8th ANNUAL POTATO HARVEST PARTY!
Tomorrow — SATURDAY, October 4th, 9:00 am - 11:30 am
Join us for our 8th annual potato harvest party! There’s nothing like watching potatoes shower up out of the ground in the wake of the tractor and then bagging them, fresh out of the ground, with friends. It’s an unforgettable experience, especially for the kiddos. All ages and abilities welcome.
We recommend clothes you don’t mind getting dirty. Some people prefer using light gloves. We’ll have some light refreshments, music from the boombox, and an agrarianly awesome time. Feel free to bring non-members. (For new members: This potato harvest is not required in any way for members to enjoy potatoes, we will be distributing them every week whether or not you come to harvest!)
FALL HARVEST POTLUCK CELEBRATION!
Saturday, October 11th, 4:00 - 6:00pm
Feast and toast with fellow members and farmers and taste the abundance of fall at our annual Harvest Potluck Celebration! We’ll gather under the oaks and let the kids run wild and eat and drink what will probably be the best potluck food ever assembled. (We know you all can cook!) Click here for more details and to RSVP!
THIS WEEK’S HARVEST
Garlic, Harvest Moon Potatoes, Bulk Sweet Peppers, Tomatoes, Rainbow Carrots, Daikon Radish, Leeks, Scallions, Fennel, Rainbow Chard, Mei Qing Bok Choi, Assorted Lettuces, Spinach, Arugula, Mustard Mix
U-PICK
Check the u-pick board in the barn for weekly u-pick limits.
🎃 Our u-pick Jack-O-Lantern pumpkin patch will open next Saturday, October 11th! 🎃
Goldilocks Beans | No Limit - Take what you’ll eat or preserve this week! | There are so many of these beautiful beans right now and they make the best dilly beans!
Albion Strawberries | Gleanings | Strawberries are pretty much done for the season. Feel free to harvest a small taste, but know that the rain ruined most of the berries on the plants.
Cherry Tomatoes | No Limit | Beginning to wind down.
Frying Peppers:
Shishitos | No Limit
Padróns | No Limit
Hot Peppers:
Jalapeños | No limit | Red jalapenos are sweet & hot and used in making Chipotle.
Habanero | 10 peppers per share | Citrusy & mildly hot. Pick when orange. (These are past the Vietnamese Devil Peppers.)
Thai Chilis | 5 peppers per share | Spicy! Pick when red.
Wilson’s Vietnamese Devil Pepper | 5 peppers per share | A super-spicy Vietnamese heirloom. Pick when red.
Herbs & Edible Flowers: (Note: Most new annual herbs are now in the north west section of the garden.) Husk Cherries, Italian Basil, Purple Basil, Lemon Basil, Purple Basil, Dill, Tulsi, Parsley, Cilantro, Chamomile, Calendula, Nasturtium, Lemon Bergamot Bee Balm, Garlic Chives, Tarragon, Thyme, Oregano, Marjoram, Culinary Sage, Lemon Balm, Lemon Verbena, Vietnamese Coriander, Shiso/Perilla, Catnip, Pineapple Sage, Sorrel, Assorted Mints
Flowers! (Note: Most of the new flowers, like big new marigolds, are in the western beds and north section.) Too many to list!
HARVEST NOTES
This year’s Kimchi Week is a little different. We’ve been eyeing our Napa Cabbage planting for weeks now, watching as they sized up, alongside the daikon and scallions, only to discover that hiding inside them were a devastating population of caterpillars. Tragically, when we went to harvest them we found that they had been eaten into lace. So we’re pivoting and bringing you the ingredients you need to make other types of kimchi, namely bok choi (Cheonggyeongchae kimchi) or radish kimchi (Kkakdugi). Check out the links for recipes!
Bulk Cornitos Peppers: Our beautiful Italian frying peppers have been producing in such abundance that bulk quantities of Cornitos will be available this week! If you’re interested in preserving their fresh, summery taste, check out this post on four ways to preserve peppers. Personally, we’ve been enjoying them sauteed with leeks and fennel and tossed with white beans, feta and roasted sauce tomatoes (thanks Arabella!).
WINTER SISTER FARM CSA - SIGN-UPS NOW OPEN!
Want to keep getting abundant weekly veggies through the winter? Winter Sister Farm, located right next door, is open for signups for their 2025-2026 Winter-Spring CSA! They have a range of share options and sizes, including both free-choice and box shares, all of which include access to their u-pick herb and flower garden. Visit www.wintersisterfarm.com/csa for more details!
POTATO LEEK SOUP
with Crispy Skins, Sour Cream, and a Lot of Chives
From The Smitten Kitchen
In honor of the beautifully-rainy, extremely autumnal week we just had, we bring you a classic Potato Leek Soup recipe. While it calls for Russet potatoes, our Harvest Moon are similarly starchy and will make a beautiful, golden substitute, and green onion tops are a great substitute for chives.
INGREDIENTS
2 tablespoons (30 grams) unsalted butter
4 medium/large leeks
2 cloves garlic, minced
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1 1/2 pounds (680 grams) russet potatoes
4 cups (950 ml) vegetable or chicken broth
1 bay leaf
1 to 2 tablespoons olive oil
Lemon juice
1/2 cup (120 grams) sour cream
1 small bundle (about 1/2-ounce/15 grams) fresh chives, minced
Kayta in the leeks on Tuesday.
INSTRUCTIONS
Heat oven: To 375°F.
Prepare leeks: Trim off the root ends of the leeks and split each leek lengthwise. Slice white and light green parts 1/4-inch-thick. Place sliced leeks in a bowl of cold water and swish the leeks around, separating layers, and letting any sand/dirt fall to the bottom. Scoop the leeks out (leaving the grit at the bottom) and drop into a colander to shake them off. It’s fine if they’re still damp.
Prepare potatoes: Peel potatoes and place potato peels in a bowl of cold water, so they don’t discolor while you make the soup. Slice potatoes 1/4-inch-thick.
Make the soup: Heat a medium-sized soup pot over medium-high heat and add butter. Once melted, add drained leeks, garlic, 1 teaspoon kosher salt, and many grinds of black pepper. Cook leeks, stirring occasionally, until softened but not browned, about 7 to 10 minutes.
Add the broth, sliced potatoes, and bay leaf and bring to a simmer. Cover the pot and simmer over medium-low heat until the potatoes are tender, about 15 minutes. You should easily be able to break the potatoes up with a spoon.
Make the crispy skins: While the soup simmers, drain potato peels and pat them dry. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Place peels on parchment and drizzle with olive oil, then sprinkle with salt. Toss to evenly coat then spread them out in a single layer. Bake peels for 10 to 15 minutes, until dry and crisp. Check in at the 10-minute mark and add more time only as needed. Once crisp, remove from the oven and set aside.
Finish the soup: Once potatoes are tender, remove and discard bay leaf, and use an immersion blender or transfer the soup to an upright blender and blend to desired consistency. My family doesn’t like fully pureed soups (they’re wrong, but…) so I only half-blend mine. Taste and add more seasoning as needed; I usually need at least another teaspoon of salt and much more pepper.
To serve: Ladle soup into bowls. Squeeze lemon juice over each, then dollop generously with sour cream, swirling it in. Shower each soup with chives, and sprinkle the top with some crispy skins, serving the rest on the side. Eat right away.
Do ahead: I keep the toppings separate when I store the leftover soup. It keeps in the fridge for up to 5 days.
WILD-CAUGHT SALMON
Interested in sustainably-caught salmon? CSA member Stacey Rosenberg hosts a distribution hub for Gypsy Fish Company salmon at her home in Santa Rosa and will be having a pickup Friday, October 17. In Stacey’s words:
I want to introduce you to my friend, Christopher Wang who spends each summer in Bristol Bay, Alaska fishing for salmon and sells it throughout Northern California via his company, The Gypsy Fish Company.
The wild caught fish that comes either frozen or smoked is distributed through a hub system which is kind of like a CSA. I've been ordering salmon from Chris for years and I can tell you, it is really delicious and it comes from a sustainable, renewable, and wild source. I’m organizing a hub at my home so that we can all enjoy this salmon.
Want more information and Chris and the Gypsy Fish Company?
Here’s Chris’ website: www.thegypsyfishcompany.com
He was written up in Sunset Magazine
Read up on why the region Chris fishes in is the gold standard for sustainability in this New York Times article.
ORDER LINK: https://www.thegypsyfishcompany.com/order
IMPORTANT INSTRUCTIONS:
For the type of order, please choose "ordering from a hub"
Click and scroll down to choose Stacey R's Santa Rosa Hub from the drop down menu.
PICK UP DATE:
Friday, October 17 after 2:00 PM at Stacey’s house in Santa Rosa—you'll get the address and more pick up details as it gets closer.
Please email Stacey at stacey@namastacey.com if you have any questions!
FARMER’S LOG
a Potato Digging
Tomorrow morning, we'll come together as a community to perform a quintessential autumn agricultural ritual: The potato harvest.
As we kneel down on the Earth, bagging cool, bulbous tubers, we will join in concert thousands of people around the world performing the same ritual. We will also join untold millions of ancestors who knelt together and harvested potatoes. We will be connected, via a living, breathing chain of seed potatoes to hundreds of historic potato harvests in Europe and Asia and to thousands of harvests in the Andes and Northeastern Bolivia — the cultural birthplace of this amazing crop.
There is nothing quite like an abundant potato harvest and the feeling, afterwards, of storing them away — in a pit, a cooler, a cave; the potatoes themselves alive, breathing slowly, promising food, promising life, throughout the winter months.
Potatoes have been the staff-of-life for many cultures throughout history.
When healthy, potatoes produce the most calories per acre of any crop in the world (more than corn, wheat, and rice). And potatoes are the only one of these staff-of-life crops that grow (the food part, at least) in the Earth — shrouded in the dark and in mystery until they are lifted up into the light at harvest.
While we check the potatoes as they grow every so often, every potato harvest is a mystery until it happens.
Many have known the feeling of incredible abundance that potatoes can give and many have known the opposite. In 1845, due to limited potato genetics in the region and the cold shoulders of powerful men, a million people starved in the poorer parts of Western Ireland and the Scottish highlands as a blighted potato crop rotted in the fields. The potato has been a powerful and painful bond between people and Mother Earth, in feast and in famine, for millennia.
The potatoes on July 16th.
The Nobel Prize winning Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, speaks to this history in his poem, “At a Potato Digging”.
* * * * *
I.
A mechanical digger wrecks the drill,
Spins up a dark shower of roots and mould.
Labourers swarm in behind, stoop to fill
Wicker creels. Fingers go dead in the cold.
Like crows attacking crow-black fields, they stretch
A higgledy line from hedge to headland;
Some pairs keep breaking ragged ranks to fetch
A full creel to the pit and straighten, stand
Tall for a moment but soon stumble back
To fish a new load from the crumbled surf.
Heads bow, trucks bend, hands fumble towards the black
Mother. Processional stooping through the turf
Turns work to ritual. Centuries
Of fear and homage to the famine god
Toughen the muscles behind their humbled knees,
Make a seasonal altar of the sod.
II.
Flint-white, purple. They lie scattered
Like inflated pebbles. Native
to the blank hutch of clay
where the halved seed shot and clotted
these knobbed and slit-eyed tubers seem
the petrified hearts of drills. Split
by the spade, they show white as cream.
Good smells exude from crumbled earth.
The rough bark of humus erupts
knots of potatoes (a clean birth)
whose solid feel, whose wet inside
promises taste of ground and root.
To be piled in pits; live skulls, blind-eyed.
III.
Live skulls, blind-eyed, balanced on
wild higgledy skeletons
scoured the land in 'forty-five,'
wolfed the blighted root and died.
The new potato, sound as stone,
putrified when it had lain
three days in the long clay pit.
Millions rotted along with it.
Mouths tightened in, eyes died hard,
faces chilled to a plucked bird.
In a million wicker huts
beaks of famine snipped at guts.
A people hungering from birth,
grubbing, like plants, in the earth,
were grafted with a great sorrow.
Hope rotted like a marrow.
Stinking potatoes fouled the land,
pits turned pus in filthy mounds:
and where potato diggers are
you still smell the running sore.
IV.
Under a white flotilla of gulls
The rhythm deadens, the workers stop.
White bread and tea in bright canfuls
Are served for lunch. Dead-beat, they flop
Down in the ditch and take their fill,
Thankfully breaking timeless fasts;
Then, stretched on the faithless ground, spill
Libations of cold tea, scatter crusts.
* * * * *
We include this poem, with its dark memory, not for its shock value, but for the bond it invokes.
Modern markets divorces us from feeling the primal bond we have to our staple food crops — and from the planet that cradles them. To be sure, this bond is still as strong as ever, but we rarely, if ever, feel it like Seamus Heaney asks us to. On the eve of the harvest of one of our staple crops, we think it is important to feel it. While this bond can be scary, it is also the source of our life and deserves our most profound gratitude.
At West County Community Farm this year, we are thankful. This year’s potato crop will be super abundant and it will fill our bellies long into winter.
The potato field in July was a vision to behold — a sea of purple and white flowers. The shimmering green foliage reached to our belly-buttons, covering every inch of ground so that it was hard to walk. All that energy, all that delight, all that sunlight, was sent down below to the tubers, which are waiting for us now to unearth.
Join us tomorrow for our 8th annual potato harvest as we "shower" up the living roots and scatter libations in remembrance and thanks.
See you in the fields,
David
CSA BASICS
Slow on Cooper Road! Out of respect for our neighbors and the many kids and animals that live on Cooper Rd., please drive slow (20 mph)!
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
U-pick hours: Oriented members can come to the farm any time, 7 days a week, sunrise to sunset, to u-pick and enjoy the farm.
2025 CSA program dates: Our harvest season will run from Saturday, June 14th through Tuesday, December 9th this year.
Where is the farm? The member parking lot is located at 1720 Cooper Rd., Sebastopol, CA 95472.
