THIS WEEK’S HARVEST
Little Gem Lettuces, Rouxai Oakleaf Lettuce, Assorted Chicories, Dino Kale, Assorted Cabbage, Bunched Golden Beets, Green Magic Broccoli, Celery, Loose Narvik Carrots, Pickling Cucumbers, Persian & Lemon Cucumbers, Costata Romanesco & Patty Pan Squash, Fresh Cipollini Onions, Early Girl Tomatoes
U-PICK
Albion Strawberries | 3 pints per share: 🚨 ATTENTION! The areas near the entrances are pretty picked on, don’t forget to branch out to the back areas to find the jack-pots!
Purple Sugar Snap Peas | 2 pints per share: As these peas fill out and get sweeter they also get more green. Look out for camouflaged green ones, which are particularly plentiful towards the back left of the beds.
Padrón Peppers | 2 pints per share | See Week 4’s Newsletter for tips on how to prepare these delicacies.
Shishito Peppers | 3 pints per share | See Week 4’s Newsletter for tips on how to prepare these delicacies.
Cherry Tomatoes | 1/2 pint per share | Just getting started…
🌟 Amethyst Green Beans | 4 pints per share | See harvest note below.
🌟 Jalapeños | 2 peppers per share | To find the hottest ones, look for “checking”, the delicate cracks in the skin like on the one on the right in the photo above.
Herbs: Italian, Purple and Thai Basil, Dill, Tulsi, Chamomile, Parsley, Onion Chives, Garlic Chives, Tarragon, Thyme, Oregano, Marjoram, Culinary Sage, Lemon Balm, Lemon Verbena, Vietnamese Coriander, Shiso (Perilla), Catnip, Pineapple, Sorrel, Assorted Mints
Flowers!
This week’s u-pick abundance!
HARVEST NOTES
Fresh Cipollini Onions: A sweet, fresh delicacy that is often eaten raw — it is so mild you can cut it thin and eat in on pizza, salad, or straight up! Also delicious grilled or roasted until translucent and slightly charred.
Early Girl Tomatoes: Because we’re farming in the cool bowl of the Laguna, we’ve planted these reliable, early red slicers as our entire first succession to make sure we get you tomatoes as early as possible. Tomato limits should increase over the course of the next month, and when the second succession comes on we’ll have an array of heirloom and canning tomatoes too.
Bunched Golden Beets: The sweetest and least earthy of the beets. For a simple preparation, boil until tender, peel and cube and store in the refrigerator tossed with a bit of lemon juice to heighten their color and flavor. Then toss on a green salad or dress up to make a salad on their own.
Amethyst Beans: Purple on the outside and green on the inside! Like many purple vegetables, they will turn green when cooked, so if you want to highlight their beautiful color, we recommend using them raw. Even if you plan to cook them in your favorite green bean dish, do make sure to taste one or two as you’re picking so that you can appreciate their sweet, delicate flavor.
From left: Baby cabbage, beds waiting for fall carrot seeds, young lettuce, turnip, arugula and mustard green beds under cover.
Big-Flavor Broccoli
While this recipe was written for Broccoli, it would also be a delicious way to cook this week’s Amethyst Beans!
Chris writes: “Chances are you’re trimming off and discarding way too much of your broccoli stems. The stems are so flavorful, they should be their own vegetable. This is our hands-down favorite way to cook the whole plant.”
Ingredients
1 lb. broccoli (about 1 large or 2 medium heads)
5 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil, divided
Kosher salt
1 small red onion, cut lengthwise into ½"-thick slices
4 garlic cloves, sliced
6 oil-packed anchovy fillets
1 oz. Parmesan, finely grated (about ¼ cup)
Lemon wedges (for serving)
Preparation
Preheat oven to 400°. Trim only the very bottom, woody part of broccoli stem. Peel tough outer layer from stem, from the florets down to the end of the stalk. Starting from stem end, cut broccoli at a 45° angle into ¾"-thick slices until you reach the florets. Break florets apart with your hands into bite-size pieces (this avoids getting bitsy trimmings all over the place).
Heat 3 Tbsp. oil in a large heatproof skillet over medium-high until shimmering. Add broccoli; season with salt. Cook, tossing occasionally, until broccoli is bright green and lightly charred, about 3 minutes. Transfer to a plate. Wipe out skillet.
Heat remaining 2 Tbsp. oil in same skillet over medium. Cook onion and garlic, stirring often, until onion is beginning to soften, about 3 minutes. Add anchovies and cook, breaking apart with a spoon, until broken down and garlic is beginning to turn golden around the edges, about 2 minutes.
Return broccoli to skillet and toss to coat with oil. Transfer to oven and roast, tossing once, until broccoli is browned and tender, 20–25 minutes. Wrap handle of skillet with a towel before you forget it’s REALLY HOT.
Scatter Parmesan over hot broccoli. Divide among plates. Serve with lemon wedges alongside.
HOW TO STORE YOUR VEGETABLES
We’ve been getting some questions in the pickup barn about how to best store your produce, so we wanted to offer a few simple tips to help you get the most out of the fresh food we’re growing for you.
Keep them enclosed. Vegetables, like all plants, are mainly water, so the quickest way to lose them is to let them desiccate. We recommend keeping all of your produce (with a few exceptions, listed below) in plastic bags or airtight containers. Don’t rely on the crisper drawer in your fridge — it won’t do much to keep things turgid on its own.
Keep them cool. Put everything right in the fridge when you get it home. If you find that anything’s wilted on the way home, a brief soak in cold water will do wonders. This is particularly true for u-pick crops like green beans and snap peas that have been picked during the heat of the day.
Take off tops and store them separately. Vegetables will continue to transpire after they’ve been picked, so for crops like beets and carrots, it’s best to remove the tops so that the roots don’t wilt as the greens do. This is also true for celery, which will wilt faster if you leave the leaves attached — consider taking them off and storing them for making stock with. It’s great to keep a bag of aromatic scraps in the freezer for this purpose.
Use the most delicate things first. As you’ve probably experienced by now, there’s a lot of variety in terms of how long different crops will store. Loose greens tend to have a shorter shelf like than whole heads, so plan on using up loose salad mixes and arugula early in the week, and counting on heads of lettuce for later on.
Treat your herbs like flowers: While they can also be bagged and put in the fridge, u-pick herbs like basil, dill, marjoram, etc. will be most vibrant and easiest to remember to use if you put them in a jar or vase on the kitchen counter. More delicate herbs like chives would prefer to be refrigerated in a bag.
The exceptions: tomatoes, winter squash and cured onions and garlic. Everything in this list would prefer to be kept unbagged on the counter. Tomatoes tend to change texture when refrigerated, and winter squash, cured onions and garlic have all gone through a curing process that enables them to last for a long time in normal household temperatures. The fresh onions that we’ve been distributing this week and last have not been cured (notice their shiny skin and juicy flesh) and would last best in the fridge, stored according to the recommendations above.
VOLUNTEERING ON THE FARM!
Feel like getting some dirt on your hands and working in the garden with us? Send us and email! CSA member Rose Brink-Cappriola has generously offered to coordinate. We’ll send out an email and try to find a day / time that works for as many of you as possible! Kids welcome!
FARMER’S LOG
ON LIMITS AND THE ENJOYMENT OF LIFE
As our fields and harvests transition away from the delicate greens of early summer into the cacophonous colors and flavors of peak summer, we are reminded of some of the reasons why we love eating seasonally from the farm.
Nothing dictates what is on our tables more than the tilt of the Earth. As you’ve seen, the shares of mid-June are very different from those of late July. The spring, with its soft waxing light, grows tender, almost translucent, baby-soft greens. While the hard summer sun condenses itself into weighty, colorful, sweet fruits. Mentally compare an early Spring strawberry, with it’s silky soft skin and wateriness, to the more sun hardened, acid-sweet strawberries this week.
Another cool thing about eating from the farm is that we get to experience the full arc of plant growth — from fresh onions to cured onions; from baby Spring carrots to deep orange Fall carrots kissed by frost. In supermarkets, most produce is harvested at one standard stage of a few standard varieties. Here, life is happening, and we pull it all out of the field for you to taste.
We also love that this model allows us the chance to distribute less-than-perfect produce and to share over-abundant harvests with members. You’ll experience this more as the season goes on. Ancestral cultures were scrupulously efficient in their use of food because they had to be. There was a use for everything. And it was a duty to preserve the abundance of Summer. In this spirit, we will put out the 2nd tomatoes, split and cracked, but still perfectly good (sometimes even better) sliced on a BLT.
But perhaps our favorite thing about this model is an unsung hero: Limits.
Nothing like those first spring carrots. (Drawing by Kayta)
Yes, limits. Not having something. “Limit: 1 per share.”
“What!?”
We live in a time and a place where we can get just about any food, anytime, en masse, if you can afford it. Tomatoes in January. Melons in the February. Mangos in Sebastopol.
We have conquered seasons. We have conquered limits.
But have we also conquered one of life’s simplest pleasures? What is the fulfillment of desire without the longing that precedes it?
This week, we will cherish the year’s first slicing tomato. That first slice of vine-ripened tomato on an open faced sandwich (with a little basil, olive oil, and salt) will bring back a flood of memories from last summer, and summers before that, and we will smile at our loved ones at the table in our shared remembrance and shared enjoyment of this thing that we have now, but did not have for so long. It will bring us together. Perhaps your first bite of Kabocha squash will unlock a similar smile this Fall.
In most (or maybe all) rooted cultures there are festivals celebrating the return of foods. In Southern France there is a plum festival and a Spring festival marking the return of the egg, when the hens start laying again. (What is life without eggs?) In Sebastopol, we have the Gravenstein Apple Fair.
Limits, scarcity, the lean times — they help us appreciate, like really appreciate, what we have and where we are, maybe even who we are.
Life's fleeting nature is really it's spice — and so it goes for food, we'd say.
In a few short weeks, we will be drowning in tomatoes. We will be filthy rich in tomatoes of all stripes and colors. We will take for granted their spiced-earth smell and the way they tie so many meals together. We may even grow sick of tomatoes. But not this week. This week we will hold up the year’s first tomato and rotate it around with our fingers — impossibly red, impossibly perfect — and it will shine back at us and remind us how impossibly lucky we are.
See you in the fields,
David
CSA BASICS
Still need an orientation? Please contact us by email with a few days notice to set up a time for an orientation tour. We are available for tours during Tuesday CSA pickups from 1-6 pm and Saturday CSA pickups from 9 am - 2 pm.
No dogs: Unfortunately, dogs are not allowed on the farm.
Drive slow! Please drive slow on Cooper Rd. and in our driveway / parking lot area. Kids at play!
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.
Where is the farm? The member parking lot is located at 1720 Cooper Rd., Sebastopol, CA 95472.
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!
2024 CSA program dates: Our harvest season will run from Saturday, June 15th through Tuesday, December 10th this year.
