from Jeanne and Steve

We had a lovely time at our Harvest Fair and Pumpkin Patch last Saturday. Thank you to all those of you who were able to come, as well as all of our wonderful volunteers. The weather was perfect, the cider press was a big hit, as was the music, the food, the face painting, the crafts, the hayrides, and the bunnies, ducks, goats, cows, horses, and bees. Some pictures below; plus, Chef Andrew has written up recipes for all of the great fair food that we had to offer at the event.

I took a walk through the pumpkin patch yesterday (the leaves are starting to die back so we can actually get through now and see what’s there). The pumpkins have sized up and are turning from green to orange, which is always a relief a few weeks before our Harvest Fair and Pumpkin Patch.

For a time around the turn of the last century the Pajaro Valley was considered the largest apple growing district in the United States. By some accounts the valley floor from Corralitos to Aromas was nearly carpeted with trees.

We officially still have a month left of summer, so why does it feel like fall already? The kids are heading off to school, and it’s a chilly 52 degrees with thick drippy fog.

Half of our home farm is in a conservation easement—it can never be developed or farmed and our goal is to restore this area to as natural a state as possible. It’s a work in progress.

The first of our tomatoes are beginning to turn red and will start to appear in your boxes over the next few weeks. The plants look great and are loaded with fruit, so we almost certainly will be offering them for sale by the case, for those who like to can.

We have offered flowers with the CSA shares for as long as we have been farming, at first for everyone and then as an optional add-on. We have always enjoyed having flowers to feed the soul while the vegetables feed the body.

As an organic farm, we’re always looking for natural ways to combat insect pests. In the 15 years or so that we’ve been farming we have rarely resorted to using any of the wide assortment of organically approved pesticides that are available.

This is the first year that we are able to use our new hoophouses on the terraced field at our Lewis Road ranch. As with all big farm projects, installing the hoophouses took longer and cost more than expected, but so far we’re delighted with how they are working out.

Steve’s off at an organic fruit growers’ conference in Leavenworth, Washington this week, so I’m holding down the fort and hoping to get through the week with no major emergencies (like the broken mainline irrigation pipe last week).

Although the strawberries started late this year, the plants are healthy and the white flowers that are abundant in the field mean a steady supply of fruit for the foreseeable future. Last week we released another round of persimilis mites for what will probably be the last time. Persimilis feed on only one host, the two spotted spider mite—among the worst pests that organic strawberry growers face.

I’m going to keep this short this week, because we’re going through our first renewal period with our new sign-up system and it’s been a busy few days!

If you are on the quarterly schedule and haven’t yet signed up for Session 2, you need to do it by noon today (for Wednesday deliveries) or noon tomorrow (for Thursday deliveries) or you won’t be on the list for this week. Go to Manage Your Account, log in with your e-mail address and password (have it send you a temporary password if you don’t know your password), then navigate to Add Share and choose “Session 2: Early Summer.”

This week we are mowing down and incorporating the last few blocks of over-wintered cover crop that we still have standing. I’m always a little ambivalent about this because it officially marks the transition from the lush, green, and more quiet time of winter and early spring to the dry, dusty, and bustling time of late spring and summer. Most of these late blocks will be planted to winter squash and pumpkins.

We enjoyed meeting some of you at our spring farm tour last Saturday. It was a beautiful day for walking around the farm and seeing what’s growing. Here in this picture, Steve is showing off one of our new hoophouses. He talked about the mechanics of using the hoophouses to extend the season and improve the growing conditions for heat-loving crops like tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. We could see the stark difference in the size of the plants that were growing right outside the hoophouse compared to those on the inside.

When people think about the difference between growing vegetables organically vs. conventionally, what generally pops into their minds is that they are different methods of handling insect pests–conventional growers use chemical pesticides while organic growers don’t.

The warm temperatures this week are making things grow fast after all the stormy weather we’ve been having. The cauliflower is not maturing uniformly, so we’ll give half of you cauliflower this week and the other half next week. This is our first spinach and cilantro of the season and we’re harvesting off a new planting of kale. We’ll be getting head lettuce in probably by next week, but for now enjoy the salad mix.

We do realize that we have been giving you a lot of carrots to start off the CSA this year, but you will be getting a break after this week. Unfortunately this week marks the end of the over-wintered Chantenays that are our family favorites. We dug and topped them all last week because they were showing signs of sending up seeders, which they always do coming into spring (the carrots develop a tough, woody core and are practically inedible once the plants go to seed). If you can’t use all of your carrots this week, don’t worry—chantenays are a great storage carrot and they will still be good for weeks to come. The next block of carrots we will be harvesting from will be of the mokum variety, a tender, sweet, early carrot in the Nantes class.

When we did our subscriber survey last year we asked what your main reasons were for being part of a CSA. The choices were: to eat more vegetables, to support small sustainable organic farms, to get the freshest food possible, and to connect with where food is grown and support a local economy and community. There was also an “other” option which allowed you to write in your own reasons. All of the options got lots of votes (you could choose as many options as you wanted), but a lot of people also wrote in the other category: “to eat seasonally.”

Plastic bags have been in the news this week, as Santa Cruz banned stores from giving people plastic bags to carry home their purchases. We have had a few comments from CSA subscribers about the plastic liner bags that we use in the CSA boxes, wondering why we use them. This is a topic that we have thought a lot about and have actually reduced our packaging a lot in the past year. We wish it were as easy as eliminating the plastic bags altogether, but have found that the issue is more complicated than that. We appreciate that our members are concerned about the environment and want to explain the purpose and benefits of the plastic bags that we use.