10/30/20 - Week 21 - The Season of Death

THIS WEEK’S HARVEST

Mustard Greens, Fall Braising Mix (with Radicchio, Frisee, Arugula, Ethiopian Kale, Red Russian Kale, Shungiku, and Baby Chard), Red Butter and assorted Head Lettuces, Indigo Radicchio, Dandelion Greens, Dazzling Blue Dino Kale, Daikon Radish, Cabbage, Fennel, Cauliflower & Romanesco, Green Magic Broccoli, Shallots, Red Thumb Fingerling Potatoes, Rainbow Carrots, Cured Cabernet Onions, Sunshine Kabocha Winter Squash

U-PICK

• Albion Strawberries: Gleanings

• Cherry Tomatoes: Final gleanings | See below…

• Frying Peppers: Final gleanings | See below…

• Jalapeños: Final gleanings | See below…

• Yellow & Red Thai Hot Peppers: Final gleanings

• Herbs: Italian Parsley, Rosemary, Thyme, Tulsi Basil, Thai Basil, Oregano, Marjoram, Onion Chives, Garlic Chives, Vietnamese Coriander, Culinary Lavender, French Sorrel, Lemon Verbena, Lemon Balm

Some beautiful Green Magic Broccoli coming atchya Week 21!

HARVEST NOTES

• Sunshine Kabocha Winter Squash: Sunshine Kabocha is our farm crew’s unanimous all-time favorite squash. Excellent for eating straight roasted. Also excellent in pies, curries, etc. Super sweet, velvety smooth texture.

• Dandelion Greens: A bitter green, in the chicory family (radicchio, escarole, etc.), try chopping these up in a nice rich omelet with Moonfruit Mushrooms and the last frying peppers. Also delicious lightly sautéed with garlic, bacon and red wine vinegar. Deeply nutritious and cleansing.

• Shallots: We tried growing shallots for the first time this year, inspired by Anna’s Dad’s deep love of this delicacy allium. We’re not at quite the right latitude for this seed — but we did get a nice little fresh crop for you this week. To highlight them, try making a risotto, or slicing them thin, frying them, and then using as a topping for a rice bowl.

FINAL TOMATO AND PEPPER GLEANINGS

We’d like to invite any and all who wish to perform final gleanings on our Cherry Tomatoes, Shishito and Padrón frying peppers, Jalapeños and Thai Hot Peppers, as well as our main crop field tomatoes. Time permitting, we will begin ripping all of these plants out as soon as this coming Wednesday to make way for cover crop.

Our main crop tomatoes (of which there are still some yummy ones to be found) are the big patch of trellised tomatoes you having been passing, to your right, on your way to the cherry tomatoes. Ask one of us in the barn for directions if needed.

LOGISTICS

• 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.

FALL CARROT HARVEST this WEDNESDAY | 9:00 am

Joins is this Wednesday morning to our great Fall carrot harvest! Wherein we kneel on the soft dirt and top carrots into bags for washing. There are a ton of them (literally). We can use all the help we can get!

These Bolero Carrots, sweetened by light frost, will get sweeter and sweeter in storage and nourish us all through the Fall and winter. Join us for this fun, kid friendly harvest!

FARMER’S LOG

THE SEASON OF DEATH

Rise and fall. Light and shadow. Summer and Winter. Life and death.

Halloween is an important time of year on the farm. It is the season of Death.

The Gaelic Samhain festival — the root of our Halloween — marked the end of the harvest season, "summer’s end”, the transition to the darkest half of the year, and the transhumance time when shepherds brought their livestock, fattened in the summer mountain pastures, down for the winter for shelter or for slaughter. There were feasts. People opened their burial mounds, portals to the Underworld, and lit cleansing bonfires. The borders between the worlds were thought to thin around the Samhain and supernatural spirits and the spirits of the dead walked amongst us. Spirits and fairies were to be appeased to survive the winter. Tables were set for deceased relatives at the Samhain dinner. People wore costumes to disguise themselves from evils spirits and carved turnips and placed candles in them (in lieu of pumpkins) to ward them off.

You can feel the Samhain in every nook and cranny on the farm these days. How different it looks from Spring’s jubilant green promise, from Summer’s colorful cacophony. The life cycles of the plants that showered us with riches all Summer are now at an end. Their bodies hang drawn, gaunt and ghostly on their trellises, or they lay shriveled, mildewed, and desiccated in the rows, awaiting the final stab of a killing frost or the furious whir of the flail mower.

The portal is open. Anna broadcasting cover crop in 2020’s potato field.

This week, with our major harvests nearly complete, we started the liminal work of the Samhain. On Wednesday, we mowed and spaded under large sections of fields 1 and 2, transitioning our potatoes, squash, and Spring vegetables into the Underworld, where they are now being devoured by worms and bugs. On Wednesday night, there lay a bleak, deep brown maw of bare soil.

A great, pregnant silence. An open portal.

The next morning at sun rise, the four of us broadcast the first cover crop seed of the year, walking back and forth over the field, processionally, rhythmically tossing bell beans, peas, vetch, and grass seed — little prayers — into the black veil.

The rising sun was welcomely warm and good earth smells lofted up from the ground as it warmed. Later that afternoon we harrowed the seeds under, our little old tiller we use to “kiss” the seed into the ground whirring like a little demon.

One can only marvel at the wisdom of ancient agrarian festivals, born from bone deep relationship to the cycles of nature: How directly Death was confronted and dealt with.

Those people knew.

They knew that from death comes life. They knew that death and life were only thinly separated. They knew that the rotting, decaying, destructive forces were the building blocks and the gateways from which life would spring forth anew in the Spring and that the portals, the transitions, needed to be tended to, cleansed, and faced.

This Halloween, while you’re out there gleaning the last summer fruits, we invite you to cherish the ghoulish site of the dying cherry tomatoes, sagging limply, skeletal, and vacant; and the blocks of bare ground — portals, now pregnant with cover crop seed.

This death is the doorway. And on the other side are verdant Spring meadows, flower scented breezes, plump sugar snap peas, and bouquet after bouquet of Spring flowers.

See you in the fields,
David for Kayta, Anna, and Kate

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10/23/20 - Week 20 - Fall Mode

THIS WEEK’S HARVEST

Mustard Greens, Arugula, Rosaine Little Gem Lettuces, Indigo Red Radicchio, Collard Greens, Poblano Peppers, Bishop Cauliflower, Romanesco, Red Ace + Chioggia + Golden Loose Beets, Eggplant, Leeks, Desiree Potatoes, Rainbow Carrots, Zoey Yellow Onions, Jester Acorn Winter Squash, Metechi Hardneck Garlic

U-PICK

Check the u-pick board for updated weekly limits. With the ash that has settled on produce, we recommend washing all u-pick produce before consumption

• Jack-O-Lantern Pumpkins: Season limit: 3 per share for shares with kids | Limit 1 per share for shares without kids

• Green Beans: Gleanings

• Albion Strawberries: Gleanings

• Cherry Tomatoes: Gleanings

• Frying Peppers: 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

• Herbs: Italian Parsley, Rosemary, Thyme, Tulsi Basil, Thai Basil, Oregano, Marjoram, Onion Chives, Garlic Chives, Vietnamese Coriander, Culinary Lavender, Culinary Sage, French Sorrel, Lemon Verbena, Lemon Balm

Late season Agrostemma in the flower garden

HARVEST NOTES

• Jester Acorn Winter Squash: A true gem. The sweetest Acorn squash we've ever tasted. A hard ribbed shell hides pudding-sweet flesh. A good Jester can be among the sweetest of all winter squashes. David's favorite. Try halving long ways, scooping out the seeds, and roasting at 400 until you can poke a fork in the skin and the flesh is soft and creamy. Add a dash of water to the baking sheet while roasting to keep your squash moist. Eat straight out of the shell with a spoon like pudding! Try adding butter, coconut oil, and/or maple syrup to and eating out of the shell with a spoon.

We brought the last carving pumpkins into the barn so that we could transition that field into it’s Winter clothes. There are a few carving pumpkins left. Did everyone get one? Don't be shy! Season limit 1 per share, and for households with children the season limit is now 3 per share.

LOGISTICS

• Tuesday pick-ups (especially the last hour) have become hectic — likely because we had to cancel a Saturday pick-up due to the fire and everyone switched to Tuesday. Just a heads up, if you are able, a more relaxed pick-up experience can be had on Saturdays and earlier on Tuesdays.

• 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.

THANKS, VOLUNTEERS!

We’d just like to say a huge thank you to everyone who came out to help harvest all 7,000 lbs of this year’s potato crop! We rely on volunteer labor for these big harvest pushes and you all made this giant task easy and delightful.

We have one last big harvest — the Fall carrots — which we’ll let you know about, as well as our Garlic planting party. Stay tuned!

FARMER’S LOG

FALL MODE

This week was all about harvest, harvest, harvest…

After Monday and Tuesday’s share harvest, we enjoyed a sweet Wednesday morning potato harvest with about 15 volunteer members. All told, we brought in about 3,000 lbs of beautiful tubers, putting our total potato harvest for the year around 7,000 lbs — now tucked away in our trailer cooler, awaiting your belly.

On Wednesday and Thursday, we kept on harvesting: Loose Beets for storage; Napa Cabbage for storage; and today, bins and bins of beautiful Cauliflower and Romanesco for this week’s share. All this harvesting can only mean one thing….

We are smack dab in the middle of one of two major transition moments in our yearly farm cycle. You can feel it in the air (kind of?) and you can definitely see it in the fields. Almost all of the long-season crops have grown, matured, been harvested and are now dying back — their bounty curing in the greenhouses or in the cooler, or become a memory of a BLT. In the fields, the slate is being cleaned. The first frost is imminent. The farm is bare — awaiting it’s Winter cloak.

Potato harvest 2020 — part two!

Bed by bed, field by field, the farm is changing from summer attire (veggie crops) to winter clothes (cover crop). For our cover crop, we seed a nitrogen fixing, organic matter building mixture of Bell Beans, Magnus Peas, Dundale Peas, Crimson Clover, Common Vetch and Triticale on pretty much every inch we planted this year. Soon you will see a green fuzz of Triticale covering the bare beds. Come spring a waist high sea of green will wave in the wind. This crop will feed, enrich, and build the soil for 2021 and for many years to come. (Indeed, a healthy cover crop stand can generate over 8,000lbs of biomass per acre. It's like growing compost out of thin air — right where you need it.)

This Fall’s transition into cover crop makes us think of one of the ways vegetable farming in Sonoma is very different than vegetable farming in New England or colder climates Northward. In colder places, Old Man Winter mandates that you initiate this process; i.e. frost comes in early October and kills the tomatoes and peppers and other cold sensitive crops. In our climate, hot crops can sometimes limp on into November. Here, instead, we must end them in order to germinate a great stand of winter cover crop.

In Sonoma county, it is best to broadcast your cover crop seed mid to late October. Any later and you risk colder temperatures inhibiting the germination of the cover crop seed and your fields laying relatively naked through the winter. So, it is time to say farewell to the cherry tomatoes, and the frying peppers — they must now make way for a dense, lush, life-giving cover crop.

We recommend taking a moment to appreciate the changing of the guard out there if you have a moment. The first blades of cover crop will soon poke up out of the soil, reaching for the sun, and waiting for the winter rains to transform the farm into a sea of green.

See you in the fields,
David for Kayta, Anna, and Kate

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10/16/20 - Week 19 - The Potato Harvest

Potato Harvest PARTY ROUND 2! THIS WEDNESDAY, October 21st: 9:00am - 11:00pm

A giant spud sized thank you to everyone who came out this Wednesday to bust and bag over 2,700 lbs of future tater-tots. Let’s do it again! We will be harvesting the second-half of our bulbous bounty this coming Wednesday — same time, same place (in the field where the corn used to be.)

All abilities and interests welcome — come even to just watch the scene of a fountain of tubers “erupting out of the humus” behind the tractor. Please bring a mask. We recommend light gloves, a sunhat and water bottle.

THIS WEEK’S HARVEST

Bonbon Buttercup Winter Squash, Harvest Moon Potatoes, Napa Cabbage, Daikon Radish, Scallions, Poblano Peppers, Sweet Peppers (last week!), Chard, Lady Murasaki Purple Bok Choi, Bunched Rainbow Carrots, New Family Farm Cauliflower, Easter Egg Radishes, Cured Cabernet Onions, Rouxai Oak Leaf Lettuce, Hearty Fall Braising Mix (with Ethiopian Kale, Red Russian Kale, Baby Chard, Baby Bok Choi, Frisee, Escarole Hearts, Bel Fiore Chicory, Arugula)

U-PICK

Check the u-pick board for updated weekly limits. With the ash that has settled 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: 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

• Herbs: Italian Parsley, Rosemary, Thyme, Tulsi Basil, Thai Basil, Oregano, Marjoram, Onion Chives, Garlic Chives, Vietnamese Coriander, Culinary Lavender, Culinary Sage, French Sorrel, Lemon Verbena, Lemon Balm

HARVEST NOTES

• Hearty Fall Braising Mix: This week’s greens mix is an amalgam of Baby Ethiopian Kale, Red Russian Kale, Baby Chard, Baby Bok Choi, Frisee, Escarole Hearts, Radicchio, and Arugula.

  • Eat it raw on its own drenched in your favorite dressing

  • Mix it up: Mix it in with the lettuce this week to add a hearty note to your lettuce salad

  • Broil it: Our favorite method. In a bowl, toss the Fall Braising Mix lightly with oil, coating every leaf. Lay the coated leaves out on a pan and put in the broiler just long enough to wilt the leaves and brown some of them. Watch carefully to keep from burning! Take out of the broiler and toss with raw garlic, lemon juice, perhaps more olive oil, and salt to taste. Top with shredded parmesan to take it to the next level. Bon appetite!

  • Braise it: in a pan with garlic and lemon, or whatever flavors call to you.

• Poblano Peppers: these beauties won’t be around much longer, so may we suggest that before they go you indulge? Try roasting them and freezing for summer-time flavor in the winter, or make this super simple 4-ingredient Roasted Poblano Cream Sauce.

• Bonbon Buttercup Squash: A cute little buttercup variety with a light green belly button. Thick orange, bread-like, sweet, floral tasting flesh. We cooked up our first last night and it was excellent. To roast, cut in half, scoop out the seeds, and roast cut side down at 400 degrees until you can poke a fork through the skin and the flesh is soft and creamy. Add dashes of water to the baking sheet while roasting to keep squash moist. Eat straight out of the shell with a spoon or use like you would any sweet winter squash (soups, stews, curries, pies, etc.).

• New Family Cauliflower: This cauliflower is from the sweet, sandy soils of the Laguna and our friends at New Family Farm — where Kayta and I farmed for 3 years back in the day! When the COVID lockdown was imploding restaurant sales of so many of our farmer friends and interest in our CSA was expanded, we wanted to be part of the solution, so we nixed some Cauliflower out of our crop plan so we could buy this Cauliflower from them. You’ll be able to taste the way they care for their soils and the love they put into what they do. Thanks, New Family friends!

PRESERVING THE HARVEST

• Kim-chi recipes: Welcome to Kim-chi week, the week when Kayta’s magical crop planning skills make Napa Cabbage, Scallions, and Daikon Radish align together on the harvest table. Try this classic spicy Kim-chi recipe and/or this more mellow, kid friendly, white Kim-chi recipe from CSA member Robin Kim. Robin made a vegan version of the white Kim-chi recipe for us last year that was one of our all-time favorite farm preserves. She substituted the salted shrimp and fish sauce with Bragg’s aminos / soy sauce and also omitted the alliums. It was mellow but still packed with flavor. For the jujubes, chestnuts, pine nuts, and rice flour, Robin recommends visiting Asiana Market in Cotati or Asia Mart in Santa Rosa.

• Plenty of Peppers: Just a heads up, there are plentiful red Shishitos and Jalapeños, and padrons in the u-pick peppers which are great for making pickled peppers. Check out last week’s newsletter for simple pickle recipes.

Kate harvesting Radicchio on a glorious Tuesday morning.

LOGISTICS

• Tuesday pick-ups (especially the last hour) have become hectic — likely because we had to cancel a Saturday pick-up due to the fire and everyone switched to Tuesday. Just a heads up, if you are able, a more relaxed pick-up experience can be had on Saturdays and earlier on Tuesdays.

• Please write your 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

THE POTATO HARVEST

This coming Wednesday morning, we'll come together again as a community to perform a quintessential agricultural ritual: Harvesting potatoes. As we kneel down, on the Earth, digging through the soil and bagging the cool, bulbous tubers, we will join in concert thousands of people around the world performing the same act. We will also join untold millions of ancestors who, every Fall, knelt together and harvested potatoes. We will also be joined, by a real living breathing chain of seed potatoes, to the hundreds of harvests in Europe and Asia and the thousands of harvests in the Andes and Northeastern Bolivia and those ancient ancestors who first knelt, harvested, and saved seed potatoes.

There is nothing quite like a potato harvest and the feeling, afterwards, of storing them away in a cool dark place — a pit, a cellar, a cave; the potatoes themselves alive, breathing slowly, promising food, promising life, as Fall turns to Winter.

The highest caloric food crop per-acre in the world (over maize, wheat, and rice) potatoes are the only of these that grow (the food part, at least) deep in the Earth — shrouded in dark and mystery until we lift them up, into light, together in the Fall. 

Many have known the feeling of incredible abundance that potatoes can give. And sadly, many have known the inverse. 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. Aye, the potato has been a powerful, joyful, and painful bond between people and Mother Earth, in feast and in famine, for millennia.

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.

******

At Green Valley Community Farm this year, we are thankful: We are blessed with a vigorous, healthy potato crop. The whole potato field in flower in August was a vision to behold — the Desiree flowers jasmine-scented the foggy mornings. All that energy, all that delight, was sent down below to the tubers, which have been coming up “sound as stone” and will nourish us all through this Fall and Winter. And that is cause for celebration.

Join us this Wednesday for Part Two of our 4th annual potato harvest as we "shower" up the living roots and scatter libations in remembrance and thanks.

See you in the fields,
David for Kayta, Anna, and Kate

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