U-PICK COVID-19 REMINDER
In order to u-pick all members are required to:
Wear a mask
Abstain from eating
Have washed or sanitized hands
Maintain social distance
Children must be able to follow these rules in order to u-pick. Thanks for helping keep the farm safe, everyone!
THIS WEEK’S HARVEST
Bunched Rainbow Carrots, Scallions, Easter Egg Radishes, Green Curly Kale, Rainbow Chard, Red, Gold & Chioggia Beets, Summer Squash, Olympian Cucumbers, Arugula, Braising Mix, Spinach, Mixed Little Gems, Romaine Lettuce, Garlic, Greenhouse Tomatoes
U-PICK
Check the u-pick board for updated weekly limits
Albion Strawberries
Sugar Snap Peas
Frying Peppers (see below for harvest tips)
Jalapeños
Herbs: Rosemary, Thyme, Dill, Tulsi Basil, Italian Basil, Thai Basil, Purple Basil, Oregano, Marjoram, Parsley (last legs), Tarragon, Onion Chives, Garlic Chives, Vietnamese Coriander, Culinary Lavender, Culinary Sage, French Sorrel, Lemon Verbena, Lemon Balm, Shiso, Chamomile, Cilantro & Mints
HARVEST NOTES
Frying Peppers: Frying peppers are little peppers commonly pan fried. A little olive oil, a little salt, a little seared til black, and wallah, an amazing hors d'oeuvre!
Shishitos: A wonderfully mild (no heat), green frying pepper. Popular in Japan where its thin walls make it particularly suitable for tempura. Also very good in stir fries or sautés, or just seared in oil and salt. Ideally harvest at 2 to 4 inches, but bigger is fine. Older peppers turn red but are 99% mild.
Padróns: The famous Spanish heirloom, named after their town of origin. Padróns are served sautéed in olive oil with a little sea salt, and eaten as tapas in Spain. Ideally harvest when they are 1" to 1 1/2" long. About 1 out of 10 fruits will be hot. All the fruits become hot if allowed to grow 2-3" long.
Braising Mix: A mix of young chard, Red Russian kale, and Amara (Ethiopian Kale) that is delicious lightly sautéed or braised.
ADD-ONS
Revolution Bread: Our baker Eli is dealing with some (non-COVID) health challenges. Fresh bread and cookies are on hold for the time being. Get well soon, Eli!
Moonfruit Mushrooms: Cory and Ryath just harvested 25 lbs of fresh shiitakes. Will now be sold self-serve from a fridge next to the bread freezer. First come first serve while supplies last.
Bramble Tail Homestead Creamery: Stocked with Bramble Tail frozen yogurt, 100% grass-fed beef, Green Star chicken, eggs, Oz Family Farm heritage rabbit and more. Become a member of the weekly dairy herdshare by emailing Aubrie at brambletailhomestead@gmail.com.
The Marketplace: An ode to our local foodshed stocked with art, soaps, honey, coffee, Moonfruit Mushroom creations, beverages, and more. Across from the Bramble Tail Creamery.
You can plant it, but then you gotta weed it….
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
People sometimes asks what happens to leftover GVCFarm food at the end of pick-ups. We’re so happy that for the last couple years it has gone to Food For Thought via a relationship setup and facilitated by CSA member Helen Myers. Food For Thought is a non-profit food bank that provides meals to people with serious illness in Sonoma County.
Thank you Helen, Melissa Tarzia, and everyone at Food For Thought!
FARMER’S LOG
A DANCE WITH THE TIME-SCALES OF PLANTS
We had a great, productive week out here. We weeded the pathways of the potatoes and gave them their first hilling with the electric tractor. Kayta and Kate did a large greenhouse sowing (almost 5,000 compound beet seeds!) We spent the majority of Wednesday giving the garden a tune-up — weeding, prepping beds, and planting new successions of sunflowers, snapdragons and basil. On Thursday we planted our 3rd and final Fall cabbage succession, prepped ground for our 5th of 13 arugula and mustard sowings and prepped beds for our 3rd and final Fall bunched and storage carrots patch.
Sometimes people ask, "How do you know what to plant when?"
Crop planning, as we call it, looks slightly different on every farm. Here’s a little rundown of how it works on ours…
Working Backwards
Every Winter since our first year, Kayta and I sketch examples of the harvest shares we want to have for people in the Spring, Summer, and Fall. That sketch process goes something like, “Well, we gotta have alliums every week. What’s life without alliums?” “Yeah, and gotta have snack crops! The kiddos gotta have snacks!” “Lettuce and carrots = always.” “And fancy salad greens too” “Yeah, and some sort of hearty brassica for braising and sides.” “And novelties to keep it fun: Corn, scapes, fennel, kohlrabi…” “What flowers are possible in early June?” “What are the most epic 9 Winter Squash varieties to dole out in the Fall?” Etc, etc….
From these envisioned ideal harvests, we work backwards, pouring over the seed catalogues, crop by crop, going through memories of seasons past, picking favorite varieties and considering their “days to maturity", heat and frost sensitivities, yield expectations, etc. The yield, maturity, and almanac-esque numbers give us the basic idea of how many seeds to sow in the greenhouse and fields and when.
A Dance of Time Scales
When things are sown is super dependent on each crops days to maturity. For example, we like to have nice arugula and mustard greens every week from June-December. Arugula and mustards are a super fast maturing (~25 days from germination to harvest) so we sow 130 ft of 4 rows of arugula every other week from May 8th until September 25th. Carrots, on the other hand, take 75-90 days to mature. They also have a large harvest window (meaning we can harvest off the same patch for over a month). So for carrots we’ll sow 3 large patches, the first on April 24th, and the last in mid-July, and that will give us fresh bunched and Fall storage carrots all the way until mid-December. On the longest end of the spectrum are crops like Hopi Blue Corn, Pumpkins and Winter Squash. These crops we plant once, as they take all season to mature, and we enjoy them throughout the Fall.
And so it goes that each Spring we embark with neat greenhouse sowing and field planting schedules — musical scores to a carefully choreographed dance with the time-scales of plants. These schedules become the drum-beat of our weeks and eventually become the harvests.
Late May was a little cray cray.
Rubber Hits the Road
On our farm, greenhouse sowings begin in early February with slow maturing flowers, alliums, nightshades, and apiaceae and they continue with the last lettuce sowing in October; field seedings begin with the first Carrot sowing, April 24th and the last arugula and mustards sowing late September.
Harvest is when the real work — namely the note taking and record keeping — begins. What actually happened? How many bedfeet of cabbage were transplanted? How much cabbage did we harvest, how much did people take home? Was it enough? Was it too much? How much too much? How did that variety hold up to the heat of July? Some things we don’t need to take notes on, like Sarah’s Choice cantaloupe being the best melon of all time. We remember that one.
Record keeping, planting, harvest and CSA pickup logs are the name of the game for us now. Every Thursday Kayta and I take a walk through the fields looking to see what we can offer in the harvest that week. Kayta looks at how much people took home of various crops in the previous week (even the previous year) to estimate how many lugs to harvest. We also look at crops we’ve just finished harvesting from. This year, for example, it seems we are uber rich in lettuce — lettuce billionaires. We will adjust our future plantings down a notch.
Indeed, the most sacred objects on the farm are the famous scrumpled “Harvest Log” composition notebook and a dirty old binder that lives in the truck labeled “Planting Log”. These are outward symbols of our slowly amassing memory of successes and failures that will help us, each winter, to create a planting plan ever more refined and custom tailored to this soil and this micro-climate and this CSA membership.
Painting with Seeds
But the “art” and the heart of crop planning for us is in taking all of this bizniss and planting for harvests that harmonize with the seasons, surprise, delight, and help CSA members fall in love with food and flowers every week.
If everything goes to plan this year, for example, you should experience a seasonal arc of alliums. The fresh garlic, scapes, scallions, and cipollini onions of Spring will soon give way to the full sized, rich Cabernet Red, Walla Walla Sweet, and Torpedo bulbs of Summer which will in turn give way to the solid, crispy-paper cured orbs of late Summer and Fall. In this way we hope our allium crop plan, and our whole crop plan, is a love song to seasons and the soil.
They say, "If you want to make God laugh, make a plan." But, with some elbow grease and a little bit of luck, I think we are we're well on our way to pulling off Kayta's 400 row, 60 column “2020 Crop Plan.xlsx”! Thanks to a little help from our friends...
See you in the fields,
David and Kayta
It all starts with a spreadsheet.
