8/26/2022 - Week 12 - The Dog Days of Summer

POTATO HARVEST PARTY!

nEXT SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3RD, 9AM

Join us for first big harvest party on the new land and our first big harvest of 2022 — the potatoes! There’s nothing like watching a metric ton of potatoes bloop up out of the ground behind the wake of the tractor, getting dirty, and bagging them with friends. It’s an unforgettable experience, especially for the kiddos, and we hope you’ll join us! All abilities and interests welcome. Feel free to bring non-members. We recommend a sunhat, water bottle, and clothes you don’t mind getting dirty. We’ll have light refreshments, music from the boombox, and a mountain of taters.

THIS WEEK’S HARVEST

Baby Mustard Green and Arugula Salad Mix, Rosaine Little Gems, Head Lettuce, Rainbow Chard, Celery, Hakurei Salad Turnips, Romance Carrots, Lemon Cucumbers, Bridger Yellow Onions, Heirloom Tomatoes, Sweet Peppers, Poblano Peppers, Galia Melons, Summer Squash & Zucchini, Lorz Italian Softneck Garlic

U-PICK

Please remember to check the u-pick board for updated weekly limits before going out to pick

• Albion Strawberries: The triumphant return! | 2 pints per share this week

• Cherry Tomatoes: See week 8’s newsletter for variety descriptions

• Frying Peppers: Shishitos & Padrons | See week 4’s newsletter for harvest and preparation tips

• Buena Mulata, Habanero, and Jalapeño Hot Peppers

• Tomatillos: Located next to the frying peppers

• Herbs: Dill, Thyme, Oregano, Marjoram, 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

• European Corn Borers on Sweet Corn: Last week we forgot to mention that you will likely find a European Corn Borer Caterpillar in your corn! An unfortunate reality of organically grown corn, this little moth grub, while a little gross, is harmless. Don’t let it deter you from this scrumptious sweet corn! Just cut or wash out the eaten part, feed the little grub to the birds, and enjoy your corn!

• Galia Melons: Originally developed by growers in Israel, Galia melons were the first hybrid of intensely perfumed Middle Eastern melons. The Galia melon looks like a cantaloupe on the outside and a honeydew on the inside. Its light green, smooth-textured flesh, and honey sweet.

• Strawberries: They’re back. We watered the heck out of them to encourage more berries so they’re a little more watery this week, but it’s good to see them.

• Abundant Italian Basil, Dill & Cilantro: We are swimming in great basil right now! There is a beautiful patch of new Italian Basil ready for picking on the West side of the garden and with this summer heat the first succession is looking great too! Also check out the newest planting of dill and cilantro also on the West side of the garden (closest to the cherry tomatoes).

WINTER SISTER FARM CSA SIGN-UPS NOW OPEN!

The hottest tickets in town are now on sale — Winter Sister Farm’s 2023 Winter CSA program is now open for registration! Winter Sister Farm, right next door to us, was started by our dear friends Anna and Sarah Dozor. Their CSA runs runs from December through May and includes 24 weeks of specialty winter veggies, flowers, herbs, and more — all picked up by CSA members, free-choice market style, on their beautiful farm here on Cooper Rd! Sign-up today!

FARMER’S LOG

THE DOG DAYS OF SUMMER

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.

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 the great dormant period of our year.

“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: Melons, tomatoes, cucumbers; we are enjoying our first poblanos and sweet peppers; the wild blackberries are laden. In the garden, our first rounds of flowers and herbs are following the wild grasses, tapping out and throwing seed. Even our Jack-O-Lantern pumpkins are calling it a year.

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. Our Hopi Blue corn and Calico Popcorn are in silks, with ears swelling. The jubilant winter squash flowers have metamorphosized — green and gold orbs now swell in the shade of their sun battered leaves. The abundant potato foliage is no more as they’ve completed their growing cycle, the leaves have died back, and their secret orbs now lie curing in the black earth waiting for us to harvest them next Saturday!

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. The deer annihilated a whole patch of Romaine meant for last week’s shares. Gophers take bites out of our drip irrigation lines nightly, seeking the cool water flowing within. 

But the sweet relief of the first Fall rains will come soon enough.

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

8/19/2022 - Week 11 - Falling Into Late Summer

THIS WEEK’S HARVEST

Mustard Mix, Assorted Lettuce, Purple Bok Choi, Dino Kale, Baby Carrots, Sugarloaf Chicories, Bicolor Sweet Corn, Onions, Summer Squash & Zucchini, Persian & Lemon Cucumbers, Sarah’s Choice Cantaloupe, Galia Melons, Tomatoes, Tendersweet Cabbage, Garlic.

U-PICK

Please remember to check the u-pick board for updated weekly limits before going out to pick

• Albion Strawberries: Are back! | 1 pint per share this week

• Pickling Cucumbers: Gleanings | See week 6’s newsletter for harvest and pickling tips

• Cherry Tomatoes: See week 8’s newsletter for variety descriptions

• Amethyst Green Beans: Gleanings

• Frying Peppers: Shishitos & Padrons | See week 4’s newsletter for harvest and preparation tips

• Jalapeño Peppers

• Buena Mulata Hot Peppers: Cayenne type hot pepper | See Week 10’s Newsletter for description

• Tomatillos: Located next to the frying peppers

• Herbs: Dill, Thyme, Oregano, Marjoram, 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

• Bicolor Sweet Corn: Before you do anything to this sweet corn, take a bite of it raw. It’s like candy!

• Galia Melons: Originally developed by growers in Israel, Galia melons were the first hybrid of intensely perfumed Middle Eastern melons. The Galia melon looks like a cantaloupe on the outside and a honeydew on the inside. Its light green, smooth-textured flesh, and honey sweet.

• Abundant Italian Basil, Dill & Cilantro: We are swimming in great basil right now! There is a beautiful patch of new Italian Basil ready for picking on the West side of the garden and with this summer heat the first succession is looking great too! Also check out the newest planting of dill and cilantro also on the West side of the garden (closest to the cherry tomatoes).

• Cherry Tomatoes: 2 pints this week! With this summer heat our tomatoes are finally starting to come in. Gird yourself for the tomato avalanche!

VOLUNTEER WEDNESDAYS

Come work with us! Find us in the garden or fields from 9am - 11am on Wednesday mornings for our standing volunteer morning. We’ll work together on tasks like weeding the garden, deadheading flowers, cleaning garlic. Come hang with your farmers and put your hands in the soil! All ages and abilities welcome!

FARMER’S LOG

FALLING INTO LATE SUMMER

This week was our first week that had at its center a big storage harvest — the cabernet onions for storage — and with this harvest we began of the Fall Phase of our harvest season. As one of our farmer heroes, Dan Kaplan of Brookfield Farm near Amherst, MA, put it, “After a winter of planning. A spring of getting going, plowing, and planting. A summer of crop growing, putting out fires, keeping plants alive, staying hydrated. We arrive to a fall of harvesting, of playing the cards we've been dealt, of reaping what we have sown. Or another way to look at it:  Winter is dreaming and scheming, Spring is action, Summer is fretting, and Fall is acceptance. And that is where we are heading headlong right now. That first hurdle into the bittersweet final place where there's nothing more for us to do, or worrying about — just plain being with what is.”

Here’s what this looked like in the fields!

Monday morning had us doing our usual pre-harvesting for Tuesday — with Lauren, Grace, and Ashlynn going through the cucurbits, tomatoes, and poblanos. We were happy to see the tomatoes coloring up with this nice summer heat. Kayta rested (Monday is her Sunday) while David went to Harmony to get potting soil for a big Fall beet re-seeding (as we didn’t like how our initial seeding took in the Farfield — lots of damping off.) In the afternoon, Grace, Lauren and Ashlynn did a gopher and leak check in the drip tape lines of the u-pick zone, and prepped the 47 beet trays, while David cultivated the pathways of Bolero storage carrots in the Farfield with the electric tractor.

On Tuesday we did our main harvest, washed, Ashlynn ran pick-up, and Grace and Lauren got those 47 trays filled with beet seed!

All five of us spent most of Wednesday in the Farfield, with Lauren on the New Holland making fresh beds for this week’s transplantings and prepping the next block of ground for next week’s plantings, while Ashlynn, Kayta, and Grace hoed the fall storage carrots, chard, and beets, and David on the Kubota mowing down the expired foliage of 3 of our 4 potato varieties to begin the curing process! Potato harvest is imminent! In the afternoon Lauren, Grace, and Ashlynn led the weekly transplanting (Napa cabbage, bok choi, and chicories) while Kayta walked the crops to plan this week’s harvest and David built irrigation lines for fall plantings.

Thursday morning it was back to our normal hot crop harvest routine, with the addition of bulk harvesting rainbow and romance carrots. After lunch Grace and Lauren washed and bagged the roots, did a gopher check, while Ashlynn, David and Kayta harvested this year’s Cabernet storage onions. They looked great… possibly the biggest we’ve every grown of this usually small variety! We paraded them back to the farm from Farfield and spent the rest of the afternoon setting the onion out to cure on tables in the greenhouse Be sure to take a peek in the greenhouse to catch a glimpse of our growing onion hoard — it is a site to behold! Walla Walla onions are up next…

Today, Friday, we all harvested the fresh crops for tomorrow’s pickup (hello, sweet corn and Galia melons!). After lunch, Grace and Lauren put the last trellis line up on the cherry tomatoes, set gopher traps and weeded problem spots around the garden, while Kayta did the week’s direct seeding (arugula, mustard greens, daikon radish) and row covered them in the Farfield. We finished the day with a comprehensive walk around the farm to plan for next week, onion cleaning, and prep for Saturday CSA pickup!

That’s the roundup of a great, late summer week on the farm that felt and tasted like summer and saw the first of our big fall harvests rolling back to the greenhouse from whence they came in the spring.

We hope you enjoy the bounty!

See you in the fields,
David & Kayta

8/13/2022 - Week 10 - Farming in the Aftermath Redux

THIS WEEK’S HARVEST

Arugula, Mustard Mix, Cegolaine Little Gem Lettuce, Magenta Summer Crisp Lettuce, Red Butter Lettuce, Red Russian Kale, Komatsuna, Poblano Peppers, Rainbow Carrots, Multicolored Beets, Fresh Torpedo and Walla Walla Sweet Onions, Summer Squash & Zucchini, Persian & Lemon Cucumbers, Sarah’s Choice Cantaloupe, Early Tomatoes (limited)

U-PICK

Please remember to check the u-pick board for updated weekly limits before going out to pick

• Albion Strawberries: Rehabilitation in progress, still only enough for everyone to have a snack this week

• Pickling Cucumbers: Likely the last week! | See week 6’s newsletter for harvest and pickling tips

• Cherry Tomatoes: See week 8’s newsletter for variety descriptions

• Amethyst Green Beans: Likely the last week

• Frying Peppers: Shishitos & Padrons | See week 4’s newsletter for harvest and preparation tips

• Jalapeño Peppers

• 🌟Buena Mulata Hot Peppers: See below for tips

• 🌟Tomatillos: Located next to the frying peppers

• Herbs: Dill, Thyme, Oregano, Marjoram, 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

Fresh Torpedo Onions: These onions are mild and delicate. Use like a normal onion or try slicing very thin and using raw.

Sarah’s Choice Cantaloupes: The best cantaloupe variety there is… period.

Poblano Peppers: The poblano chili pepper is the beloved mild chili, originating in the state of Puebla, Mexico that when dried it is called “ancho” or chili ancho and when roasted and stuffed with cheese becomes the magnificent chili relleno. This week will be offering the first taste of these wonderful peppers.

Buena Mulata Peppers: We're excited to introduce these gorgeous and new-to-us peppers. Seeds came from Truelove Seeds, a farm-based seed company specializing in culturally important seeds. Here's how they describe this pepper and its story:

"Beautiful, spicy, and flavorful cayenne pepper that starts purple and then passes through salmon and orange on the way to turning a gorgeous red. The tall striking plants are laden with 4-5 inch fruits, which are tasty at all stages, but we prefer the added sweetness of the fully red fruit.

Buena Mulata Pepper was the name on the baby food jar next to the name "Pippin" in the bottom of the deep freezer in William Woys Weaver's grandmother's basement, a decade after his plant-loving grandfather's untimely death. If you've heard of the Fish Pepper, this story probably sounds familiar. There were many other seeds besides those of the beautiful, delicious, and now widely-available Fish Pepper in that frozen trove, and many that passed through Horace Pippin's hands, including this Buena Mulata. Horace Pippin is now a well-known artist who beautifully depicted everyday life, landscapes, religion, WWI, and themes of the injustices of slavery and segregation. In the 1940s, he traded seeds from his friends in the Black catering communities of Philly and Baltimore in exchange for bee sting therapy for WWI arm injury from William Woys Weaver's grandfather H. Ralph Weaver's hives. Seeds stay viable longer in the freezer; our heirlooms only survive if someone removes them from storage and places them in soil; and stories only live when they are told."

As they ripen to red, Buena Mulata develop a sweetness in addition to their spice. They're particularly great for making beautiful pickles or drying to crush into pepper flakes or powder.

VOLUNTEER WEDNESDAYS

Come work with us! Find us in the garden or fields from 9am - 11am on Wednesday mornings for our standing volunteer morning. We’ll work together on tasks like weeding the garden, deadheading flowers, cleaning garlic. Come meet your farmers and put your hands in the soil! All ages and abilities welcome!

FARMER’S LOG

FARMING IN THE AFTERMATH REDUX

We have family visiting this weekend, so this week we wanted to revisit a newsletter from August 2020 on what our farm might look like, and how it would have to change, in an “apocalyptic” scenario.

* * * * *

Whether evoked by current events or not, apocalyptic reveries are, it seems, a recurring obsession of human imagination across cultures. Why? Perhaps because they tell us about ourselves in the present. Imagining an extreme future holds up a mirror. What is important to us? What is essential? What are we afraid of? And what luxuries do we take for granted? 

Assuming we were all still here and had to eat, how would our farm have to change and adapt after the breakdown of most or all of the supply chains that sustain it now? 

We tossed this admittedly fantastical subject around and the conversation was illuminating — not as exercise in science fiction or doomsday thinking, but because it taught us about the farm now.

The subjects we honed in on were seeds, manure, labor and motive power. 

SEEDS

Seed saving is a beautiful task. You lovingly grow something until it matures. You select the most beautiful and store it with care. You give some to friends. The seed ties you to past seasons — to past generations — to time itself. You repeat the cycle — a cycle of love and discipline — each year.

We save some seed at Green Valley Community Farm. We’ve been saving the Hopi Blue Corn seed we plant for several years now. We’ve been saving our big Lorz Garlic seed for 5 season now — and generally they look better and better every harvest. We’ve occasionally saved seed potato. Kayta has been saving several flower seeds from the garden: Nigella, hollyhock, agrostemma — last year, Sora, Ahn, and Tuli helped gather the celosia you see blooming today. 

But most of the vegetables we grow we do not save seed from. Why?

First, time and space management. Seed saving is a meticulous, labor intensive craft and takes special equipment. Seed saving also ties up field space as you must allow lettuce, for example, to grow, flower, and make seed a month and a half after the delicious head has passed. We pay other farmers for seeds because then we can devote more of our limited space and time to the food part of farming.

Secondly, saving our own seed would mean we couldn’t offer nearly the diversity we do. This is because of cross pollination. The cross pollination of two different varieties of the same species creates a vigorous hybrid that is often not yummy to eat. The carefully isolated genetics in open-pollinated food crops is why a lot of heirloom varieties have place names. Marina di Chioggia winter squash, for example, comes from a certain region of Italy. People from that region started to fall in love with a certain sweet pumpkin. Farmers grew fields of them in isolated patches, and slowly the region developed a fairly consistent strain of squash that became a local staple. If we saved seed from our Marina di Chioggia squash, which is currently being grown next to 8 other varieties of winter squash originating from other other regions, what we would get would end up next year would possibly be bitter, hard skinned, and ugly!  

A luxuriously modern salad nicoise spread with farm fresh tomatoes, vinegared daikon, beets and carrots; Amethyst green beans with fresh basil, garlic, and balsamic; new potatoes with garden fresh dill; Persian cucumber salad; all over Magenta romaine lettuce and arugula.

So the vast, and relatively affordable modern seed exchange we have access to allows us to grow 10 different brassica varieties in the same field at the same time. GVCFarm is very much a product of modern times in this way. We take advantage of our access to a world library of seeds at our fingertips to grow an extreme amount of diversity in our fields. In this way we are deeply connected to myriad regions, farms, and farm workers devoted to growing vegetable seeds for market farmers like us. 

After the apocalypse we’d have to focus. We’d have to drop sweet corn in favor of massive field of hardy Hopi Blue to feed us through the winter. We’d have to choose a brassica, possibly a hardy turnip to harvest both for storage and for cooking greens. We’d gather tomatoes from the healthiest Aunt Ruby’s German Green. We’d let those tomatoes rot and ferment. We’d dry the seeds and store them away safe. We’d trade with neighbors growing a different tomato.

If you could only pick one squash to save in your family for generations, which seed would you start with?

MANURE

But before we even thought about planting seeds we’d be thinking about poop. 

Similar to seeds, a functional modern supply chain gives modern farmers like us cheap and easy access to fertility. For a very reasonable price, you can go to a warehouse in Roseland, or call up Adam in Cloverdale, and within 24 hours get 24 tons of compost delivered to your fields; or 500 lbs of the dried, processed, neatly packaged, and potent manure of Petaluma chickens loaded into the back of your truck.

This is all because of cheap energy, which we will get to next.  

In the olden times, or the end times as it were, the amount of energy involved in mixing that compost (Caterpillar D9’s) or processing and shipping that chicken manure, would not be possible. Indeed, a post apocalyptic Green Valley Community Farmers would need to devote much more time and energy to manure.

We would capture human manure in carefully managed composting toilets that we’d spread on fields and pastures (after a long ferment for sure). In fact, we would encourage, possible demand that you, dear members, donate some of your own manure! We would trade our neighbors handsomely for cow manure, and each month venture into their meadows with a giant pooper scooper, harvesting the fertile gold.

In order to sustain the level of vegetable production we do, we would need many more human hands managing many more animals, and their manures, and funneling them into piles and then into the fields. We would all miss our clothes washing machines greatly. 

LABOR AND MOTIVE POWER

We never think apoco-thoughts more viscerally than during power outages. For a farm reliant on electric power to irrigate — if feels a little bit like having a knife to your throat. 100 degree heat, no electricity, and a field of baby brassicas = not comfortable. We have a generator (as of this week) in for those emergencies, but in our imagined future we’d have no fossil fuels to power that generator.

That’s where things get really interesting. Indeed, our farm — and our society — without fossil fuels would be hard to recognize.

For starters, all of our irrigation would be done with lower powered solar pumps. Without access to plastic and aluminum irrigation supplies we would likely have to flood irrigate, as so many of our ancestral cultures did, releasing water down careful canals shaped in the fields. Because this method of irrigation would limit the crops amenable to this arid climate, gone would be the lettuce and arugula of August, relegated now, perhaps, to a short fling of succulent greens in the early Spring. We would forage for our greens and herbs in the creek beds and wetlands. Our fields would focus on the hardy, deep rooted staples amendable to flood irrigation and dry summers: Potatoes, corn, winter squash… some hardy roots. We would plant fruit and nut trees and look to the indigenous people and the indigenous foodways of California. We would tend oaks religiously. 

When we did prep a valley field for food, we would all do it together. Gone would be the luxury of a Kubota doing the day’s work of a village in one hour. Green Valley Community Farm members would become Green Valley Community Farm farmers. The horse and mule and donkey would rule again. 

The reason why 95% of humans were, before the industrial revolution, involved in agriculture is because that is how many human bodies and human hands it takes to tend landscapes without fossil power.  

IN CONCLUSION

It struck us, in the carrots, tossing around this imagined future both how close and how far we are from it.

Our modern luxuries can feel like a thick, insurmountable wall between us and both the pain and, possibly, the deliverance of this kind of future. 

In reality, these luxuries are only a thin veil between this paradise and hell. Perhaps, by recognizing the tenuousness of this veil, we can glean its lessons and spur our technologies and actions toward paradise — toward simplicity, grace, and balance.

See you in the fields.
David for Kayta