8/20/2021 - Goldenrod

IN THE FLOWERS

This Week’s Flower Challenge: This week in addition to your usual bouquet consider picking a bunch of drying flowers! Check them all out in the picture below! The garden is currently bursting with them.

Pro-tip: Pick a single-type of drying flower to display all together, or to arrange in bouquets or wreaths later, or pick a varied bouquet of drying flowers that you can dry all together. For the best color, and to keep those stems straight, make a tight bunch (twist ties are great for this and can be found in the clipper basket in the barn) and hang upside down in a cool, dry place until they set.

Beautiful hand modeling by crew member Sophia.

Pictured above from left to right.

• Top row: 5 colors of Statice, Ecchinacea, Fama Scabiosa seedhead, Breadseed Poppy pod, Pincushion Scabiosa seedhead, Flamingo Feather Celosia, Temple Bells Celosia, Pampas Plume Celosia.

• Middle row: 9 colors of Strawflower, 5 colors of Yarrow, Nigella seed pods, Veronica seeds, 2 colors of Xeranthemum (Immortelle), 3 colors of Marigolds.

• Bottom row: 6 colors of Gomphrena, Monarda seedhead, Baby’s Breath, Verbena, Godetia pods, and Amaranth.

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, Husk Cherries.

Herb Spotlight: The next time you’re in the garden, stop for a little snack at the Husk Cherry bed below the Celosia and above the thornless blackberries. These little berries go by many names including Cape Gooseberry and Ground Cherry. They are closely related to Tomatillos and have been said to taste like a tropical combination of orange and tomato. To find a ripe Husk Cherry, look for golden, papery skins. Inside the fruit should be golden yellow. Ripe fruit are usually carpeting the ground underneath the plants and are protected by their papery wrappers. Enjoy!

On the left: ripe Husk Cherries — the golden color of the berry on the bottom right is what you’re looking for. On the left: a new succession of Cupcake Cosmos! This elegant variety is reminiscent of Icelandic Poppies or the crinkled wrappers of cupcakes and make a delicious bouquet ingredient.

FARMER’S LOG

Today we’ll leave you with a poem. We hope that the garden, and the bees, and the goldenrod bursting into bloom in the hedgerow by the strawberry field has for a moment pulled you into the joyousness of sharing this earth, this moment, with all these other beings.

Goldenrod

By Mary Oliver

 On roadsides,
  in fall fields,
      in rumpy bunches,
          saffron and orange and pale gold, 

in little towers,
  soft as mash,
      sneeze-bringers and seed-bearers,
          full of bees sand yellow beads and perfect flowerlets 

and orange butterflies.
  I don’t suppose
      much notice comes of it, except for honey,
           and how it heartens the heart with its 

blank blaze.
  I don’t suppose anything loves it, except, perhaps,
      the rocky voids
          filled by its dumb dazzle. 

For myself,
  I was just passing by, when the wind flared
      and the blossoms rustled,
          and the glittering pandemonium 

leaned on me.
  I was just minding my own business
      when I found myself on their straw hillsides,
          citron and butter-colored, 

and was happy, and why not?
  Are not the difficult labors of our lives
      full of dark hours?
          And what has consciousness come to anyway, so far, 

that is better than these light-filled bodies?
  All day
       on their airy backbones
           they toss in the wind, 

they bend as though it was natural and godly to bend,
  they rise in a stiff sweetness,
      in the pure peace of giving
           one’s gold away.

See you in the fields,
David and Kayta

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8/13/2021 - The Dog Days of Summer

IN THE FLOWERS

This Week’s Flower Challenge: This week, try putting herbs in your bouquet! “You can do that!?” Yes, and they can really put a bouquet over the edge into the sublime — and then you can eat that sublimity. Check out the bouquet below which features chive flowers, purple and green basil foliage and flowers, delicate flowering cilantro, borage, and nasturtium.

A flower bouquet heavy on the herbs

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

Herb Challenge: This would be a wonderful week to make pesto! Our first basil succession is in flower but can still be put to delicious use in pesto, and the plants would really thank us for a good cutting back. Feel free to take a significant amount (it’s great frozen!).

A beautiful evening to get lost in the flowers

FARMER’S LOG

THE DOG DAYS OF SUMMER: Reposted from early August, 2020

The sun beats down, the hills are bleached gold, and the wind blows hot… the dog days of summer are here.

The term “dog days”, for the late summer, traces back to the ancient Mediterranean, where people connected the night sky return of the brightest star, Canis Majoris (aka Sirius, aka “Orion’s Dog”), to the sultry days of late July-August when, as Virgil said, “the Dog-star cleaves the thirsty ground.” These ancient people associated the dog days with fever, bad luck, and heat.

Illustration by Kayta for Richard Vacha’s book The Heart of Tracking.

As Marin naturalist and tracker Richard Vacha brilliantly observes of our own Mediterranean climate in his book The Heart of Tracking, the dog days can be a raucous, frolicking time for wild canines as they feast on the fattened prey and tree fruit of summer and as canine pups leave the den and come into their own. (Perhaps this is the wild origin of the naming of the star?)

But, in Mediterranean climates like ours, the dog days are also a scarce time, a spent time. They are the beginning of a great dry down and a great dormancy.

“For an animal,” Vacha writes, the late-Summer-early-Fall “can be as tough to endure as an East Coast winter. Food is scarce, water is scarce, and green vegetation is crowded into riparian corridors, drawing the animals that depend on these resources closer together. The animals who prey upon them have shifted correspondingly. Territorial patterns are all in great flux as the expansive cycle of the summer season slowly winds down.”

On the farm, this shift into the dog days — their abundance and scarcity — has been clear.

Our harvests are more and more heavy with fruit: Cucumbers, squash, eggplant; the first poblanos and sweet peppers are on their way; we picked the first few field heirloom tomatoes this week; our first melons are swelling; the wild blackberries are laden. In the garden the first flowers and herbs are following the wild grasses, tapping out and throwing seed. Even our Jack-O-Lantern pumpkins are turning from green to orange.

In our staple field crops, if July was an outward explosion of verdant green growth, the dog days are the beginning of a hunkering down, a drawing nigh, a focused inward stare toward the serious work of setting fruit, forming bulbs and tubers, and setting seed. The corn is tassling. The jubilant winter squash flowers are beginning to wilt and metamorphosize — green and gold orbs now swell in the shade of sun battered leaves. The potato flowers are beginning to pop and with them the plants will now look to swelling their secret orbs in the black earth.

Field 4 in the Dog Days of summer 2020

And as the wildland plants dry out and are scorched to gold, her wild inhabitants turn more and more to the farm — an irrigated green oasis — for moisture and succulent meals. The wild turkeys and their fluffy younglings visit the fields every morning and evening, snipping off hydrating bits of lettuce and broccoli leaves. They annihilated a whole patch of Romaine in just one evening this week. Song birds are raiding the greenhouse now, right on schedule, eating juicy germinating beets and Fall chicories. Gophers take bites out of our drip irrigation lines nightly, seeking the cool water flowing within. 

The sweet relief of the first Fall rains will come to us all sooner than we think. Until then, keep cool, move slow, and enjoy the fruitful abundance of the dog days of summer.

See you in the fields,
David & Kayta

“Fox in a Coyote Bush” illustration by Kayta from The Heart of Tracking by Richard Vacha from Mount Vision Press

See you in the fields,
David and Kayta

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8/6/2021 - Echoes

Hollyhock, Gaura, and Daylight White Scabiosa in one of the mixed perennial beds.

IN THE FLOWERS THIS WEEK

Pro-tip: If you decided to take us up on last week’s challenge to incorporate seed heads into your bouquet, consider saving the seeds when your bouquet is done! This could either mean letting them dry fully and packing them in an envelope for planting later, or just sprinkling them somewhere that you’d like to see flowers. (If you take the second option, the seeds will likely not germinate until the rainy season unless you’re watering, but some may survive and surprise you come fall).

This Week’s Flower Challenge: This week, consider an act of focused devotion — try making a large bouquet out only one type of flower. Varieties that come to mind as likely to dazzle are our purple Queen Anne’s Lace, vibrant and long-lasting Marigolds, or the Daylight White Scabiosa that’s exploding in the upper east side of the garden.

Shortbread cookies with edible flowers, featuring Bachelor’s Buttons, Fennel, Viola (Pansies), and Calendula.

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

Herb Challenge: For this week’s herb challenge, we’re going to do something a little different — edible flowers! While edible flowers are always delightful atop a salad, or frozen in ice cubes in a fancy cocktail, we think these magical flower-topped shortbread cookies really take them to another level. If you have a favorite shortbread recipe, feel free to use that, and read on for many variations below!

Ina Garten’s Shortbread Cookies

Ingredients:

• 3/4 lb unsalted butter, at room temperature

• 1 cup sugar, plus extra for sprinkling

• 1 tsp vanilla extract

• 3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

• 1/4 tsp salt

Instructions:

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

• Mix together the butter and sugar until just combined. Incorporate the vanilla.

• In a medium bowl, sift together the flour and salt and then add them to the butter and sugar mixture. Mix until just combined.

• Roll the dough into a log with the diameter of the designed width of your cookies. Wrap in parchment paper and refrigerate for a half hour, until firm.

• Once firm, cut the log into discs that are 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick, depending on your preference.

• Press flowers firmly into the top of the cookies, sprinkle with coarse sugar, and bake! Baking time will depend on the size of your cookies, and will vary from 10 minutes to 25. Look for the edges to just begin to brown. (Since these shortbread are all about the looks, we prefer a shorter bake time and less caramelization.)

Flower topping suggestions:

• For the most showy, consider Viola (Pansies), Calendula, Anise Hyssop, Nasturtium, Lavender, Fennel and Borage.

• For an elegant, flavorful twist consider Lavender or Rosemary. If you want the flavor to really come through, consider pulsing some of the flowers or leaves with the sugar before mixing up the dough.

• Don’t forget about leaves! The tiniest leaves on Shiso, Lemon Verbena, Anise Hyssop, Lemon Balm, or Purple Basil would be both beautiful and flavorful.

Garlic for sale

We are excited to share that our organic, heirloom garlic is ready for sale! Please bring cash — $10 / lb, available anytime. 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.

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

• Venture forth: Don’t be trapped by the first strawberry sirens you hear calling to you as you approach the rows — have inner fortitude and journey to the far reaches of the strawberry patch where you will be rewarded with bountiful treasure.

• 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

ECHOES

In the field, time is an echo. Each season, and everything that comes with it, returns as if from a long distance — the long distance of a year. A corn plant itself is an echo. Its whole life, from seed to harvest, the echo of the untold thousands of lives of corn plants from years long past.

For the farmer, these echoes are full of memory. All it takes is a smell, the angle of the sun, a certain task, and there you are again, surrounded by memories of who you were with, of who you were, of what has changed, and what has not.

Last August 7th, we were rich in vegetables. Our bumper onion crop was swelling handsomely. This year is different. The drought has left our fields empty of food plants. Our hearts long to be harvesting food for you again.

But even in this silent year, the August light is full of echoes. We can hear them in the early morning light, shimmering out over the dry grass, and they make us smile.

And sometimes, when we are still, the echoes seem to continue on forward, strangely, and it is as if we can hear the echoes of August harvests yet to come…

Harvest share from the first week of August 2020

AUGUST EMPTINESS — 8/1/2020

This time of year it is hard to find time to write one’s thoughts down… the rhythm of the steady, bulky harvests drowns them out with an ever increasing tempo. The sun blares down. It’s hard to think about anything but the farm. To sneak in planting and seeding and other tasks in the margins, your only thoughts are farm thoughts, your only feelings are farm feelings. You must remain disciplined, focused… you can’t miss a beat.

This week we turned the farm another turn towards Fall. Kayta seeded our 5,600 ft of Fall carrots. We cultivated our Fall Brussels sprouts and planted Romanesco for our Fall selves. We trellised tomatoes and planted our last cucumber succession.

Our internal lives — our emotions, dreams, and whimsies — feel far away at this time or year; shoved aside by harvest and urgent needs in the field. But at the same time we never feel more full.

There is a strange fullness in being so busy as to be empty.

Then, the swelling corn stalks can lift you up to the eaves. The heat is your sorrow. The flowering potatoes are your whimsical thoughts. And the simple things — a good sip of coffee, a crew mate’s joke, a good harvest — can fill you to the brim.

See you in the fields,
David and Kayta

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