THIS WEEK’S HARVEST
In a nutshell: Peak sugar snap peas are exploding while the flowers keep on rolling along with the first taste of cool summer cucumbers, dill and cilantro.
Lettuce Mix, Mustard Mix, Cegolaine Little Gems, Red Butter Lettuce, Baby Romaine Lettuce, Dino Kale, Komatsuna, French Breakfast Radishes, Kohlrabi, Corinto Cucumbers, Green Zucchini and Yellow Crookneck Squash, Scallions, Mokum Carrots
U-PICK
Albion Strawberries | 2 pints per share: There are two strawberry patches open for picking this year. Looks like the second year strawberries (closer to the flower garden) are a little more prolific this week, but new patch is worth a visit.
Sugar Snap Peas | 3 pint per share: Read below for important tip
Herbs: Cilantro, Dill, Italian Basil, Thai Basil, Tulsi Basil, Chamomile, Parsley, Onion Chives, Garlic Chives, Tarragon, Oregano, Marjoram, Culinary Sage, Lemon Balm, Lemon Verbena, Vietnamese Coriander, Shiso (Perilla), Culinary Lavender, French Sorrel, Borage, Violas, Calendula, Nasturtium / Thyme and Mints are taking a break to regrow a bit.
Flowers! Too many to list…
HARVEST NOTES
Sugar Snap Peas: The sugar snap peas are exploding this week. Pro-tip: Go to the areas less travelled to find the jackpots. If the plants are leaning into the pathway, just gently push them aside to walk past them. Also, pick the fattest pods to find the sweetest peas.
Cilantro and Dill: Look for the colored stakes on the west side of the garden to find these lush happy herbs. The plants are still a bit small so harvest, but take it easy on them this week.
His Royal Highness, the Prince of West County Community Farm, Froggy McFroggertons VIII | Photo by CSA member Erin Wong.
FARM ORIENTATION TOURS FOR NEW MEMBERS
All new members are asked to attend a brief orientation tour their first time picking up their harvest share. We’ll give you your farm tote bags, show you ropes in the flower and herb garden and the strawberry patch, and go over farm safety and common questions.
WEEK 3 TOUR TIMES: Saturday, 9 am, 11am, 1pm and Tuesday, 1 pm, 3 pm, and 5:30 pm
CSA BASICS
What time is harvest pick-up?:
Saturday harvest pick-ups run from 9:00 am - 2:00 pm
Tuesday harvest pick-ups will run from 1:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Oriented members can come to the farm any time, 7 days a week, sunrise to sunset, to u-pick and enjoy the farm.
2023 CSA program dates: Our harvest season will run this year from June 24th - December 19th
Where is the farm? The member parking lot is located at 1720 Cooper Rd., Sebastopol, CA 95472.
Where should I park?: Follow our sign on Cooper Rd. down a short gravel driveway. Please find a parking spot under the solar panels to your left, or up against the straw bales further down.
Where is the food?: The produce pick-up barn is just to the right of the solar panels and above our big greenhouse. You can’t miss it!
What should I bring?:
Former members, please bring your WCCF tote bag! (New members will be given a new one.)
Pint baskets or small containers for strawberries and herbs (if you have some, we can provision you with 3 pint baskets)
A vase, bucket, or water bottle to keep your flowers and herbs happy
Clippers or secateurs to cut flowers (if you have some)
Water / sun hat / picnic supplies if you plan to stay awhile!
Newsletters & email communication: All our important CSA communications are through this email address, which seems to be getting spam blocked a lot. Please make sure this email address is in your address book so you get important CSA communications. All newsletters and important updates are also posted on the Newsletters page of our website weekly.
SUMMER Squash & SCALLIONS SAUCE GOODNESS
If you thought we only had a Flower Ambassador this year, think again. We also have a Home Chef Ambassador, CSA member extraordinaire Adam Kahn, who we’ll introduce you to later — because he’s is currently rescuing a vehicle stuck in a ditch. In between all the heroic stuff he does, Adam consistently whips up heroically delicious meals from CSA produce. He’s kindly agreed to share his stoke with us this year to rescue us from being stuck (metaphorically) in the kitchen. This is how he’ll be using this week’s zucchini and scallions.
THOMAS KELLER’S SQUASH
Despite the provenance, this is also super simple, and is more about technique than flavor.
Slice the squash lengthwise
Place the squash cut-side up, and ensure it’s stable. If it’s rolling around on you, you can nestle the squash in a clean, bunched up kitchen towel.
With a small (paring) knife, make diagonal crosshatch slits into the flesh of the squash. (I’ve found it's best not to cut into the skin if you can avoid it, as it makes it easier to handle later on)
Sprinkle the cut side liberally with salt
Let sit for ~20 mins. Wait time is the key to this technique. The salt will draw out the moisture, which will dissolve the salt, then the salty liquid will go back into the squash.
Once most of the moisture has been reabsorbed, dry the surface with a clean towel, brush with oil, and sear or grill over high heat (close the grill or cover the pan as much as possible to also cook through while you’re searing. This will avoid the need to finish in the oven as the original recipe calls for). Once seared, flip and repeat on the other side.
Top with your favorite sauce. I like the charred scallion listed below, or a spiced yogurt.
This process leverages osmosis, and is equally applicable on any protein (add salt, let it sit for long enough that the moisture has been reabsorbed, pat dry right before cooking).
Charred Scallion Condiment Sauce
Toss the scallions in oil and salt, and throw them on high heat. I’ll usually use at least an entire bunch, sometimes two or three. To keep it simple, I’ll just use whatever I’m using to cook the rest of the meal (the grill, fry pan, oven, etc.) Turn the scallions once, and don’t be afraid to burn them. Some char is good here. Now you have a couple options.
First, choose the rest of your flavors for the sauce. I will always include something sweet, something sour, and an herb. I’ve found these make a great balance, but you can omit anything to fit your needs. Here are some combinations I like:
mustard, sweet pickles, and thyme
chiles, lime, brown sugar, and cilantro
Strawberries, balsamic, mint
Second, texture:
For chunky and rustic, just chop the scallions into big (1-2”) pieces. You’ll probably still want the other ingredients to be smaller, especially if they are strongly-flavored like the pickles.
For a smoother sauce, just throw everything into a blender.
That’s it. Add more oil and salt to your liking, and mix it all together. A very quick way to turn a simple protein into a composed dish!
FARMER’S LOG
VEGGIE CHOREOGRAPHY
We had a great, productive week out here in the fields! We hilled out potatoes and hand weeded our second succession of carrots. We spaded a big block for our 3rd and final Fall storage carrot and Fall veg field. And on Thursday we transplanted our 3rd and final Fall cabbage patch and seeded our 2nd of 6 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 work backwards from 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 start mapping it out. Using harvest and planting logs (and memories) from seasons past regarding yields and how much people took, and taking into account each crop’s growth cycle, heat and frost sensitivities, yield expectations, and things like that, we can deduce how many seeds to sow in the greenhouse and fields and when.
Freshly planted winter squash on June 18th with 2023’s onion crop in the background.
A Dance of Time Scales
When we plant seeds depends on each individual crop’s life span, or “days to maturity” in farmer lingo. For example, we like to have primo arugula and mustard greens at least twice a month every week from June-December. Arugula and mustards are a super fast maturing little plants (~25 days from germination to primo harvest) so this year we’ll sow about 1,600 ft of arugula every month 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 after they size up). 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‘ll 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!
Rubber Hits the Road
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 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 is key. Every Wednesday, we take a walk through the fields looking to see what we can offer in the harvest that next week. We look at how much people took home of various crops in the previous week (and previous years) to estimate how many bins to harvest. 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 a 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, this microclimate, and this CSA.
Painting with Seeds
But the “art” of crop planning for us is in taking all of this business and planting for harvests in a way that harmonizes with the seasons, surpises, delights, and helps our 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 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 “2023 Crop Plan.xlsx”!
Thanks to a little help from our friends...
See you in the fields,
David
