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Strawberry U-Pick Opening Soon!

The berry patch is starting to yield some lovely fruit and we hope to open the u-pick by mid-June. We'll keep our website updated, so check back here again soon for our offical opening date!

Once the u-pick season begins, we'll be open every Wednesday and Saturday starting at 11:30 am until 2:30 pm, or until the patch gets picked out - whichever comes first.

Week 1 (of 28!) from Valley Flora!

  • Baby arugula (bulk, in the larger of the two plastic bags)
  • Head Lettuce - varieties rotate each week
  • Yellow bunched spring onions
  • Bunched Tatsoi (bunched, dark leaves with white stems)
  • Radishes - pink or purple
  • Spinach, bunched
  • Sunflower Shoots (in the smaller plastic bag)
  • Strawberries!!!
  • A SunOrange Cherry Tomato Plant

On Rotation:

  • Zucchini
  • Artichokes

Hello 2023 CSA Members, and welcome! The Valley Flora van is on the road as we speak, delivering the first load of CSA totes to Coos Bay! Old Frank (that's the van) is also loaded down with a motherlode of head lettuce, radishes, turnips, and other VF produce for Coos Head Food Co-op, 7 Devils Brewing Co., the Langlois Market, and a handful of other stores and restaurants (insider tip: the first Abby's Greens salad was delivered to McKay's in Bandon today, in case you are not an Abby's Greens Salad Share member and are jonesing for some of those greens, stat!). All to say, the season has started with a bang. We are off and running.

The farm surprised us with a few things this week, in quantity enough to share with our beloved CSA members: namely, STRAWBERRIES! This has been perfect strawberry weather the past couple weeks and the plants are starting to yield some beautiful fruit. There isn't enough red out there to open the u-pick yet, but hopefully within a few weeks we'll be ready for the strawberry stampede. Also ramping up: our early zucchinis, which - like artichokes - are on rotation this week. That means that some pickup sites will get them this week, others will get them in the coming week or two. We are diligent about tracking who gets what every week so that we can keep it even-steven for all of our members throughout the season.

Overall, though, the name of the game right now is greens! Big salads, spinach in your smoothies, tatsoi in your stir-fry. We farmers tend to be terrible sympathizers when it comes to that common feeling of greens-overwhelm that some CSA members experience at the start of the season (that's because our household can easily put down a couple heads of lettuce and bunch of spinach/chard/kale/tatsoi every day, between morning smoothies, lunchtime leftovers, and dinner plates heaped high with salad). So my advice: eat like your farmer! The more greens the better! Also, remember that you have a superpower in the kitchen and it's called heat. If that bunch of tatsoi or spinach is staring you down in your fridge, toss it in a frying pan or the steamer and you'll diminish it to a teency but tasty little pile in a flash. Zap! Take that, tatsoi! (Definitely put on your superhero cape when you do that, and please send me the picture.)

Also going home with Harvest Basket members this week: a SunOrange cherry tomato plant. Be sure you take a plant from the yellow bin at your pickup site, one per Harvest Basket. We don't grow cherry tomatoes for the CSA, but we provide you with our all-time favorite variety, SunOrange, to grow in your own garden or pot. It's an improved Sungold the produces tons of tangerine-orange fruits from August through the fall. The flavor is exquisite - tropical/tangy/sweet. For best results, plant your tomato as deep as possible in a warm, protected location (it's good to bury the stem and some of the bottom leaves; the plant will sprout new roots underground and add to it's root mass). If you're planting it in a pot, use at least a 5 gallon container and put it in a warm, sunny, protected location. Give it a balanced organic fertilizer and water deeply. You'll need to provide some kind of trellis or support because this variety is an indeterminate, which means it'll climb, and climb, and climb. Prune excess leaves as it grows, leaving all fruiting/flowering stems and suckers. With a litte TLC it should be yielding fruit for you by August. These little cherry bombs are fantastic snackers, are awesome sliced up in salads, and also make the best dried tomatoes I've ever eaten - like little candies.

A reminder that all of the info about our CSA pick-up locations is on our website, in case you need a refresher about the when, where and how of it all: https://www.valleyflorafarm.com/content/valley-flora-pick-locations

FARMSTAND UPDATES

As of today our farmstand is operating on Summer hours: we're open every Wednesday from 11:30 to 2:30 for order pickup and drop-in shopping. We will be adding Saturdays to the schedule within a couple weeks, once the strawberry u-pick is ready to open. You have two options for sourcing produce at the farmstand: pre-order your produce on Local Line (our online store); or, drop in to shop. You'll find the greatest diversity, abundance, and guarantee if you pre-order on Local Line, but we try hard to always have some produce on display for folks who don't want deal with the internet :). (We understand, we're half-Luddite, too. See Exhibit A, below).

Enjoy your first week of VF produce, and thank you ALL for being part of the magic!

-Zoë

P.S. Coming in next week's newsletter: an introduction to our all-star crew, aka the fantastic humans who are growing and harvesting your produce this season! Stay tuned for more!

Newsletter: 

Shop our Farmstand - In-Person or through our Online Store!

Our farmstand is open for the 2023 season!

  • As of May 31st we'll be open EVERY WEDNESDAY, 11:30 to 2:30
  • By mid-June-ish/summer solstice, we'll be adding Saturdays to our schedule as well.

There are two ways to get our farmstand produce: pre-order it online, or swing by and drop in to shop when we're open.

If you’d like to pre-order and haven’t registered an account with Local Line (our virtual store), it’s quick and easy. Simply follow the instructions below to set up your account. Once you do that you will begin to receive our availability emails with a link to our “store.”

You can also go directly to our Local Line store to check it out: https://valley-flora.localline.ca/farmstand

Farmstand Details and How to Order:

  • Anyone is welcome to shop our farmstand. You do not need to be a CSA member and there is no waiting list to join.
  • The farmstand is located 1.5 miles up Floras Creek Road at the shed just after the bridge. Directions
  • When picking up your order or dropping in to shop, please wait in line until it's your turn to be served. 
  • If you want to pre-order produce, you will need to register a new account with Local Line before you can place an order. Here's how (it's easy):
    1. Go to https://valley-flora.localline.ca/farmstand to view our store.
    2. Click "Register" on the right side of the page.
    3. Set up your account by providing your email address, password, name, phone number and address.
    4. Accept the terms and conditions,
    5. Click the green button, "Creat Your Account"
    6. Start shopping!
  • The ordering window for our Wednesday farmstand opens on Thursday morning by 9 am until Sunday night at 9 pm. Farmstead Bread is available on Wednesdays only. 
  • The ordering window for our Saturday farmstand opens on Monday morning by 9 am until Wednesday night at 9 pm.
  • There is a $20 minimum on orders. The "Place Order" button will not appear until you have met the $20 minimum.
  • Once you register, you'll start getting our weekly availability emails (Thursday morning for the Wednesday farmstand; Monday morning for the Saturday farmstand). 
  • You can always access our Local Line store by clicking the "Order Farmstand Produce" button on the left sidebar of our homepage, following the link below, or going directly to https://valley-flora.localline.ca/farmstand.

Thanks for your support of the farm and your passion for eating local, seasonal produce!

Shop the Valley Flora Store for Farmstand Produce Now!

Valley Flora - Growing Good Food for Local Folks

Valley Flora is a mother-and-two-daughter collective nestled on the banks of Floras Creek near Langlois, Oregon. Together with the help of our draft horses, a handful of fantastic employees, one little tractor and 12 kilowatts of solar power, we grow hundreds of varieties of vegetables, berries and fruit to feed our local coastal community year-round. Our farm was founded in 1998 with a deep commitment to ecological and organic farming practices and our passion is growing good food to strengthen our community-based food system on the southern Oregon coast. We grow produce for our 130-member CSA, our farmstand, u-pick, and a number of stores, restaurants and co-ops. Our love of the Floras Creek valley – the fertile loam and the river that runs through it - inspires us to farm with the next generation in mind, and the next. We rely on crop diversity, compost, cover crops, and crop rotation to keep our farm healthy and thriving both above and below ground. We are grateful to call this our life, our livelihood and our passion.

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