THIS WEEK’S HARVEST
Cipollini Onions, Sunrise Carrots, Easter Egg Radishes, Garlic, Fennel, Olympian Cucumbers, Summer Squash & Zucchini, Dino Kale, Supernova Lettuce Mix, Mei Qing Bok Choi, Kohlrabi, Scallions, Arugula, and Mustard Mix
We hope you feel like this froggy in the garden this week. (Photo by CSA member Kim LaVere)
U-PICK
Albion Strawberries
Jalapeño Peppers
Frying Peppers: Shishitos and Padróns (see last week’s Newsletter for harvest and cooking tips
Herbs: Dill, Thyme, Oregano, Marjoram, Italian Parsley, Tarragon, Onion Chives, Garlic Chives, Vietnamese Coriander, Culinary Lavender, Culinary Sage, French Sorrel, Lemon Verbena, Cilantro, Tulsi, Various Mints, Catnip, Chamomile, Purple Basil, Genovese Basil, Thai Basil
Flowers!
HARVEST NOTES
Frying Peppers: Every year we grow two different varieties of these beloved peppers. Both are incredibly delicious fried in hot olive oil until browned, sometimes with a dash of lemon or smoked paprika, and always with a liberal sprinkle of salt. Because of their differing thicknesses, we recommend frying them separately so as to get each variety perfectly done. A plate of just-off-the-stove frying peppers is an irresistible appetizer or snack.
Shishitos: these Japanese frying peppers are long and wrinkled with delicate, thin walls. Best picked between 3-4” long, they are almost never spicy, and will eventually ripen to a sweet red. Also incredible as tempura.
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.
Scallions: We’ll have another appearance of our beautiful Guardsman Scallions in the share this week. If you’re looking for some inspiration, and have time for a project, try these deliciously layered and flaky Chinese Scallion Pancakes!
Scallion Pancakes recipe
By Sue Li, FROM BON APPETIT
Ingredients
Makes 8 Servings
PANCAKES
2½ cups all-purpose flour, plus more for surface
Kosher salt
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
⅓ cup chicken fat, warmed, or vegetable oil
2 bunches scallions, thinly sliced (about 2 cups) — (or 1 bunch of our giant scallions)
8 tablespoons vegetable oil, divided, plus more for brushing
SAUCE
3 tablespoons unseasoned rice vinegar
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 teaspoon chili oil
½ teaspoon sugar
¼ teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
Preparation
PANCAKES
Step 1
Whisk 2½ cups flour and 1 tsp. salt in a large bowl. Mix in sesame oil and 1 cup boiling water with a wooden spoon until a shaggy dough forms.
Step 2
Turn out dough onto a lightly floured surface and knead, adding flour as needed to prevent sticking, until dough is smooth, about 5 minutes. Cover; let rest at room temperature 1 hour.
Step 3
Divide dough into 8 pieces. Working with one at a time, roll out on a lightly floured work surface as thin as possible (each should be approximately 10" in diameter). Brush about 2 tsp. chicken fat on dough and top with about ¼ cup scallions; season with salt. Roll dough away from you (like a jelly roll) into a thin cylinder, then, starting at 1 end, wind roll onto itself to create a coil (like a cinnamon roll). Cover and repeat with remaining dough. Let rest at room temperature 15 minutes.
Step 4
Working with 1 coil at a time, roll out on a lightly floured surface to a 5" round (keep other coils covered). Repeat with remaining dough and stack as you go, separating with parchment or lightly greased foil brushed with vegetable oil.
Step 5
Heat 1 Tbsp. vegetable oil in a medium skillet over medium-low. Working with one at a time, cook pancake, turning frequently to prevent scallions from burning, until golden brown and crisp on both sides and cooked through, 8–10 minutes. Transfer pancakes to a wire rack and let rest about 5 minutes before cutting into wedges.
SAUCE
Step 6
Whisk vinegar, soy sauce, chili oil, sugar, and red pepper flakes in a small bowl until sugar is dissolved. Serve alongside pancakes for dipping.
Agrostemma, Chamomile and Cosmos in the garden.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
People sometimes asks what happens to leftover WCCFarm food at the end of pick-ups. We’re so happy that for the last few 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, Kim and Laura, and everyone at Food For Thought!
FARMER’S LOG
VEGGIE CHOREOGRAPHY
We had a great, productive week out here in the fields! A big chunk of time was aimed at trellising our “how-did-you-get-so-big!?” tomato plants. We weeded our storage onion pathways and hand weeded our second succession of carrots. We set up an irrigation block for our 3rd and final fall storage carrot (and beet) beds across the creek. And on Thursday we transplanted our 3rd and final Fall cabbage patch and seeded our 5th of 13 arugula and mustard greens beds.
Sometimes people are curious, "How do you know what to plant and when?"
Crop planning, as we call it, looks different on every farm, here’s a little rundown of how it works at WCCF…
Working Backwards
Every Winter, since 2016, Kayta and I hone examples of the harvest shares we want to have for people in the Spring, Summer, and Fall. That goes something like…
“Well, we gotta have alliums every week. What’s life without alliums?”
“And snack crops! The kiddos gotta have snacks!”
“Lettuce and carrots = always.”
“And fancy salad greens too”
“Yeah, and some sort of hearty green 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 harvests, we work backwards. Using harvest and planting logs (and memories) from seasons past regarding yields and how much people took, and taking into account each crop’s “days to maturity", heat and frost sensitivities, yield expectations, things like that, we can deduce a pretty good idea of how many seeds to sow in the greenhouse and fields and when.
A Dance of Time Scales
When things are sown so we have it when we want it depends on each individual 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 150 ft bed feet 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 much larger harvest window (meaning we can harvest off the same planting for over a month). So for carrots we sow 3 larger blocks, the first on April 24th, and the last in mid-July, and that will give us fresh bunched and loose carrots all the way until mid-December. On the long 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 in the Fall.
And so it goes that each Spring we embark with a neat greenhouse sowing and field planting schedule — a musical score to a carefully choreographed dance with the time-scales of plants. These schedules become the drum-beat of our weeks and eventually become the harvest shares you see each week!
Farfield (aka Food Field) across the creek with this year’s potato crop, storage onions, and dried corn and winter squash (not pictured).
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 of crop planning— namely the note taking and record keeping — begins. What actually happened? How many bed-feet of cabbage were transplanted? How much cabbage did we harvest and 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. 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 (and previous years) to estimate how many bins to harvest. We also look at crops we’ve just finished harvesting from. Every year, for example, it seems we are uber rich in lettuce right around the summer solstice because of how quickly it grows. So we will adjust our future plantings down a notch around then and increase back to normal as the light fades.
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.
Painting with Seeds
But the “art” and the heart of crop planning for us is in taking all of this business 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, 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 our 400 row, 60 column “2022 Crop Plan.xlsx”!
Thanks to a little help from our friends...
See you in the fields,
David and Kayta
