THIS WEEK’S HARVEST
In a nutshell: Summer arrives on the harvest table! Sweet corn, melons and eggplant , oh my!
Bicolor Sweet Corn, Summer Squash & Zucchini, Lemon & Persian Cucumbers, Striped Armenian Cucumbers, Loose Romance Carrots, Fresh Cabernet Onions, Galia & Sarah’s Choice Melons, Early Girl Tomatoes, Eggplant (from Longer Table Farm), Arugula, Mustard Mix, Cegolaine Little Gem Lettuces, Romaine Lettuce, Dino Kale, Lady Murasaki Purple Bok Choi, Fennel
U-PICK
Albion Strawberries: 4 pints per share
Cherry Tomatoes: 1 pint per share | This limit will (greatly) increase as the plants come into production.
Shishito & Padrón Frying Peppers: 5 pints total per share | There are lots of Shishitos in the back of the beds at the moment. See Week 6’s Newsletter for harvest and preparation tips.
Amethyst Green Beans: 3 pints per share | Won’t be around much longer — take advantage while they’re still here!
Pickling Cucumbers: 1 gallon season limit | See Week 6’s Newsletter for harvests and pickling instructions.
Herbs: Italian Basil, Thai Basil, Tulsi Basil, Dill, 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, Thyme and Mints.
Flowers!
Kayta’s “black and white” bouquet from this evening with night blooming Nicotiana, unopened Agrostemma, Cilantro flowers, Centauria, Bishop’s Children Dahlia foliage, and Black Scabiosa
HARVEST NOTES
Bicolor Sweet Corn: Sweet corn is a nutrient and space hungry crop, so it’s kind of a delicacy for us (limit will be 3 ears per share this week). But if you haven’t had this sweet corn from us before, it might be the best your’ve ever had. NOTE* You are likely to find a living corn borer caterpillar in at least one of your sweet corn ears! This is a totally normal (and unavoidable) part of organic sweet corn. Just toss the little guy outside and enjoy your corn!
Melons! This cool, cool summer has caused our first two successions of melons to converge. This week we’ll have mostly Galia melons, with a few Sarah’s Choice mixed in, and then in a week or two they’ll switch…
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.
Sarah’s Choice Cantaloupe: The best cantaloupe variety there is… period.
Striped Armenian Cucumbers: Sometimes called serpentine for their inventive, twisting shapes, these cucumbers are technically more closely related to melons! Their skins are very slightly fuzzy and so thin that they never need to be peeled, allowing you to highlight their beautiful stripes.
Eggplant from Longer Table Farm: After our beautiful eggplant plants hardly produced a single ripe fruit for us last year (too cool here?), we decided to outsource this crop to our friends at Longer Table Farm. Enjoy!
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!
Fall carrots, chicories, and brassicas growing out in Farfield.
FARMER’S LOG
THE DOG DAYS OF SUMMER
The sun beats down, the hills are bleached gold, and the fruits of summer rain down… 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 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 a wild animal,” Vacha writes, the late summer and 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; soon we will be 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.
And in our staple field crops, if July was an outward explosion of verdant vegetation, 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 jubilant field of winter squash flowers is now metamorphosizing as green and gold orbs swell in the shade of their sun battered leaves. Similarly, in the potatoes, a perfect waist-high sea of leaves and flowers is now shrinking down, as the plants throw all their energy into swelling their secret tubers in the black earth below. Our Hopi Blue corn and Dutch Butter Popcorn are in silks, with ears swelling.
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 (they seem to love romaine!). 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
CSA BASICS
ATTENTION MEMBERS: Please make sure to drive slow (15 - 20 mph) on Cooper Rd. out of respect for our human and pet neighbors! Thank you!
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
When can I u-pick?: 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 next to the solar panels or along the road further down. Please don’t park behind the solar panels.
Where’s the bathroom!: Under the big solar panels in the parking lot.
What should I bring?:
Your WCCF tote bag
Pint baskets or small containers for measuring your allotment of u-pick crops like strawberries
A vase, bucket, or water bottle to keep your flowers and herbs happy
Clippers or secateurs to cut flowers (if you have some), we also have some in the barn
Water / sun hat / picnic supplies if you plan to stay awhile!
Friends and family!
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.
