THIS WEEK’S HARVEST
German Butterball Potatoes, Green Tomatoes, Napa Cabbage, Poblano Peppers, Sweet Peppers, Brussels Sprout Tops, Indigo Radicchio, Delicata Winter Squash, Carrots, Easter Egg Radishes, Summer Squash & Zucchini, Olympian Cucumbers, Muir Summercrisp Lettuce, Fall Salad Mix (with Arugula, Ethiopian Kale, Red Russian Kale, Mustard Greens, Bel Fiore Chicory) Leeks, Cured Yellow Onions
U-PICK
Check the u-pick board for updated weekly limits. With the ash settling on produce, we recommend washing all u-pick produce before consumption
🌟Jack-O-Lantern Pumpkins: Season limit: 2 per share for shares with kids | Limit 1 per share for shares without kids
Green Beans: Down in Field 5
Albion Strawberries: Gleanings
Cherry Tomatoes: Gleanings
Frying Peppers: Still plenty! Shishitos, Padróns | See week 5’s newsletter for harvest tips
Jalapeños: Winding down | Located below the Padróns
Yellow & Red Thai Hot Peppers: Winding down | Located next to the Jalapeños
Husk Cherries: Gleanings | See Week 9’s Harvest Notes for tips
Herbs: Rosemary, Thyme, Tulsi Basil, Thai Basil, Purple Basil, Oregano, Marjoram, Onion Chives, Garlic Chives, Vietnamese Coriander, Culinary Lavender, Culinary Sage, French Sorrel, Lemon Verbena, Lemon Balm, Green Coriander
HARVEST NOTES
Kim-Chi Week Next Week! Every year, we design our crop plan so that scallions, daikon, and Napa cabbage all line up so that members can make kim-chi! While we will be distributing beautiful Napa cabbage this week, we will also be distributing it next week along with daikon and scallions. If you want to you can save your Napa cabbage to make a big batch of Kimchi next week!
German Butterball Potatoes: Debuting our final of four potato varieties that we will be distributing on into December, German Butterballs are aptly named. A creamy, rich, yellow-fleshed beauty with sublime flavor. These potatoes are sometimes called the gold standard of gold potatoes.
Delicata Winter Squash: Debuting our first of 9 Winter Squash varieties harvested earlier this month, Delicata are a perennial favorite. Versatile, sweet, edible skins. This year’s Delicata harvest is half from our fields and half from our friends at New Family Farm in South Sebastopol, the fruits of a plan hatched in March. When COVID lockdown was imploding restaurant sales of so many of our farmer friends and interest in CSA was expanded, we wanted to be part of the solution, so we nixed some Delicata out of our crop plan so we could buy from them. You’ll be able to taste the love they put into their soil.
Brussels Sprouts Tops: Each year around this time we trim the tops off of the Brussel sprouts plants to spur the sprouts to size up evenly. This annual necessity has the delicious benefit of giving us delicate bunches of cooking greens with that lovely Brussel sprout flavor. Use as you would any of your favorite cooking greens, like Kale or Collards.
Green Tomatoes: Tomato production is dropping off for the year, but they have one last gift to give us — green fruit! We suggest fried green tomatoes (possibly with GVCF cornmeal that you might still have laying around?) or try this pork stew which includes green tomatoes to provide flavor and texture.
PRESERVING THE HARVEST
Bulk Carrots: We will be putting out bulk carrots on the back table this week for juicing or preserving. Here are a couple of our favorite quick pickle recipes for preserving the harvest:
Pickled Carrots from Gourmet. These are quick, easy and delicious!
Pickled Vegetables from Bon Appetite. A gorgeous mix of anything you have on hand, including onions, radishes, turnips, beets and carrots. Beautiful enough to be served as a side on any table.
Plenty of Peppers: There are plentiful red shishitos and jalapeños, and padrons in the u-pick peppers that are great for making pickled peppers.
POTATO HARVEST PARTY ~ WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14th, 9am
Join us for our last big harvest party of the year — the potatoes! There’s nothing like watching a ton of potatoes bloop up out of the ground behind the wake of the tractor. It’s a big, unforgettable experience getting dirty, finding and bagging the potatoes, especially for kids. All abilities and interest welcome. Please bring a mask. We recommend light gloves and a sunhat.
Radicchio Salad with Sour Cream Ranch
Try this yummy recipe with this week’s Indigo Radicchio from Bon Appetit.
For the dressing:
⅓ cup sour cream or dairy free sour cream
⅓ cup plain whole-milk Greek yogurt or your favorite dairy free yogurt
1 Tbsp. plus 1½ tsp. sherry vinegar or apple cider vinegar
5 garlic cloves, 1 finely grated, 4 crushed
1 tsp. honey
8 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil, divided
Salt
2 scallions, thinly sliced
½ cup panko (Japanese breadcrumbs)
½ lemon
2 medium radicchio, leaves separated
To make:
Mix sour cream, yogurt, vinegar, grated garlic, honey, and 5 Tbsp. oil in a small bowl; season dressing with salt.
Heat remaining 3 Tbsp. oil in a medium skillet over medium. Add crushed garlic and scallions and cook, stirring often, until golden brown around the edges, about 4 minutes. Add panko and season with salt. Cook, stirring often, until golden brown, about 3 minutes. Finely grate lemon zest directly into the pan and toss a few times to incorporate. Transfer breadcrumbs to paper towels to drain; let cool. Taste and season with more salt if needed.
Place radicchio in a large bowl. Drizzle with dressing; toss gently to coat. Season with salt and scatter breadcrumbs over.
Do Ahead: Dressing and breadcrumbs can be made 2 days ahead. Cover and chill dressing. Store breadcrumbs airtight at room temperature.
REMINDERS
Please write you name on your farm tote bag and make sure don’t accidentally grab someone else’s when you head to your car.
The 2020 harvest season runs from Saturday, June 13th til Tuesday, December, 8th.
Saturday pick-up runs from 9:00am - 2:00pm
Tuesday pick-up runs from 1:00 pm - 6:00 pm
The farm and u-picking are open 7-days a week, sunrise to sunset. Please close the farm gates behind you on off days.
FARMER’S LOG
WESLEY
A month or so ago, as we were wheeling some totes of carrots out of Field 3, Kayta saw, out of the corner of her eye, a flash of red-brown, like nothing she had seen before, streaking into the melons. A hallucination? A gnome? A magical animal?
A couple of week’s after that, the two of us were sitting at our picnic table in the shed, hunched over the harvest notebook, when she saw it again: A red-brown streak bounding into the Pumpkins. “There it is again!” she gasped and grabbed my arm.
Kayta guided my eyes and we fixed our gaze between the two pumpkins where the flash had disappeared, and held our breath. After a few seconds, out popped a cute little inquisitive head, with a black and white mask.
A long-tailed weasel.
He scanned the ground ahead, checked us out, decided we were safe, and bounded under a pallet right in front of us. A few moments later he emerged — with a gopher in his mouth half the size of his body! We watched in disbelief as the little pirate scanned the open ground between him and the pumpkins, a plump, limp gopher jiggling in his mouth. In two lightning fast leaps, he bounded back into pumpkins patch and disappeared. Dinner time.
Wesley the Weasel, bounding home with dinner.
We walkie-talkied Anna and Kate directly to report what we had seen. Kate named him Wesley. Wesley the Weasel.
Yesterday, as I was parking the tractor, I saw the unmistakable, streaking from under the mower into the shed. “Wesley!”, I yelled into my walkie-talkie. Kate, who was hoeing in the collards, walked slowly over to the shed. She stood patiently by a pallet when, lo-and-behold, out popped Wesley, just 10 feet away.
He looked up at Kate with his beady, black, inquisitive black eyes — unafraid, curious, comfortable — and Kate looked back in breathless glee. Wesley took a few steps toward her out from under the pallet, and cocked his head up and her. Soul touched soul. Time froze. And then the bubble burst, and Wesley popped back under the pallet.
For the next 5 or 10 minutes, Kate and I watched as Wesley bounded, from one corner of the shed to the other, from under one pallet and under another, surveying his domain, and checking us out.
He was so comfortable with us watching him that it occurred to us, “Perhaps this little guy knows us better than we think. He listens to us blabbing away in this shed and in his fields everyday!”
Finally, Wesley bounded away in one, two, THREEeee olympic leaps, over the frying peppers, into the cherry tomatoes, and out of sight, leaving us with a soft glow in our hearts. Being checked out by a pirate as cute as Wesley will do that to you.
The encounter with Wesley reminded me how blessed we are to farm in a place as wild as this — and it made me think back on some of the other wild encounters we’ve had here on the farm. There were the Baby Owlets; the Fox in the Rain; the Golden Eagle attack; and of course Ingrid, sweet Ingrid, the Great White Egret who graced our fields, and terrorized our gopher population, for 6 months in 2018.
Aside from giving us glowy hearts, these encounters give us hope and fuel a purpose.
Top row Left: Sneezeweed and California Fuchsia in the hedgerow by the creek funded by a California HSI grant and managed by Aubrie and Green Valley Farm + Mill | Top row Right: A Valley Oak sapling and Goldenrod in our member-supported hedgerow | Bottom Row Left: A Live Oak sapling in the same hedgerow. | Bottom row Right: A Valley Oak sapling along our back fence line, planted by Weaving Earth Wild Tenders kiddos.
They give us hope that the dream is real — that it is possible to grow food in a way that doesn’t exclude our wild relations but invites them in to weave their lives and catch their dinner in the same landscape. And these encounters fuel a purpose to use all tools and powerful means at our disposal to restore and rebuild the homes and the habitats that two centuries of forgetfulness and callousness have destroyed.
Leaving shed for home that evening, we passed the hedgerow lining the path — the baby Oak Trees, the Manzanitas, the Milkweed — and we thought of Wesley’s grand-babies raising their babies someday in a hole under a sprawling Valley Oak tree next to the shed.
Or, if they prefer, the pallets will be there too.
See you in the fields,
David for Kayta, Kate, and Anna
