “The Kiss” by Gustav Klimt, a brilliant choice for the garden this time of year — rife with rich yellows and golds. If you look carefully you’ll notice how she brought in each of the colors in the painting (the asparagus greens for the grass in the bottom, the reds and purples in the details of the dress, and the pale white gold celosia as the white rectangles in the robe), and how she chose flowers of different shapes and textures to mirror Klimt’s fascinating use of decorative shapes within the painting.
Sophia’s bouquet includes Amaranth, Bachelor’s Buttons, Rudbeckia, Zinnias, Celosia, Purple Basil, Asparagus, Strawflower, Verbena, Coreopsis, Gomphrena, and Scabiosa.
IN THE HERBS
Parsley, Oregano, Marjoram, Thyme, Chives & Garlic Chives, Lemon Balm, Lemon Verbena, Tulsi Basil, Mints, Italian Basil, Purple Basil, Thai Basil, Cilantro, Anise Hyssop, Tarragon, Vietnamese Cilantro, Sorrel, Husk Cherries, Lemongrass.
Herb Spotlight: While some of the herbs are winding down for the season, we have a couple fresh plantings just ready for picking - one of Cilantro and one of Parsley. You’ll find them in the beds above and just to the right of the picnic table.
WINTER SISTER FARM SIGN UPS OPEN!
Our dear friend and former employee Anna Dozor, and her sister Sarah, are deep into their first harvest season on their new farm in South Sebastopol. They are offering a winter CSA program of 24 weeks of delicious, lovingly grown winter fair (think dried beans, cabbage, winter squash, potatoes, dried flowers, herbs, and more). We HIGHLY recommend getting on board what will be a truly special winter of local produce. Spots are limited, so sign up fast!
a couple notes
Garlic: We are down to our last few pounds of garlic available for sale! If you were still hoping to get some now is the time as it will be first come first serve until we run out.
Clippers: Our small orange and black garden clippers are in scarce supply. If you’ve accidentally made your way home with some please try to bring them along with you next time you come to the farm.
FARMER’S LOG
Rest assured that your Green Valley Community Farmers are making sure that our vegetable CSA program will be back up and running next year. We’ll let you know when sign-ups open this winter.
For this week’s newsletter we’ll leave you with a Newsletter from last fall, to whet your appetite for bounteous vegetables in 2022. We’re excited to turn the page on this dry dry year and get to planting food again.
TURN! TURN! TURN!
9/18/20
It struck me today how the tasks of pulling off the farm year harmonize with the seasons in such a way that it always seems like there is just enough time to accomplish what needs to be accomplished by the skin on our chinny-chin-chins.
The Byrds were right: To everything, there is a season.
In the Spring, you aren’t harvesting yet so you have all the time in all the medium-length days to prep the canvas and plant out the farm; to expand the propagation zone and build new irrigation systems; to fix gates; to seed 60 trays a week in the greenhouse; to pot up tomatoes, to stake tomatoes, to trellis tomatoes; to mow cover crop and turn soil and shape beds and plant! plant! plant!
Then harvest seasons starts and two, then three, then then four days of the week are consumed with reaping the fruit of Spring’s labor. You put down the hammer and take up the harvest knife. All other projects cease. Planting and harvesting are your life — some weeding if you’re lucky. The days are at their longest. If there is ever a time to be harvesting 1,000+ pounds of cucumbers, tomatoes and squash in the morning, prepping and planting out half mile in the afternoon, it is when there is 16 hours of daylight.
Before you know it, it’s late Summer. The tomatoes start exploding, the cucumbers already are, you’re still planting like crazy and then the melons come in — and just when you think you’ll break, that there isn’t enough time in the day, you scroll down on your crop plan and you see that plantings are nearly done. No more compost spreading; no more bed shaping; greenhouse seedings shrink. You plant the last Fall brassicas in the field, the tractor sits quiet for a minute, and you can spend all day amongst the vines and in the cooler playing Tetris with boxes of Summer fruit.
Then comes the Autumnal Equinox.
The tomatoes are still pumping and the potatoes and winter squash start to die back; the corn fills out, crisps up. The big harvests are coming. Space needs to be cleared. Winter is just around the corner so you need to establish garlic and strawberries for next year; mow and hold over spent beds, lime new fields, and get ready for cover cropping — and just when you think you’ll break, that there isn’t enough time in the shortening days the heat ebbs, the tomatoes start to show signs of slowing down. A light frost will soon roll through the farm. Smiling friends will come to help you harvest your winter squash. Chilling morning air goes down like a draught of ambrosia. You seed the last lettuce of the season. You have a moment sit down and calculate your garlic seed and cover crop order.
All this is why you won’t ever hear a farmer say, “Shucks! Summer is over.” We are greedy for the turnings. We love nothing more than a first harvest. But first tomato harvest glory fades under the weight of tomato crates and we crave cold hands and cozy coats and the crisp snap of the stem of a plump radicchio glowing in morning sun. Lucky for us, when scolding kiddos for running through the corn becomes sad and hackneyed, Autumn comes, and we can yell, “Come! Knock it down! Gather armfuls of cobs!”
Change is our tonic — one of the great sustaining elixirs of farm life.
Soon, Winter will come. It’s so close now we can almost taste it. The rains will fall and we will turn in — to rest, rejuvenation, and internality. We’ll clean up our books, do our taxes; we’ll look back on the year and create next year’s crop plan and next year’s budget. We’ll open CSA sign-ups. We’ll look at spreadsheets, sit, think, build, fix things, and sleep.
But ample sleep turns into insomnia; too much internality into angst. We will get pudgy, our harvest muscles will atrophy, and we will forget for what we are doing out in the wet and the cold — and just when we think we’ll break, that there is too much open-endedness in the too short days, the sun will return. We will hear the Swainson’s Thrush calling us, beckoning us, “Come out! Build it up again! Plant! Turn! Turn! Turn!”
See you in the fields,
David and Kayta
