16th Week of the Summer CSA Season: Week of September 8th
Looking down from the upper fields, photo by Adam Ford
This Week’s Availability
This week we will have:
Greens: baby lettuce, spinach, green curly kale bunches, lacinato, rainbow chard, pea shoots, arugula, green cabbage
Roots: new red potatoes, new yellow potatoes, red beet bunches, yellow beet bunches, carrots
Alliums: scallions, yellow onions, red onions, sweet onions, fresh garlic bulbs, shallots, leeks
Herbs: sage, parsley, thyme, basil tops, bulk pesto basil
Fruiting crops: zucchini, summer squash, slicing cucumbers, pickling cucumbers, Japanese cucumbers, heirloom tomatoes, beefsteak tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, roma tomatoes, tomatillos, shishito peppers, jalapeno peppers, poblano peppers, sweeet Italian Carmen peppers, green beans, husk cherries
Miscellaneous: rhubarb, celery
Crop Report
It is great to have some excellent looking spinach back after a break from the summer. This week we will also have new yellow potatoes, which tend to be a little smaller than the red potatoes. Last call on cucumbers…it’s amazing that our single planting in our high tunnel has continued to pump out the cukes this long, but this coming week we will be removing those plants in order to plant those beds in our high tunnels to kale and chard to harvest through the fall and early spring. We repaired the green bean trellis! But we aren’t sure how many we can harvest this week, so list a sub if you choose that in your order.
Above the flower garden, photo by Adam Ford
Farm News
Wendell Berry, a writer, farmer, and keen observer of the natural world and our cultural detachment to it, died this week at 92. I will make the wildly unsubstantiated claim that the majority of first-generation farmers read some of Wendell Berry’s writings their formative years and his writings on agriculture, community, and connection to place were a foundational flame in our drive to reconnect our communities to the land. Reading the Unsettling of America may have been the first reading that helped me articulate my calling to develop a relationship to land and finding my way into feeding community. I remember feeling that reading that book almost offered an invitation and subtle road back towards connection to the land and respectful agricultural practices that we could return to for a more vibrant, life-giving world. (If you do give it a read, I struggled with Chapter 7 which was his take on how industrial agriculture has contributed to the destruction of everything in our society, including marriage and home life… As a 20-year-old I bristled at his antiquated-seeming take on marriage and gender, but I seem to understand the generous progressive explanation for that questionable chapter can be described as Berry’s observation that all the invisible domestic labor that traditionally falls on women used to be valued culturally, in a way it no longer is. And I suppose I can get on board with that… I believe that the time I take in the evenings to “rescue” all the “farmer” quality food and turn them into winter meals for our family is just as valuable as paid work out in the world. But I digress, this is just to offer my discomfort of Chapter 7, ha.)
I could ramble on my thoughts on Wendell Berry’s writings and impact on a generation of farmers, but I am juggling some parenting duties, so this will suffice for today. Besides, he is best enjoyed in his own words…. Here is a timeless favorite that I have spent plenty of time with over the years:
The Peace of Wild Things
By Wendell Berry
When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.Have a great week,
-ESF Team: Kara, Ryan, Vanessa, Taylor, Katie, Galen, Leah, Natalie, Cindy, Amelia, Morgan, Hannah, and Grandpa Jim the delivery guy (and Sky and Soraya)
Recipe inspiration
I haven’t assembled a recipe for this week, but I just have to tell you about what I am making all the time right now to put on top of evertyhing, because it is SO delicious: Remove the core and seeds from about 3-4 jalapenos, and then finely slice into thin strips. I then “air fry” them on the air fryer setting in my toaster over with a little of each: bacon grease, salt, and maple syrup until they are lightly started to crisp. These are excellent on pizza, tacos, sandwiches, quinoa bowls, everything. And this is also delicious done with olive oil instead of bacon grease. Enjoy!
scooping compost from the old compost pile, where we mix in all of the weeds and crop residues from our farm to recycle the nutrients and carbon from those plants, Photo by Adam Ford
And piling it in a new spot. Thoroughly mixing the compost will kill the weed seeds by exposing them to the hot temperature of the fermenting compost. Check out the steam! photo by Adam Ford
We missed you carrots, photo by Adam Ford
We love you sungolds, photo by Adam Ford
We are always cleaning bins and stacking them to dry, photo by Adam Ford
cover crops on a field, photo by Adam Ford
We’ve picked a lot of rocks out of these fields, photo by Adam Ford
husk cherries are here! photo by Adam Ford
tomatoes are still cruising, photo by Adam Ford
getting some lunch, photo by Adam Ford
brussels sprouts are starting to brussels, photo by Adam Ford
I hope that this parsnip seed will germinate well so that we can use it to plant next year’s parsnips, photo by Adam Ford
sprinkler in the carrot greens photo by Adam Ford
lots of onions and garlic curing in the prophouse, photo by Adam Ford
get your pesto in the freezer! photo by Adam Ford
tendrils are always gorgeous, photo by Adam Ford
couple more weeks until these are ready, photo by Adam Ford
cukes have been so good to us, photo by Adam Ford