THIS WEEK’S HARVEST
Arugula, Mustard Mix, Cegolaine Little Gem Lettuce, Magenta Summer Crisp Lettuce, Red Butter Lettuce, Red Russian Kale, Komatsuna, Poblano Peppers, Rainbow Carrots, Multicolored Beets, Fresh Torpedo and Walla Walla Sweet Onions, Summer Squash & Zucchini, Persian & Lemon Cucumbers, Sarah’s Choice Cantaloupe, Early Tomatoes (limited)
U-PICK
Please remember to check the u-pick board for updated weekly limits before going out to pick
Albion Strawberries: Rehabilitation in progress, still only enough for everyone to have a snack this week
Pickling Cucumbers: Likely the last week! | See week 6’s newsletter for harvest and pickling tips
Cherry Tomatoes: See week 8’s newsletter for variety descriptions
Amethyst Green Beans: Likely the last week
Frying Peppers: Shishitos & Padrons | See week 4’s newsletter for harvest and preparation tips
Jalapeño Peppers
🌟Buena Mulata Hot Peppers: See below for tips
🌟Tomatillos: Located next to the frying peppers
Herbs: Dill, Thyme, Oregano, Marjoram, Tarragon, Onion Chives, Garlic Chives, Vietnamese Coriander, Culinary Lavender, Culinary Sage, French Sorrel, Lemon Verbena, Cilantro, Tulsi, Various Mints, Catnip, Chamomile, Purple Basil, Genovese Basil, Thai Basil
Flowers!
HARVEST NOTES
Fresh Torpedo Onions: These onions are mild and delicate. Use like a normal onion or try slicing very thin and using raw.
Sarah’s Choice Cantaloupes: The best cantaloupe variety there is… period.
Poblano Peppers: The poblano chili pepper is the beloved mild chili, originating in the state of Puebla, Mexico that when dried it is called “ancho” or chili ancho and when roasted and stuffed with cheese becomes the magnificent chili relleno. This week will be offering the first taste of these wonderful peppers.
Buena Mulata Peppers: We're excited to introduce these gorgeous and new-to-us peppers. Seeds came from Truelove Seeds, a farm-based seed company specializing in culturally important seeds. Here's how they describe this pepper and its story:
"Beautiful, spicy, and flavorful cayenne pepper that starts purple and then passes through salmon and orange on the way to turning a gorgeous red. The tall striking plants are laden with 4-5 inch fruits, which are tasty at all stages, but we prefer the added sweetness of the fully red fruit.
Buena Mulata Pepper was the name on the baby food jar next to the name "Pippin" in the bottom of the deep freezer in William Woys Weaver's grandmother's basement, a decade after his plant-loving grandfather's untimely death. If you've heard of the Fish Pepper, this story probably sounds familiar. There were many other seeds besides those of the beautiful, delicious, and now widely-available Fish Pepper in that frozen trove, and many that passed through Horace Pippin's hands, including this Buena Mulata. Horace Pippin is now a well-known artist who beautifully depicted everyday life, landscapes, religion, WWI, and themes of the injustices of slavery and segregation. In the 1940s, he traded seeds from his friends in the Black catering communities of Philly and Baltimore in exchange for bee sting therapy for WWI arm injury from William Woys Weaver's grandfather H. Ralph Weaver's hives. Seeds stay viable longer in the freezer; our heirlooms only survive if someone removes them from storage and places them in soil; and stories only live when they are told."
As they ripen to red, Buena Mulata develop a sweetness in addition to their spice. They're particularly great for making beautiful pickles or drying to crush into pepper flakes or powder.
VOLUNTEER WEDNESDAYS
Come work with us! Find us in the garden or fields from 9am - 11am on Wednesday mornings for our standing volunteer morning. We’ll work together on tasks like weeding the garden, deadheading flowers, cleaning garlic. Come meet your farmers and put your hands in the soil! All ages and abilities welcome!
FARMER’S LOG
FARMING IN THE AFTERMATH REDUX
We have family visiting this weekend, so this week we wanted to revisit a newsletter from August 2020 on what our farm might look like, and how it would have to change, in an “apocalyptic” scenario.
* * * * *
Whether evoked by current events or not, apocalyptic reveries are, it seems, a recurring obsession of human imagination across cultures. Why? Perhaps because they tell us about ourselves in the present. Imagining an extreme future holds up a mirror. What is important to us? What is essential? What are we afraid of? And what luxuries do we take for granted?
Assuming we were all still here and had to eat, how would our farm have to change and adapt after the breakdown of most or all of the supply chains that sustain it now?
We tossed this admittedly fantastical subject around and the conversation was illuminating — not as exercise in science fiction or doomsday thinking, but because it taught us about the farm now.
The subjects we honed in on were seeds, manure, labor and motive power.
SEEDS
Seed saving is a beautiful task. You lovingly grow something until it matures. You select the most beautiful and store it with care. You give some to friends. The seed ties you to past seasons — to past generations — to time itself. You repeat the cycle — a cycle of love and discipline — each year.
We save some seed at Green Valley Community Farm. We’ve been saving the Hopi Blue Corn seed we plant for several years now. We’ve been saving our big Lorz Garlic seed for 5 season now — and generally they look better and better every harvest. We’ve occasionally saved seed potato. Kayta has been saving several flower seeds from the garden: Nigella, hollyhock, agrostemma — last year, Sora, Ahn, and Tuli helped gather the celosia you see blooming today.
But most of the vegetables we grow we do not save seed from. Why?
First, time and space management. Seed saving is a meticulous, labor intensive craft and takes special equipment. Seed saving also ties up field space as you must allow lettuce, for example, to grow, flower, and make seed a month and a half after the delicious head has passed. We pay other farmers for seeds because then we can devote more of our limited space and time to the food part of farming.
Secondly, saving our own seed would mean we couldn’t offer nearly the diversity we do. This is because of cross pollination. The cross pollination of two different varieties of the same species creates a vigorous hybrid that is often not yummy to eat. The carefully isolated genetics in open-pollinated food crops is why a lot of heirloom varieties have place names. Marina di Chioggia winter squash, for example, comes from a certain region of Italy. People from that region started to fall in love with a certain sweet pumpkin. Farmers grew fields of them in isolated patches, and slowly the region developed a fairly consistent strain of squash that became a local staple. If we saved seed from our Marina di Chioggia squash, which is currently being grown next to 8 other varieties of winter squash originating from other other regions, what we would get would end up next year would possibly be bitter, hard skinned, and ugly!
A luxuriously modern salad nicoise spread with farm fresh tomatoes, vinegared daikon, beets and carrots; Amethyst green beans with fresh basil, garlic, and balsamic; new potatoes with garden fresh dill; Persian cucumber salad; all over Magenta romaine lettuce and arugula.
So the vast, and relatively affordable modern seed exchange we have access to allows us to grow 10 different brassica varieties in the same field at the same time. GVCFarm is very much a product of modern times in this way. We take advantage of our access to a world library of seeds at our fingertips to grow an extreme amount of diversity in our fields. In this way we are deeply connected to myriad regions, farms, and farm workers devoted to growing vegetable seeds for market farmers like us.
After the apocalypse we’d have to focus. We’d have to drop sweet corn in favor of massive field of hardy Hopi Blue to feed us through the winter. We’d have to choose a brassica, possibly a hardy turnip to harvest both for storage and for cooking greens. We’d gather tomatoes from the healthiest Aunt Ruby’s German Green. We’d let those tomatoes rot and ferment. We’d dry the seeds and store them away safe. We’d trade with neighbors growing a different tomato.
If you could only pick one squash to save in your family for generations, which seed would you start with?
MANURE
But before we even thought about planting seeds we’d be thinking about poop.
Similar to seeds, a functional modern supply chain gives modern farmers like us cheap and easy access to fertility. For a very reasonable price, you can go to a warehouse in Roseland, or call up Adam in Cloverdale, and within 24 hours get 24 tons of compost delivered to your fields; or 500 lbs of the dried, processed, neatly packaged, and potent manure of Petaluma chickens loaded into the back of your truck.
This is all because of cheap energy, which we will get to next.
In the olden times, or the end times as it were, the amount of energy involved in mixing that compost (Caterpillar D9’s) or processing and shipping that chicken manure, would not be possible. Indeed, a post apocalyptic Green Valley Community Farmers would need to devote much more time and energy to manure.
We would capture human manure in carefully managed composting toilets that we’d spread on fields and pastures (after a long ferment for sure). In fact, we would encourage, possible demand that you, dear members, donate some of your own manure! We would trade our neighbors handsomely for cow manure, and each month venture into their meadows with a giant pooper scooper, harvesting the fertile gold.
In order to sustain the level of vegetable production we do, we would need many more human hands managing many more animals, and their manures, and funneling them into piles and then into the fields. We would all miss our clothes washing machines greatly.
LABOR AND MOTIVE POWER
We never think apoco-thoughts more viscerally than during power outages. For a farm reliant on electric power to irrigate — if feels a little bit like having a knife to your throat. 100 degree heat, no electricity, and a field of baby brassicas = not comfortable. We have a generator (as of this week) in for those emergencies, but in our imagined future we’d have no fossil fuels to power that generator.
That’s where things get really interesting. Indeed, our farm — and our society — without fossil fuels would be hard to recognize.
For starters, all of our irrigation would be done with lower powered solar pumps. Without access to plastic and aluminum irrigation supplies we would likely have to flood irrigate, as so many of our ancestral cultures did, releasing water down careful canals shaped in the fields. Because this method of irrigation would limit the crops amenable to this arid climate, gone would be the lettuce and arugula of August, relegated now, perhaps, to a short fling of succulent greens in the early Spring. We would forage for our greens and herbs in the creek beds and wetlands. Our fields would focus on the hardy, deep rooted staples amendable to flood irrigation and dry summers: Potatoes, corn, winter squash… some hardy roots. We would plant fruit and nut trees and look to the indigenous people and the indigenous foodways of California. We would tend oaks religiously.
When we did prep a valley field for food, we would all do it together. Gone would be the luxury of a Kubota doing the day’s work of a village in one hour. Green Valley Community Farm members would become Green Valley Community Farm farmers. The horse and mule and donkey would rule again.
The reason why 95% of humans were, before the industrial revolution, involved in agriculture is because that is how many human bodies and human hands it takes to tend landscapes without fossil power.
IN CONCLUSION
It struck us, in the carrots, tossing around this imagined future both how close and how far we are from it.
Our modern luxuries can feel like a thick, insurmountable wall between us and both the pain and, possibly, the deliverance of this kind of future.
In reality, these luxuries are only a thin veil between this paradise and hell. Perhaps, by recognizing the tenuousness of this veil, we can glean its lessons and spur our technologies and actions toward paradise — toward simplicity, grace, and balance.
See you in the fields.
David for Kayta
