Newsletter 2.1

December 1, 2009

IN YOUR BASKET THIS WEEK
Garlic
Red Russian Kale
Broccoli
Spinach
Honey Bear Acorn Squash
Mixed Beets

spinach

A NOTE FROM YOUR FARMERS

Thank you everyone for making a second winter CSA season possible. We hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and that your bellies are ready for our winter vegetables. The veggies are ready for you!

We started off the planting season in July with the winter squash, also around the time that we harvested and cured the garlic. We are actually in the middle of planting next year’s garlic right now. Through August, we started other crops like kale, cabbage, carrots, beets, spinach, and much more. It was a little tough as CSA sign-ups lulled, and we depended on “off-farm” work to get the bills paid. But by mid-October, we had to start turning potential members away as we only had enough planted for 60 member households by that time. So, we hope you find your baskets bountiful throughout most of the season.

Some gophers munched a few cauliflower and cabbages before we caught them, but all in all, the crops that got planted and germinated have fared well. Our spring was very difficult due to Adam’s father’s health crisis, so we do not have many potatoes or any onions. However, there should be spring onions later in the season.

We are very excited to have peas, fava beans, and Brussels sprouts, new this year. And the overall soil has improved such that the brassicas are bigger and tastier. This past month, the weather has been cooperating by giving us just enough water to keep crops irrigated but also dry enough that we can continue with successional planting and cultivating.

Despite the recession, thank you everyone for your commitment to the winter CSA. Many thanks to every shareholder for your continued support – moral and material – as we establish the farm. We hope you enjoy this first week’s basket!

Eat well,
Adam Gaska & Paula Manalo

P.S. Can anyone recommend an accountant? We need assistance in preparing our taxes and are preferably looking for someone at a reasonable cost and who has experience with diversified farm operations. Thanks!

COOKING TIPS
We’re starting the season with basic tips on cooking your veggies throughout the season. In subsequent weeks, you will see recipes from Janie Sheppard’s collection.
Some dishes we enjoy cooking with the winter veggies are soups, potpies, and stir fry, which can vary with the week’s harvest. If you are unfamiliar with a vegetable in your basket, in general you can cook them this way:
Roots (beets, carrots, potatoes, turnips, rutabagas, parsnips): chop it up, add oil, salt and pepper, and roast them in the oven; chop it up, partially boil (aka parboil) to soften it & sauté; beets & carrots – chop or shred for salads
Greens & Brassicas (kale, cabbage, spinach, chard, Asian greens, chicory, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts): chop it up & sauté in oil; chop & add to soup; chop it up & steam
Winter Squash: cut in half, scoop out seeds, bake in the oven with butter or oil and eat as is; bake it, scoop into pot with minced garlic & stock or milk, purée with hand blender or in a blender for soup
Peas: fresh in salads; stir fry
Alliums: (leeks, garlic, onions): chop & sauté in oil or butter with other veg, add to soup, add to anything for flavor
Lettuce: fresh in salad; chop & add to soup

There are numerous variations and ways to cook your produce, but these are some basic tips. Along with your cookbooks at home, there are great recipes online, such as at www.epicurious.com, www.allrecipes.com, www.recipezaar.com, and www.recipe.com just to name a few. Happy cooking!

Visit to Angelic Organics in the Heartland

This is not about Mendocino Organics CSA, but I wanted to share a tiny bit about a beautiful and inspiring farm I visited over the weekend. This visit was part of a semi-annual retreat I go on with fellow volunteer board members of the Biodynamic Association. This retreat took place in East Troy, Wisconsin, not far from Angelic Organics.

Watching the film about Farmer John is fun and moving, but visiting with John, Bob, Tom, April, and Amy at Angelic Organics was quite special. I think there are over 1,000 CSA members, and a lot of people visit the farm for field trips, workshops, and just fun events. The CSA farm and learning center are grand and inviting, and the welcoming qualities of the farm are very intentional. Throughout the farm, you find community spaces, inside and outside. John spoke very passionately to us about the importance of community coming together at the farm. Sadly, it is not so commonplace for people to join together at the farm, particularly since the urban migration of recent generations. The way John was eager to show us the farm and his house revealed how much he wants his farm to be a place for people to gather. Structures are being built to allow for more community and good times, as well as celebrate beauty in the rural landscape.

Learning Center offices, storage, gathering places. love the colors and arches.

view of some land recently in vegetable production

Bob describes how harvests are projected and planned. veg sorting happens here.

just to give you an idea of scale, this is where they make up the boxes. they also had a variety of veg-washing machines.

a space to hang out "where it doesn't matter if you spill your beer." disco ball included. the new beams were stained so that they look older than they are.

another field. pump does 220 gal/min. or something voluminous like that.

an outdoor gathering place. if you see the film, this is where the house was before it was burned to the ground.

an arch of fruit trees to enclose the space

the learning center. whole tree building design.

Scottish highland cows. one crossed with a longhorn.

generations of Allis Chalmers tractors

If people can feel as welcome at Mendocino Organics as I think people are at Angelic Organics, I’d be thrilled. That’s what community supported agriculture is about. It’s not just about financing your local farmer, eating healthy food with the seasons, and learning about farming, but also about returning to farms as cultural centers again. Food is culture, and the land is living beauty, and these are things that are embodied on a farm – something we should celebrate together.

November – Growing Feed

It’s a chilly, rainy day, and a good time to post those pictures from a week or two ago.

At the Hale Ranch in Potter Valley

Sometimes, leasing and farming somewhere means cleaning up the mess the prior farmer left. Before we could disc up and plant hay, we had to pull out old drip tape and take it to the dump. It was a challenge with the tall grass.

Adam secures the tarp over a truckload of old irrigation drip tape.

We hired Bernie, the neighbor, to disc up the field.

part of the field already cultivated and prepped for seeding

At the Mattern field, by Plant Road and Hwy 101

With the beginning of the rainy season, it’s like our growing season for non-irrigated fields. Once planted with grapes, this roughly 7.5 acre field owned by Richard Mattern was just being mowed each year. It only has city water, which is expensive, so we are trying to grow grain here this winter. If the oats, triticale, and wheat are clean enough, they can be harvested for human food, but more than likely, we will feed it to our egg-laying chickens. (Yes, we are getting back into raising egg layers!)

Adam checks how the grain is growing.

Some of our Livestock

the moon & the sheep

cows munching in the old winter squash & pumpkin field

berkshires munching on pumpkins we grew.

Halloween Fun

a lamb and border collie leave the ranch to celebrate hallow's eve

 

October

red express cabbage

lacinato kale, broccoli

red Russian kale, Lincoln leeks

spinach, beets, Swiss chard

collards, Brussels sprouts, tendersweet cabbage, Napa cabbage (under cover), red romaine lettuce (under cover), tadorna leeks, cassius cauliflower, bolero & napoli carrots

Napa cabbage

red romaine lettuce. you can see how the recent rain has brought forth the weeds!

zucchini and lemon cucumbers still in production

Membership Closed

Thank you everyone who has signed up for the winter CSA this season. Unfortunately, we cannot accept anymore members this year. If you were too late to sign up this year and want a reminder for next year, please feel free to send us your contact info. We will keep you on a list of folks to contact next summer.

The summer months are when we do the bulk of the winter planting and when member financial support is needed most to get to a great harvest starting in December.

Deadline to Sign Up

There are less than two months away until our first winter vegetable harvest! We’ve surveyed what we have planted, and based on our projected harvest, we have to cut off our CSA membership at 30 full shares (60 half shares). With the households who have signed up already, that means we only have 3 full shares (6 half shares) left for taking. And even if those shares are not spoken for by the end of this month, October 31, we will not be taking any more members for this season.

This means we are cutting off the sign-up date earlier than last year. The winter harvest is directly affected by the financial commitment that members give in the summer. While we have enough land and water to grow winter produce for 50 full shares, we did not receive enough member support to grow that much food. We want the members who signed up early on to get the amount and quality of produce they expect. So, if we were to take on more members up until the first harvest or after, the share size for everyone would go down significantly.

Thanks! Adam & Paula USE THIS FORM TO SIGN UP

Michaelmas on the Farm

It is fall! And it finally felt like it today – the morning was brisk, the day was chilly, and the wind howled this evening. Just a couple days ago we were watering crops with overhead sprinklers to keep them cool. Now we start to ponder soil temperatures cooling and plant growth slowing down.

Cabbage & brussels sprouts got a shower in the 100+ degree heat over the weekend.

Broccoli is looking quite happy.

Succession planting is underway with more seedling trays of leeks, lettuce, chard, Asian greens, chicory, broccoli...

Bed shaping is not easy in the north side of the garden where rocks abound. (We did not plant crops here last year.) While transplanting cabbage, I pulled out all these rocks from the bed. Now we just have to move them out of the pathway and make more veg beds.

The south section is fully planted and seeded. The summer crops downhill from the oak tree will get pulled out, and those areas will be cover cropped around November.

Peas are beginning to germinate in between the cabbages.

Field of feed corn, winter squash, and pumpkins.

Amazingly, this irrigation pond above the CSA garden site still has some water. We'll see how much longer it will flow before we have to start pumping out of the lower pond.

Berkshire piggies from Walnut Grove! Adam picked up 7 of these boys yesterday.

The last batch of broiler chickens for this season are pasturing next to the horses and young cows.

Alesander & Beaumont are guarding the broiler chickens. They enjoy raw meat scraps for dinner.

Gobble Gobble!

turkeys being goofy

If you haven’t heard, we’re raising free-range organically-fed turkeys! They will be up to size by Thanksgiving (just two months away!). Put a down a deposit of $35 t0 reserve your bird. They cost $5/pound. Toms are +14 lb, hens are +10 lb.

Turkeys will get processed on November 21 and can be picked up at the farm. Alternatively, you can pick up your turkey at Westside Renaissance Market after that date and at $5 convenience fee.

Impress your guests over the holiday with a tasty home-cooked  sustainably-grown turkey!

Turkey Order Form

Transplants & Crop Rotation

Ziggy scopes out the view from behind the bed of chard.

Sorry these pictures are a bit fuzzy. The vegetables are much prettier when they’re in focus. We’ve finished planting out the first two sections in the south side of the CSA garden. Looking at last year’s field map, we’ve rotated where certain crops are being planted. We basically make sure that we don’t plant crop families in the same spot twice. For example, we planted chenopods (beets, chard, spinach) where we had brassicas (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, turnips, kale, etc.) last year. Leeks – alliums – are growing where we had brassicas. You get the idea.

While we dump lots of yummy compost on all the beds we made, certain nutrients get drained from the soil by certain crops. So, to balance the soil fertility and ensure all the crops get enough food from the soil, we rotate the families of crops.

lacinato kale & broccoli. they've grown so much since this picture was taken!

beets! a bit over-seeded so they will need thinning. but beet greens are delicious, too!