Cherry Caramel and Sugar Stars Phlox in the garden.
IN THE FLOWERS THIS WEEK
Featured Flower: As you walk through the garden this week, see if you can pick out the sweet scent emanating from our newly blooming phlox. Floret Flower Farm describes it as resembling “lilac combined with melon”, but Kayta thinks it smells more like My Little Ponies. We have two varieties — the sophisticated antique Cherry Caramel and it’s glittering and variable counterpart Sugar Stars. Both are endlessly useful in arrangements and have delightfully long vase life.
Pro-tip: Your flowers will appreciate being in as clean an environment as you can provide for them. This means keeping your vase scrubbed, replacing (or at least topping off) the water as often as possible, and removing any leaves that would be submerged in the water and go bad. You’ll be rewarded for your efforts by much longer lasting blooms.
This Week’s Flower Challenge: This week, try utilizing flower seed heads in your arrangements. Seed heads come in an incredible variety of textures and shapes, and can make you look at the garden in a whole new way. The bouquet below features seed heads from Scabiosa, Poppies and Transformer Nigella, as well as Dill flowers and Centaurea buds for all the wild textures.
IN THE HERBS
Oregano, Marjoram, Thyme, Chives & Garlic Chives, Lemon Balm, Lemon Verbena, Chamomile, Tulsi Basil, Purple & Green & Bi-color Shiso (aka Perilla), Mints, Italian Basil, Purple Basil, Thai Basil, Cilantro Flowers, Dill Flowers, Anise Hyssop, Sage, Tarragon, and Vietnamese Cilantro, Culinary Sage, Sorrel
Pro-tip: Our beautiful bed of dill is in full bloom! Now is the time to indulge in this brief and delightful form of a beloved herb. We love putting dill flowers in our bouquets, as above, or popping them whole — stem, flowers, seeds and all— into jars of homemade pickles. For a quick take, try making fridge pickles that don’t require water bath canning.
Garlic for sale
We are excited to share that our farm-grown garlic is ready for sale! This beautiful softneck variety is one that we originally purchased from local garlic superstar Bernier Farms in 2017. Ever since then, we’ve saved the best of each season’s harvest to be used as seed stock in the coming year, thus selecting the most vigorous plants best adapted to our unique growing conditions. It’s available for sale on the front table of the barn, right next to the basket of clippers. Please bring cash — $10 / lb, available anytime.
Pint Baskets
We are currently out of pint baskets in the barn. Please remember to reuse your baskets, and, if you’ve developed a stockpile, please bring them back to the barn so that some are available for members who’ve forgotten theirs.
CONSTRUCTION ZONE FOR SOLAR ARRAY
For the next 6 weeks or so, the area in front of our barn will be a construction zone — for the best possible reason: A giant solar array!
Please pardon the inconvenience and make sure your little ones are extra careful around the construction site.
NOTES & REMINDERS
Confused? Ask us! If you’re ever confused about anything in the garden, don’t hesitate to ask us in person or via email. We love helping you use the garden!
How do I find the herbs? All herbs that are ready to pick are marked with a colored stake with the name of the herb on it.
FARMER’S LOG
POND LOVE
This farm — all the flowers and the strawberries and the bumble bees sleeping on zinnias — is all possible because of pond water. That’s right… pond water.
In the 1960’s, seeing that there wasn’t much ground water out here, the old-timers jumped through the hoops and shelled out the dough to install a two-acre catchment pond up in the hills above the fields.
It was a good idea.
That pond is a beautiful place. Besides the straight line hill of the dam, it looks prehistoric up there, like it has been there forever. Mr. Blue Heron has lived there ever since we got here, probably since the beginning of time, croaking his dinosaur croak and feasting on fat bull frog tadpoles. On the inner wall of the dam there is a huge wall of cat-tails where red wing blackbirds nest. Our neighbor once saw river otters dashing up the spillway.
It is a summer oasis in our parched ecosystem. All our wild neighbors drink from there in the summer, but most of all us — in the form of food begot from its water.
Aye, if it were not for the pond, Green Valley Community Farm would not be here. The ground water on this land could only support a couple large kitchen gardens and some landscaping.
We’ve been feeling extra grateful for the pond this week. Even after two years of pretty intensive farming under two years of historic drought, it’s still up there; still holding quite a lot of water, a football field 6 ft high by my count today.
We’ve got pond on the mind because it was a momentous week on the pond. This new raft that you see in the picture above was installed. This here raft holds and winches up the floating intakes that provide our irrigation water. They are the main arteries of the farm, where it all begins.
The raft is the finishing touch on a project the Gold Ridge Resource Conservation District sponsored in 2019 to re-build the old intakes to better facilitate farm irrigation and yearly dry-season water releases to support salmon and other species in the creek. It’s a beautiful win-win. We would never have been able to afford this necessary improvement to the farm’s irrigation infrastructure and it will make for easy dry season water releases into the creek for years — hopefully decades — to come.
So here is to John Green & Erica Mikesh at the Gold Ridge RCD and Jerry and Don’s Yager Pump and Well for doing such a great job on this project. And here is to the old timers for the foresight to build this pond. It supports so many lives — human, plant, animal, and bumble bee alike.
See you in the fields,
David & Kayta
