• Baby Hakurei Turnips - a "thinning" harvest, which means the turnips are petite, extra-tender, and the greens are top quality for stir-fries, sauteeing, or steaming. By doing a preliminary thinning this week, we should have larger bunches for you next time.
• Leeks - so fat!
• Cauliflower
• Savoy Cabbage
• Purple Daikon Radish - the last of the season. Peel, slice and enjoy on tacos, burrito bowls, posole, salads, or dipped in dressing!
• Spring Raab - a combo of Lacinato and cabbage raab this week
• Purple Sprouting Broccoli (PSB) - sometimes aphids like to hide amongst the tight buds of PSB during the winter. A great way to get rid of them is to soak your florets in salty water for 10-15 minutes and then rinse them off with fresh water. Add 1 tsp salt per 1 quart water in a bowl or your sink and submerge the broccoli (this also works with any other type of produce where aphids are keen to congregate: kale, cauliflower, regular heading broccoli and broccolini, Brussels sprouts, etc). You can also make a white vinegar solution instead of salt to similar effect.
• Painted Purple Potatoes
• Pea Shoots
• Italian Parsley
• Bunched Spinach
• Autumn Frost Winter Squash

Only THREE CSA Basket Left for our Upcoming Summer Season!

As of last count, we only have three Harvest Baskets left before we're sold out for the the 2025 Summer Season (heads up if you've been procrastinating on signing up!). If you want to eat crazy-fresh-and-tasty veggies, avoid the grocery store stickershock, and vote with your fork for local family farming and a resilient, community-forward food system, grab your CSA share today before it's too late!

Sign Up Here!

Grant Freeze Update from the Farm:

Two of the federal grants we received last year to make upgrades at the farm continue to be frozen by the federal government. It's been a part-time job the past six weeks trying to get our funds released so that we can get reimbursed for the $90,000 in projects we have in the works (a new tractor with pallet forks and a battery back-up system for our solar array that would keep our coolers running and our produce safe during power outages). So far the new administration has flouted two judicial orders demanding that these Congressionally-appropriated funds be reinstated to farms across the country. The Rural Energy for America Program (REAP) that was supposed to fund our battery backup project has $600 million in signed contracts with farmers across the country right now, all to support solar installations and energy efficiency projects. The entirety of that funding is currently frozen (somewhat ironically) by President Trump's "Unleashing American Energy" Executive Order. We continue to advocate, agitate, and organize with farmers around the state and country to get this illegal action reversed so we can move forward with these projects that are intended to increase the capacity and the resiliency of the farm and our local food system. Please add your voice if you haven't already by sending a message to Congress: https://sustainableagriculture.net/take-action/

Photo of the Week: Avocadoes in the Orchard!

Mexicola is an avocado variety that's hardy down to 20 degrees, so it stands a chance to survive here on the coast. Inherent gamblers that we are, we planted four of them (they need each other for pollination) last week, and one of the trees arrived already loaded with hundreds of baby avocadoes the size of little raisins. We'll see if they can hack it on Floras Creek, and if they can, holy-moly there might be homegrown guacamole in your CSA future! :)

• Last of the Apples! - Enjoy the final distribution of Goldrush and Fuji!
• Yellow Potatoes
• Leek, leeks, leeks! - It wasn't our best year for storage onions, but the leeks have made up for it! Big and fat and abundant!
• Purple Sprouting Broccoli - our first little harvest of the season
• Lacinato Raab - Our overwintered kale is starting to stretch skyward and make tasty little flower buds, which we call spring "raab." This is the final gift from kale plants that have been in the ground for a full year, and perhaps the best treat of all. Great steamed or roasted until crispy-browned.
• Cauliflower - The first harvest of overwintered cauliflower, which always feels quasi-miraculous. 
• Red and Gold Beets
• Candystick Delicata Squash
• Butternut Squash
• Lettuce & Spinach Salad Mix - If ever there was a labor of love, it's the winter salad mix! Lots of hours spent stooped on our knees for harvest, and another half day of washing, but oh the glory of a vibrant winter salad!
• Micro Mix - we're trialing a bunch of new micro varieties, so the mix this week is a little bit of everything!

Life on the farm is always dictated by the weather, but even more so in the winter. Right now work is pretty cleanly split into two categories: the rainy-day and the dry-day list. Dry days are all about pruning fruit trees and blueberry bushes, starting with the early-to-bloom plums and peaches, moving to pears, and finally apples. We're also juggling a long list of other "off-season" projects: new fencing, irrigation improvements, greenhouse upgrades, and building barn doors for the tote storage shed we completed last month:

Rainy-day work is far-ranging in content, but centered in the office: it always involves finishing the crop plan for the season to come, getting the last of our seeds ordered and organized, managing CSA sign-ups, and doing lots of member communications. But this year the office list is stretching longer than ever. We have a couple of grants to apply for before mid-March (state funds, not unpredictable federal dollars this time). We're in the midst of importing another Toyota Hiace pickup from Japan - a lot of paperwork, but worth it for the best farm rig ever built: diesel 4WD, 1 ton capacity, fold down sides (so it converts to a full flatbed), a ten foot bed (for hauling lots of veggies! lumber! metal roofing! pallets of stuff!), but still compact for our small farm. Of course I wish it was electric, but until they invent that fantasy farm rig, my flame will burn for the Toyota Hiace. Here's a pic of Yoshi, the first one we imported last fall:

It's also been a super busy season of policy and legislative activism at the county, state and federal levels: It's almost daily that I'm submitting written testimony to the legislature regarding various bills under consideration in Salem to protect land use laws, improve water law, promote programs for farmers, immigrants, and low income communities, and support policies that underwrite more resilient local food systems in our state. Meanwhile the Curry County Board of Commissioners has many of us working overtime in an effort to steer them away from a misguided proposal to take over and clearcut our federal lands, and instead help brainstorm proposals for sustainable revenue generation for the county. Add to that the federal funding freeze, which is still impacting the farm and has me in daily correspondence with Congressional staffers, the Governor's office, farmer organizations and other farmers. There's a lot to do on all these fronts (please let me know if you want to plug in in any way, we need more voices!).

But one look at the weather forecast this week means pruning is going to win out, in spite of the pile-up on my desk (with the exception of some time-sensitive testimony that will get written somehow, by burning another other end of the candle...man, if only they could make a candle with more than two ends...).

There is also one other kind of weather that creates its very own kind of purpose: wet and very cold, which equals very cold and very snowy in the mountains. When that forecast shows up on my phone, you can bet money that this is where you'll find most of the Valley Flora family, in varying states of glee: 

After all, everyone needs a snow day now and then :)

• Leeks
• Beets: Red and Gold - Try this wonderful marinated beet recipe sent to us by a friend up Elk River: https://valleyflorafarm.com/christmasbeets (my daughter Cleo, who is NOT a fan of beets, said at the dinner table on Monday, "Now THAT's the kind of beet I would eat if I was going to eat a beet." At which point she put a pile of beets on her plate and tucked in. I tried to play it cool in hopes of belying the internal beet victory party going on inside my head. Thank you, Georgeanne (sharer of Christmas Beet recipe)!
• Goldrush Apples - Hands-down, our favorite apple of all time - for it's complex sweet-tart flavor, great texture, versatility (fresh eating or baking), and profoundly long storage life.
• Yellow Potatoes
• Chioggia Radicchio - the last of the radicchio....not sure how I'll survive the rest of winter...
• Butternut Squash
• Lacinato Kale - tender new growth shooting skyward as the days lengthen...
• Savoy Cabbage
• Radish Microgreens
• Winter Lettuce Mix - a pretty little pile of salad from our high tunnels, such a treat when it's 29 degrees and frozen solid outside!

Addendum to Last Week's Newsletter: One Stroke of a Pen, 3 Trillion Upended

If you read last week's newsletter (copied below in case you didn't), you know that we've been spearheading a bunch of exciting initiatives at Valley Flora thanks to a handful of competitive federal grants that we were awarded last year: a $48,000 grant that enables us to supply produce to local foodbanks over three years; a $50,000 grant for a 60hp tractor with forks to help with materials handling; and a $20,000 grant to cover half the cost of installing a battery backup system on our solar array for disaster preparedness and resiliency. Unfortunately all funds for these projects were suspended yesterday as part of the government's freeze on federal grants, in spite of repeated promises from grant administrators over the past two months that our funding was safe. Here on Floras Creek we are trying to navigate the same confusion and concern that local and state governments, federal agencies, schools, non-profits, social service providers, health care centers, and private businesses alike are all suddenly facing. The chief concern for the farm is that we're dealing with reimbursement grants, meaning we don't receive all of our promised grant funds until final project reporting is complete. That means the farm has been fronting the cost of these projects under the assumption that we will be paid back this spring, as per our signed contracts with the federal government. But suddenly the question of reimbursement is up in the air and none of our grant administrators have any answers yet, even though all of these funds were appropriated by an act of Congress under its constitutional authority to control the purse strings.

Ironically, and bitterly, today was a day I've been looking forward to for years: it's the day we were scheduled to have our battery backup system finally installed at the barn. A battery backup system that would allow us farmers to sleep a little better at night, knowing that the produce we work so hard to grow, harvest and clean for you is safe and sound in a cooler that won't go dead during a power outage. A battery backup system that would strengthen our little local food system and buffer against increasingly extreme weather and wildfire. Amidst all the chaos that the two page OMB memo caused yesterday, we had to cancel today's installation and are currently researching whether we can return the $24,000 battery system we've already purchased and get a refund from the manufacturer.

Or will we get left footing the whole bill for a new tractor and an uninstalled battery bank, funding withheld by a federal government that believes these pragmatic projects are "advancing Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies [and are] a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve" (Matthew Vaeth, acting director of the Office of Managment and Budget as quoted in the January 27th memo). Respectfully Sir, then who do you serve? Because I'm pretty sure our crew, our CSA members, all our farm customers, and our rural community as a whole would be well served by these fundamental improvements at Valley Flora.

As of 11 am Wednesday, news outlets are reporting that the federal grant freeze has been rescinded in the face of massive pressure from around the country, but our grant administrators are still unclear what lies ahead. One thing is for sure: I'll be spending the rest of this sunny day in the office, submitting expenditure reports to USDA in hopes we can get some reimbursement funds flowing our way before the cart gets upended by another sloppy stroke of the pen.

Last Week's Newsletter, in case you didn't read it....

Thank You Joe: Big Leaps Forward at Valley Flora Thanks to Biden

As the new year gets underway on Floras Creek, we’re catching our breath, looking back, looking ahead, and feeling gratitude. A lot of big things happened this past year on the farm, much of which we didn’t have time or bandwidth to share with you in the hustle of the season. But as a new government takes the helm today, we wanted to catch you up on some big investments that were made possible by innovative USDA funding, and what that means for our business and our community moving forward.

Our kind of small, diversified farm has always had to scrabble at the edges for limited USDA resources. Farms that produce commodity crops like corn, soy, wheat, cotton, canola, tobacco, sugar beets, etc. receive government subsidy checks and crop insurance payments every year, equaling about 16% ($70 billion) of the total federal Farm Bill budget (see pie chart below). Meanwhile, “specialty” crops (i.e. fruit and vegetables - that’s us) are lumped into a category that receives less than 1% of total Farm Bill funding (that tiny slice of the pie that also includes forestry, rural development, research, credit, and the catch-all category, “miscellaneous”). All to say, Valley Flora has never received much money from the USDA, except for the conservation programs we’re enrolled in (like planting trees along our streambank, for which they send us a token $47 check each year). 

Source: USDA Economic Research Service Based on Congressional Budget Office, Direct Spending Effects for the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 (2018 Farm Bill), December 11, 2018

While commodity programs and crop insurance have still been amply funded under the Biden administration, he also made it a priority to invest in local and regional food production, better food access for low-income communities, and clean energy/climate-smart agriculture. To this end, he empowered the USDA to roll out the most impactful set of grant programs I’ve ever seen for farms like ours. Realizing it might be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I put my nose to the grindstone last winter and cranked out a slew of grant proposals for these new USDA programs. A number of our proposals were selected and so began a very exciting phase of opportunity and investment at Valley Flora. Here’s a glimpse of what we’re doing with these special federal funds, some of which are still coming down the pipeline.

$48,000 over Three Years to Supply Local Foodbanks and Community Fridges

The Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program is a whole lot of words, and it means a whole lot of veggies are flowing from Valley Flora to local food assistance organizations. Administered by the Oregon Foodbank, the LFPA grant pays us for produce that we deliver to the Common Good foodbank in Port Orford and the Coos Bay Library Community Fridge. We’ve always donated leftover and grade B produce to these outlets for free, but this grant has allowed us to harvest and pack them three times more volume, as well as send our foodbank partners perfect peppers, beautiful bunches of kale, and cases of lettuce. The Common Good serves one out of every four families in Port Orford and the Coos Bay Library Community Fridge serves hundreds of folks daily. We love knowing that VF produce is finding its way to far more families every week thanks to these funds.

$25,000+ for SNAP and Double Up Food Bucks

The biggest slice of the Farm Bill pie – and it’s a huge one – is SNAP (food stamps), accounting for over 75% of Farm Bill spending. Double Up Food Bucks (DUFB) is an innovative program that operates in tandem with SNAP to improve access to fresh fruits and vegetables by covering half the cost of any fresh produce that’s purchased with SNAP. It was founded as a non-profit pilot program in Detroit and quickly scaled as a national model for nutrition incentives. The Biden administration oversaw significant growth in this program, enabling us to quadruple our SNAP CSA membership at the farm over the last two years. For our CSA members who have SNAP, Double Up Food Bucks is the difference between being able to afford a CSA share or not.

In Oregon, our network of CSA farms is supported by the Pacific Northwest CSA Coalition (PNWCSA) to process SNAP payments and access DUFB funds. Over the past four years, PNWCSA went from processing about $70,000 in SNAP funds in 2020 to over $200,000 in 2024 (a 185% increase), and from accessing $34,000 in Double Up Food Bucks funds in 2020, to $190,000 in 2024 (a 459% increase). This past year 66 Oregon farms participated in the Double Up CSA program, Valley Flora among them, providing shares to 650 families statewide. The good news is that PNWCSA has secured Double Up funding through 2026, however there’s concern that SNAP could undergo deep cuts under the next administration. Our goal at Valley Flora is to continue to increase our SNAP CSA membership (please spread the word about this awesome program!) so that we can get fresh produce to every family that wants it in our community. Our hope is that we can eventually extend this program to our farmstand, not just our CSA, and keep improving food access on the Southcoast.

$20,000 for a Battery Backup for our Solar Array

In 2018 we installed a 12kW solar array on the roof of our barn, which runs all our core infrastructure at the farm: coolers, freezers, propagation greenhouse, irrigation pumps and lights. It’s been awesome to power the farm with the sun, but ironically we’re not actually energy “independent” because our PV array is still tied to the grid. This allows us to send any excess power we generate back to grid, and to pull power from the grid when we don’t have enough solar gain. All good, but unfortunately it also means that if the grid goes down (due to winter storms or wildfires), we don’t have power – despite all those solar panels on the roof.

We used to think of power outages as a winter problem, and not very worrisome since we have less perishable produce in our walk-in cooler and air temps are cooler in the winter. But with growing wildfire risk – and associated summer power outages – we’ve started to feel increasingly vulnerable to the possibility that our walk-in cooler might go down on a hot August day when it’s full of perishables. We applied for and received a REAP (Rural Energy for America Program) grant to cover half the cost of a battery backup system, which will keep our coolers running and our operation humming in the face of climate change. This is the first year that battery backups have been an allowable REAP project expense, thanks to forward-thinking, climate-smart policy under Biden.

$50,000 for a 60 hp Tractor with Forks and Macro Bins

For over twenty years we’ve been unloading 1 ton pallets by hand, lifting 50 pound bins of squash one by one, and borrowing neighbors’ forklifts when we’re in a pinch. Being low-tech certainly helps keep you in shape, but it also puts some bottlenecks on efficiency and innovation (and sometimes results in back injuries). Through the Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure Program (RFSI), we received grant funding to purchase a used 60 hp Kubota tractor with forks so we can now lift and move one-ton pallets. The grant also paid for a dozen “macro” bins, which will streamline our handling of various storage crops. The tractor arrived a month ago and there is only one way to describe it: total gamechanger.

All told, these grants and programs add up to around $150,000 in investment into our family farm and this community. To put that in perspective, that’s HALF of our total gross annual sales at Valley Flora! An infusion of capital at this scale has an impact that will ripple through our business and our little local food system for years to come. It’s allowed us get more good food to folks who couldn’t otherwise afford fresh veggies. And it’s allowed us to make purchases that never would have penciled out without grant assistance: a new tractor, a state-of-the-art battery backup system, and smart materials handling equipment.

There’s legitimate concern that many of these programs will disappear with the changing of the guard in Washington, and I’ll be sad for farmers and local communities alike if that comes to pass. Unfortunately, the Farm Bill extension that was passed in December with significant input from the incoming administration hints at what might be coming down the pike: plenty of funding for commodity programs but big slashes to programs that support conservation, small family farms, and community food systems.

No matter what, I’m grateful for what the Biden administration has made possible for our farm and many others like it. No other president has ever made this kind of immediate impact on our business, in direct support of all that we are trying to do here on the banks of Floras Creek – for our community, for the environment, and for the climate.

As the baton is passed today I say thank you, Joe, thank you. You've made a big difference at Valley Flora. 

In the CSA Share this Week:

• Rainbow Chard
• Red Beets
• Cipollini Onions
• Sweet Peppers
• Tomatoes
• Zucchini
• Hot Peppers - Jalapeño & Serrano
• Red Potatoes 

On Rotation:

• Eggplant
• Head Lettuce (Wednesday CSA members only)
• Tomatillos (Port Orford only)

The red potatoes in your share this week are a substitute for our beloved "Desiree" potatoes, which were unavailable from our potato seed supplier this year. We source certified seed potatoes from a sustainable/regenerative family farm in Colorado, Rocky Farms, where they do a beautiful job of using cover crops, animal rotation, and companion planting to build soil health and produce high quality specialty and seed potatoes. They were sold out of Desiree this year, so instead they sent us "Carla Rosa," a new variety for us. We planted our seed potatoes into near-perfect conditions in early May but unfortunately the emergence on the Carla Rosa was spotty compared to our five other varieties. After a season of watering, hilling and weeding, we finally started digging them with the help of the horses a couple weeks ago, only to be deeply disappointed when we discovered that some of the Carla Rosa - which look perfect on the outside - have "brown center" and/or "hollow heart." It's very difficult to detect the problem; our best clue is a slighter darker eye at the end of the tuber. We've cut into hundreds of potatoes over the past week, trying to determine how widespread the issue is. Half the time the suspect potatoes are perfect inside. The potatoes that are afflicted have a brown internal discoloration, a hollowed out core (like a geode), and sometimes some internal rot. No fun! You can cut around the problem areas and salvage the good part of the potato, but still - there's nothing I hate more than an insidious, invisible, and unpredictable defect that makes it hard to guarantee the quality of our produce.

I reached out to Rocky Farms to see if this was a widespread problem with the Carla Rosa, since we haven't noticed it in our other varieties yet. Some potato varieties are more susceptible to brown center and hollow heart than others, so perhaps Carla Rosa is among them - I'm still awaiting their reply. When brown center and hollow heart show up in a potato crop, the problem is typically blamed on environmental stress, particularly when a dry spell is followed by excessive rainfall. In our case, our potatoes are on a consistent biweekly irrigation schedule, so they're not usually subject to major moisture swings throughout the season. All of which leaves me a little befuddled and a lot disappointed.

We painstakingly sorted this week's harvest in hopes of sending you the best potatoes possible, and we also packed everyone an extra pound of spuds in case you end up with any ugly ones. Unfortunately our red potatoes make up about a quarter of our potato production, so we can't afford to toss the whole crop. Nor can we simply leave them in the ground and till them under, lest we want a potato weed patch in that same spot next year! That means that we'll continue to sort them with utmost care and beg your forgiveness if you run into an imperfect tater. Hopefully that extra poundage in your share will make up for it.

Also in the CSA tote this week, Cipollini onions (pronounced the Italian way, CHIP-OH-LEE-NEE). This is the first onion I reach for in our dry storage room, which is now stacked floor-to-ceiling with thousands of pounds of cleaned onions (thanks to our hard-working crew; they've been cleaning onions in every spare moment the past couple weeks!). Cipollinis are typically a small, flat onion measuring one to two inches across - pungent when raw, but divinely sweet and flavorful when roasted or caramelized. Most recipes call for using them whole, due to their diminuitive size. But for whatever reason, they grow to thrice that size (and larger) at Valley Flora, so I usually slice or quarter mine up before cooking. If you want to make some homemade pizza, do NOT skip the caramelized cipollinis on top. Outta this world. You might have to shed a tear or two in the process, but I promise: it's worth it.

Happy official start of Fall this weekend! 

In this week's CSA share:

• Carrots
• Sweet Corn
• Eggplant
• Head Lettuce
• Serrano & Jalapeño hot peppers
• Sweet Peppers
• Zucchini
• Tomatoes
• Walla Walla Sweets

On Rotation:

• Strawberries

It's that sorrowful week when the farm goes quiet because the kids are back to school. Of course it's a good thing, but how we miss their belly laughs and barefoot glee and mischievous shenanigans as they roam feral around the farm all day! This year we found ourselves unexpectedly short-handed in July and for the first time ever the kids stepped up and stepped in, filling essential roles during packout on Tuesdays and Fridays: Cleo (age 13) took over flower production/making boquets and Uma (age 9) was our go-to girl for packing up green beans and cucumbers. Both of them have also been super helpful getting the CSA totes packed the past 6 weeks, which is always the final step in our 13-hour-long Tuesday and Friday marathons. It's hard to say how we'll survive September without them, now that we're short-handed again AND broken-hearted :). Needless to say, it has been SO SWEET and special to have them in the mix, getting real work done and doing it beautifully (stop by the Langlois Market this week to pick up a boquet of flowers, thanks to Cleo who put in her final day in the barn yesterday).

On the farm this week we're looking forward to In a Landscape (this Saturday at 5 pm - tickets are still available!). What else? We're cleaning a motherlode of onions in the greenhouse in order to clear out space for our next big storage crop that's almost ready to come out of the field: winter squash! We'll also start digging our first storage potatoes tomorrow with the help of the horses. Pretty much the next month is all about stuffing the barn, walk-in coolers, and any covered space with as much food as possible for fall and winter (it's easy to imagine what it's like to be a squirrel at this time of year). But meanwhile, summer persists!

• The u-pick strawberry patch is still fruiting abundantly. It's a great time to come out and pick - you'll likely have the run of the place on Wednesdays and Saturdays. That said, this might be the final week you see them in the CSA share. The berries have a shorter shelf life in the Fall, so we encourage practicing instant gratification rather than delayed (eat now, not tomorrow!) and keeping them refrigerated. 
• Uma's watermelon crop is ready! You can pick up one of her super-sweet-n-juicy open-pollinated melons at the farmstand on Wednesdays and Saturdays for the next couple weeks while supplies last!
• We should have another two weeks of sweet corn, this week and next. Get your fill while it's here!

Savor the abuandance, it doesn't get much better!

In the CSA Share this Week:

• Curly Parsley
• French Fingerling Potatoes
• Sweet Corn
• Carrots
• Cucumbers
• Red Onion
• Green Beans
• Tomatoes
• Zucchini
• Hot Peppers (Jalapeño & Serrano)

On Rotation:

• Eggplant

Surprise! I'm sending out a newsletter after all this week due to a last minute change of plans. It's now highly likely that there will be NO NEWSLETTER NEXT WEEK, but I'm guessing you all are figuring out what to do with sweet corn and tomatoes without too much help from me :).

As we head into late summer, certain seasonal shifts are underway: shorter days and chilly nights are slowing down growth in the lettuce field, hence the pause in head lettue this week. Cucumber and summer squash yields are down dramatically while eggplant and sweet peppers are revving up. All of our storage onions are out of the field - just in time ahead of this week's rain, making way for our first fall cover crops. The winter squash are fully sized up and turning a bright medley of fall colors on the vine, with harvest just a few weeks away. Fennel is at its best (fat and juicy and mild), the green beans are abundant (much to my crew's chagrin due to countless hours scooching down the bean rows on their knees lately), and our field of fall and winter Brassicas is filling in rapidly in vivid stripes of deep green and blue. We have one toe in Autumn, but the other foot is still firmly planted in summer: blueberries! blackberries! and the best strawberries I've tasted all season coming out of the u-pick patch. This crescendo moment of produce is one worth reveling in.

The arrival of fresh albacore at the dock, combined with this week's CSA share, has you perfectly poised to make Nicoise Salad: potatoes, green beans, tomatoes, red onion, fresh tuna.....

Or try this simple recipe for French Potato Salad using your pretty rose-hued French Fingerlings, parsley, red onions and green beans. 

I love it when I look at my plate and marvel aloud: all this came from our backyard! Always with that one caveat, "except the olive oil" :). But thanks to climate change we might eventually be harvesting our own Valley Flora olives - not a bad silver lining!

In This Week's CSA Share:

• Lacinato Kale
• Carrots
• Cucumbers
• Head Lettuce
• Walla Walla Sweet Onions
• Strawberries
• Zucchini
• Green Beans
• The First Tomato 

On Rotation:

• Broccoli
• Dill
• Cilantro
• Eggplant

I hope the past ten weeks of being a CSA member has gotten you in shape to eat your veggies, cuz it's a haul this week! You might call it an "Olympic" share, and maybe for some of you a true test of your ability to put down the produce. We're headed into that time of year when there is just so much good stuff to eat, it can be hard to keep the CSA share from getting out of control (especially when your farmers themselves eat inordinate quantities of vegetables and might possibly have a totally skewed sense of "normal"). This is the moment to eclipse all that "daily recommended servings" stuff from our somewhat outdated food pyramid and put veggies at the bottom. Make them your foundation and you should have no trouble getting through a peak season Valley Flora tote in a week (and you'll probably notice that powering your body with lots of plants feels pretty dang good). From what I hear, the strawberries rarely make it home from the pickup site, especially if you have kids in tow, and the same goes for the carrots and cukes. If you're getting backed up on other items, here are a few tips that might have you wishing for more:

• You can disappear kale in a heartbeat, by way of your blender (smoothies!), your oven (kale chips!), your steamer basket, or your hot wok/frying pan. Lately we've been eating about two bunches of kale every night in the form of kale chips (instead of popcorn) while we catch up on the Olympic highlights from the day. You can use any variety of kale, including this week's Lacinato. 
• If you eat salad every day, that mondo head of lettuce won't seem like enough (confession, we eat at least one to two of those almost every night, which means my personal CSA share would need to contain about ten heads of lettuce to get our household through a week - maybe I should seek professional help?). Big lettuce leaves are also great for making lettuce wraps. Stuff them with the filling of your choice, meat or vegetarian.
• Walla Walla Sweet onions, when caramelized in a skillet or roasted on a sheet pan, cook down into a succulent little pile of candy that you can put on pasta, pizza, burrito bowls, anything. I challenge you to not stand there in the kitchen eating it by the spoonful. And then, voila! your onions have disappeared!
• Zucchini fritters or zucchini bread or zucchini parmesan are great ways to burn through your zukes.
• Broccoli is winding down until Fall, so this will be the last week or two we have it. Here's a smorgasbord of recipes that put it to good use.

I'm guessing that your one lovely debut tomato won't require any pointers, nor will the first taste of fresh green beans.

Go for the CSA gold this week. As that ubiquitous Olympic sponsor likes to say, Just Do It. 

In your CSA share this week:

• Bunch Carrots, hooray!
• Walla Walla Sweet Onions
• Strawberries
• Broccoli
• Basil
• Cucumbers
• Zucchini
• Head Lettuce

Wa-wa-wee-wa, Walla Wallas!

The arrival of the Walla Walla Sweets is a true marker of July at Valley Flora. We grow seven or eight onion varieties on the farm, but there's a certain place in my heart reserved for this special open-pollinated variety. They're easy-eating: juicy, mild, sweet, versatile (check out this long list of Walla Walla-centric recipes from the Walla Walla Sweet Growers Association). But they're also fleeting compared to most of our other varieties, which store well into winter. This is a truly seasonal onion, only available from us from now until September (Walla Wallas have a higher water content than other onions, making them less suitable for long-term storage). We start them from seed, along with all of our other varieties, in early February. They spend over 10 weeks in seedling trays in the greenhouse, slowly girthing up as we nurse them through the cold, dark days of late winter and early spring. By the end of April, weather permitting, we transplant all our onions, shallots and leeks into the field (close to 23,000 bareroot seedlings that get hand-planted over the course of a few days) and then tend them for another three months until first harvest. There's a lot of hand weeding that goes into organic onion production, since they're slow growing and don't form a competitive canopy to shade out weeds. The hope is that all that TLC will add up to an abundance of onions that will see us through the rest of the season and into next spring, starting with the Walla Wallas.

I'm happy to report that this year's onion crop has been coming along spectacularly, healthy and vigorous. We always start harvesting our Walla Wallas fresh from the field while they still have green tops (those tops can be eaten like green onions if you so chose). As the onions finish maturing in the field, the tops start to dry down and flop over, at which point we pull the remainder of the crop and "cure" it in our greenhouse for 10 days. Once the tops are fully dry, we trim the roots and tops and put them in our dry storage room, which extends our Walla Walla season into September. By then we will have also harvested our yellow and red storage onions, cipollinis, and shallots and will be using every spare minute to get them cured, cleaned and stashed in climate-controlled dry storage.

We've still got a few weeks to go until the big storage onion harvest is upon us, which makes cherry-picking big, fat, fresh Walla Wallas from the field evermore enjoyable right now. I hope you feel the same way about eating them :). Buen provecho!

• New Potatoes
• Broccoli
• Sugar Snap Peas - a motherlode of 'em!
• Fava Beans
• Zucchini
• Strawberries
• Head Lettuce
• Cucumbers

On Rotation:

• Artichokes

Oh holy heat wave! Glad that's over, SHEESH! I don't know how those inland farmers do it - dealing with heat like that, and temperatures ten to fifteen degrees more extreme, on an increasingly regular basis. Climate change is no fun as a farmer, I can promise you that. Heat waves force you to spend a lot of energy throwing extra water at crops; trying to outpace the sun as it vaults into the morning sky during harvest; trying to keep your own body cool and hydrated and conscious; doing your absolute best to keep produce from wilting while you pick it and pack it. We hit the high nineties/low hundreds over the weekend, temps that we've seen before on the farm, but it's always been one random day here or there - never a string of consecutive, unrelenting, oven-broilers. Certain summer crops soaked up the heat happily: the peppers, sweet corn, onions, winter squash, green beans and eggplant all bushed out and doubled in size in the span of a few days. But some of our "spring" crops that don't like extreme temps, like peas, tried to outrun us. We put in an extra harvest day to avoid losing them all, but even so our Monday haul broke every yield record in the history of growing Sugar Snaps at Valley Flora because the pods were so fat and filled out (still sweet, thank goodness). That explains why you're getting a huge pile of them in your share this week...:). We also lost a bunch of lettuce to bolting, the aphids moved in on the broccolini, and the strawberries are in a mild state of heat shock.

It's a huge relief to see our forecast returning to the lovely 70's for now, a temperature that both flora and fauna thrive in. That said, there's a part of us that is constantly braced nowadays, trying to stay mentally, emotionally and physically prepared for the next heat wave or climate catastrophe, because it's coming at us no matter how much we hope it won't. Climate change means that farmers and farmworkers have to dig that much deeper, work that much harder in uncomfortable - if not downright dangerous - conditions, and reckon with the financial reality of climate-related crop losses. Wish us - and the global food supply - best of luck, and consider the connection before you hop willy nilly on an airplane, eat lots of meat, or cast your ballot. Your choice to source your produce from us - a local, organic, solar-powered farm - and eat a plant-forward diet is a very important step in the right direction (30% of global greenhouse gas emissions are due to the food system, nearly 20% of that 30% is food mile emissions, and 36% of that 20% is from fruit and vegetable food miles). So it's significant when you get your fruit and veg nearby, and especially significant when your produce doesn't travel by air. While you might have been motivated to join our CSA for the flavor, freshness, or health benefits of peak-of-season produce, you're also engaging in a form of climate activism when you pick up your CSA tote, farmstand order, or buy Valley Flora produce at the Port Orford Co-Op, Coos Head Food Co-op, the Langlois Market, McKay's, Crooked Creek Farmstand, or any of the other wonderful outlets that support the farm. Thank you so much for being part of the solution! We hope it feels good and tastes great.

P.S. If you don't know what to do with fresh fava beans, this guy'll help get you started :) and here are a few recipes to consider.

• Head lettuce
• Broccoli
• Green Cone Cabbage
• Basil
• Sugar Snap Peas
• Purplette Onions
• Strawberries
• Kale

On Rotation:

• Artichokes

If ever there was a "signature" Week 6 share, this is it: dainty Purplette onions, fat Sugar Snap peas, tender-sweet Caraflex cabbage, heavy heads of broccoli, bright red strawberries, luxurious basil. With one major exception: artichokes! Starting this week artichokes will be on rotation, which has never happened in the July CSA shares before. We typically move our artichoke patch every five years or so, usually in the late Fall. We missed the window to do it last fall, so they got divided and moved in February instead. That delayed their development by a couple of months, so instead of budding in April/May, which is their usual peak season, we're getting July chokes instead. These new plants are HUGE - wading through them for harvest feels like a journey into some prehistoric thistle patch, with spiky chokes bobbing above the foliage everywhere you turn.

The Valley Flora artichoke is somewhat of a local legend. They've been in our family for over fifty years, since the early 1970's when my mom's friend gave her a division from her garden on Short Street in Bandon. My mom tended and divided that plant and turned it into multiple clumps of artichokes in her own garden. Throughout my entire childhood we savored those chokes in the late spring (dipped in melted butter of course). When I moved to Portland after college in 2003, my mom gave me a few divisions for my own backyard. They threw chokes reliably, even in Portland's more extreme inland climate. When I finally moved back to Langlois, I brought my artichokes with me: forty bare root divisions that I planted out into the field next to 300 Green Globe starts that I'd germinated from a seed packet.

Once those Green Globes started producing that first season, it became apparent immediately how superior the "Mother Choke" was: those forty original plants out-yielded the three hundred Green Globes; the chokes were more beautiful and uniform; they had far better flavor; and, most striking of all, they were practicly chokeless (the "choke" is the hairy part of the flower bud, just above the heart as you eat down through the leaves). When you eat a smaller Valley Flora artichoke, you'll find that you can eat it from the bottom up, no hairy choke to choke on. The Mother Choke also puts out a smaller, secondary flush of chokes in the Fall (bonus)!

As the plants came through their first winter of frost, snow and heavy rain, it became obvious that there was no point in keeping those Green Globes around. The Mother Chokes took every beating that winter threw at them - including a 17 degree cold snap - and bounced right back, while the Green Globes faltered and many died. I wasted no time in tilling the Globes under, dividing the row of Mother Chokes yet again, and replanting the patch with our own stock. Sixteen years later they're going stronger than ever on the farm - in July! 

If Valley Flora had a mascot, most of the public would probably chose the strawberry. But deep down, I think it's the artichoke. It represents the five+ decades that this land has cupped us in its palm along Floras Creek, generously feeding us unusual and beautiful things every season over the span of three generations. People usually speak of humans as the ones who "tend" and "nurture" a piece of land - and while it's certainly true that we spend our every waking moment loving on this place - at the end of the day I feel like it's the land that's tending, nurturing and filling us with life.

There is a Kalapuya saying that I keep on a post-it note at my desk:

A homeland, an Ilihi, cannot be possessed, it possesses its people, it holds them.

For this beautiful homeland, and for the artichoke that grows so well within it, nothing but gratitude.

• Baby Arugula 
• Rhubarb - You can go sweet (crisp, compote, cake, muffins) or savory with this one
• Basil - the first harvest!
• Strawberries
• Hakurei Turnips - last week of these little morsels until Fall!
• White Kohlrabi - the big, tender cousin to the purple kohlrabi from last week. Peel and slice it into your salad for yummy crunch.
• Head Lettuce - butterhead, leaf or romaine

On Rotation:

• Zucchini
• Broccolini

Coming Soon!

• Sugar Snap Peas
• Broccoli
• Red Beets
• Fennel
• Cabbage

• Radish Micro Mix
• Baby Arugula (bagged)
• Yellow Spring Onions
• Head Lettuce
• Purple Radishes
• Strawberries
• Pea Tendrils

On Rotation:

• Broccolini
• Zucchini

We couldn't be more grateful for the almost 2" of rain on Sunday night - enough to help keep the hills green and the creek full. There's also a bit of magic in real rain, as opposed to irrigation water, that makes plants go crazy. Rainwater is slightly acidic (thanks to colliding with CO2 as it plummets through the atmosphere) and when it hits the soil it catalyzes the release of important micronutrients like zinc, copper, iron and manganese, all of which are essential to plant growth. Rainwater also contains nitrates - the form of nitrogen that plants can readily absorb through their roots - which gives crops a noticeable boost. And, it rinses off the dust that collects on the leaves of plants, allowing more sunlight to reach their cells and boost photosynthesis. It's no wonder that in the week following a good summer rain we sometimes see our field crops double in size.

Growing up here as a kid, June was always a misty, drippy, green month - a little maddening when you're ten years old and school's out for summer and all you want is to head for the swimming hole, if only it weren't 60 degrees and drizzling. In the last decade that's changed noticeably, such that June as become much more of a dry, sunny, summer month here. I suppose that's great for swimming season, but not for drought. A June without rain means less feed and a thin hay crop for the ranchers, water scarcity in the creeks and rivers, and higher risk of wildfires - our new, unnerving, normal courtesy of climate change. Even though rain makes a mess of the strawberry patch when it's loaded with ripe fruit, I'll take it any day in the summer! That's what strawberry jam was invented for: a great use for rain-battered berries.

This week you're seeing a few new things in the CSA share:

• Baby Arugula, thanks to Abby - wonderful as a stand-alone salad green, blended into pesto, tossed into risotto, sauteed, or used as a pizza topper.
• Radish Micro Mix - a superfood packed with vitamins and minerals, great as a topper on tacos, salads, pretty much any dish - or add it to your smoothie for a nutrient boost.
• Pea Tendrils - whimsical, wonderful, delicious pea tendrils! The entire thing is edible, flowers and stems included (although the lower stems may be tougher/woodier and worth avoiding). You can do just about anything with pea tendrils; here are a few recipes to help you decide which direction to go. These are a great prelude to our sugar snap peas, which are growing like gangbusters and should start yielding in a few short weeks. 

Salad Shares Begin this Week!

As of this week we'll begin delivering marked red coolers to all CSA pickup sites containing Abby's Greens Salad Shares. If you did not sign up for a salad share this season, DO NOT TAKE SALAD from the coolers! If you did sign up for a salad share, be sure you take the correct size bag each week. There are half pound and full pound shares, so please double check that you have the right size bag.

Enjoy the early summer harvest!

• Redleaf Lettuce
• Spring Lettuce Mix
• Baby Hakurei Turnips
• Pink Beauty Radishes
• Bunched Arugula
• Red Beets
• Purple Potatoes
• Tetsu Squash - don't miss the recipe included below!
• Cabbage
• Shallots

On Rotation:

• Artichokes

This is it for "winter" shares: one last medley of stalwart-storage-crops-meets-delicate-new-Spring-tenderlies. We were delighted to see our Hakurei turnips sized up enough to bunch for you this week, and relieved that our pink radishes made it through the weekend heat wave without bolting or splitting. At this time of year when the weather can swing wildly and the days are stretching long, our every-other-week harvest schedule can be tricky. You never know if you're going to nail it, or miss the window altogether on something. Fortunately, we threaded the needle this week and, and our weekly harvests are right around the corner.

For those of you opening up this final CSA tote this week, I have to make another passionate pitch about the Tetsukabuto squash in there. Maybe you're thinking it's not winter squash season anymore, or maybe you're thinking about the pile of uneaten winter squash that's already sitting on your counter from the past few months. I feel you. But this past weekend my good friend, Laura (fellow farmer and horsepacking buddy), came down to visit and we camped at the Bullards Horse Camp for two nights. She dished up dinner on the second night and as usual blew my tastebuds' brains with a simple, farm-inspired Tetsu Agrodolce. I've pasted in the recipe below for you, and if my own formerly squash-cluttered counter is any proof (not a single tetsu left on it as of this week thanks to this recipe!), the Agrodolce will have you wishing you had an entire tote full of Tetsu to see you through the summer. It's so goo-ood we packed up camp on Sunday, came home, raided the squash room at the farm, and made two more sheet pans of it for Mother's Day! FYI, Laura is also the person who introduced me to oven-roasted cabbage wedges and the famous radicchio salad that I never stop talking about, which means she gets full credit for opening my eyes to three of the best, easy, winter-produce-inspired recipes I know of. All I can say is, EAT THIS! And if you want more Tetsu, we stil have a little stash that will show up at the farmstand for a couple more weeks.

In addition to filling the last winter CSA totes this week, we were also harvesting for our first farmstand (today, Wednesday May 15th, from 11:30 to 2:30!). We were able to coax some bonus goodies out of the field in token quantities, like baby zucchini, broccolini, baby carrots, and yes, strawberries! We're feeling hopeful that this could be a good strawberry year, but let's not talk about it for fear of jinxing things. Feel free to swing by the stand today and pick up some bonus produce, and/or take home a box of organic starts for your garden. We have a good assortment of farm-grown tomato plants, pepper plants, cukes and zukes that are ready to go in the ground, all tried and true varieties that we grow and love at Valley Flora.

Next week will be a transition week for us as we switch gears out of Winter CSA mode and get ready for our main summer season, which will kick off the week of Memorial Day! Lots of things will be happening that week:

• Our first CSA totes will be delivered to our 2024 main season members:
  • First pickup for Coos Bay and Farm members will be on Wednesday, May 29th.
  • First pickup for Bandon and Port Orford members will be on Saturday, June 1st.
  • Members can read up on all the details about their pickup location (when, where, how) on our website at: https://www.valleyflorafarm.com/content/valley-flora-pick-locations
• Our farmstand will go to weekly Wednesdays starting May 29th. We'll be adding Saturdays to the schedule by the summer solstice, if not sooner.
• We will open strawberry u-pick as soon as the patch is ready. Please don't call or email if you are wracked with strawberry fever; we promise to get the word out via email, on our website, in this newsletter, and through our Instagram/Facebook feed once the patch is ready for the eager public. Remember, the strawberries produce ALL SEASON LONG, into October, so there are many good months of u-picking ahead of us. 

Recipe of the Week: Zucca in Agrodolce (Sweet and Sour Butternut Squash, but you can use Tetsu or any kind of squash!)

Credits: Naz Deravian, NYT Cooking

• 2.5 pounds Tetsu or Butternut or other squash
• 2 Tbs extra virgin olive oil
• Kosher salt and black pepper
• 1/3 cup red wine vinegar
• 2 to 4 Tbs granulated sugar or honey, to taste
• 1 large garlic clove, thinly sliced
• 20 mint leaves

Place a rack in the center position of the oven and preheat to 400 degrees.

Cut the Tetsu in half, scoop out the seeds, and then carve the halves into wedges, leaving the skin on. The fatter your wedges, the longer the baking time. Place the wedges on a sheet pan, drizzle with the oil and season well with about 1 teaspoon salt; season with black pepper to taste. Toss and spread out in a single layer.

Roast for 12 minutes (or longer, depending on the thickness of your wedges), then flip the squash slices (using two forks works well) and continue to roast until cooked through (but not falling apart) and slightly golden around the edges.

Meanwhile, add the vinegar, 2 Tbs sugar or honey, garlic slices and a pinch of salt to a small saucepan, then stir and bring to a gentle boil over medium-high heat. Immediately reduce heat to medium-low and simmer until the sugar fully dissolves and the mixture reduces to a slightly syrupy consistency, 6 to 8 minutes. Halfway through, taste the syrup and add more sugar/honey, one tablespoon at a time, if desired. Remove from the heat. You should have about 1/4 cup syrup.

Place the roasted squash in a serving dish, tear half of the mint leaves and scatter over the squash. Drizzle the syrup over the squash. Set aside and let marninate for at least 2 hours. As the squash cools, tip the dish a little to one side, spoon some syrup and drizzle it over the top of the squash. Repeat as often as you like. Garnish with the remaining mint leaves and serve at room temperature. Sidenote: you can make this a day or two ahead and let it develop flavor in the fridge, or eat it hot out of the oven if you're in a hurry - just spoon the agrodolce sauce over the squash wedges when they come out of the oven and garnish with mint.