The Valley Flora Beetbox

Valley Flora's newsletter, sharing news from the farm, seasonal updates, and more!

CSA Newsletter: Week 16 from Valley Flora!

Please note this is NOT our farmstand availability email. This is our weekly CSA newlsetter primarily intended for our subscribed Harvest Basket members who receive a weekly box of produce from the farm from June through December. You cannot order farmstand produce from this email or directly from our website. Rather, farmstand availability emails are sent out on Thursday and Monday mornings to folks who have signed up for Wednesday or Saturday pickup, respectively. To learn more or sign up for a farmstand pickup day, click here.

  • Napa Cabbage - the foundational ingredient in kimchi, but also wonderful shredded into light slaw or salad. At this time of year when we have sweet peppers and apples, I like to make a napa/apple/pepper/carrot slaw with a rice-vinegar vinaigrette.
  • Carrots
  • Sweet Corn
  • Lettuce
  • Yellow Onion
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Tomatoes
  • Beets - Red, Gold and Chioggia
  • Strawberries - we are stunned by the strawberries right now. Abundant, beautiful, better than ever! Normally there wouldn't be strawberries in the Harvest Basket at this point in the season, but they just keep giving! U-pick is going to be FANTASTIC today (Wednesday)!
  • Cucumbers

On Rotation:

  • Eggplant

I can't believe it, but yes, still strawberries! We are a bit baffled by this late season run in the berry patch - we haven't seen anything like this in years! If we get our much-hoped-for rain later this week it might start to slow them down, but right now they are phenomenal. Come upick today, starting at 11 am! And if you want a special order flat, let me know and we'll see if the weather cooperates: name, pickup location, number of flats and phone number.

Peppers Peaking: Now's the time to order up a few bags of red Italian roasters or assorted colored bells. Peppers are available in 5 pound bags for $22. To order, email Bets your name, pickup location, type and quantity of peppers you want, and a phone number. 

Help Support Farmworkers and Immigrants Impacted by the Devastating Wildfires: The wildfires have affected us all, but many of us are lucky enough to still have a home to go to. That's not the case for many immigrant Oregonians who tend to be most impacted by the smoke, have lost everything and don't have a safety net to fall into. In recognition of the devastating effects that wildfires have had on immigrant Oregonians, the Oregon Worker Relief Fund Coalition is pivoting to raise and distribute funds to impacted individuals and families. You can donate to their effort through CAUSA, Oregon's immigrant rights organization.

Strength and safekeeping to everyone in the terrifying path of fire right now, and to all those coping with hazardous air quality. We give thanks for clear air overhead today, temporary as it might be. Come on rain!

Newsletter: 

CSA Newsletter: Week 15 from Valley Flora

Please note this is NOT our farmstand availability email. This is our weekly CSA newlsetter primarily intended for our subscribed Harvest Basket members who receive a weekly box of produce from the farm from June through December. You cannot order farmstand produce from this email or directly from our website. Rather, farmstand availability emails are sent out on Thursday and Monday mornings to folks who have signed up for Wednesday or Saturday pickup, respectively. To learn more or sign up for a farmstand pickup day, click here.
  • Carrots
  • Eggplant
  • Head Lettuce
  • Red Onions
  • Hot Peppers - Jalapeño & Serranos (1 red serrano & 1 green serrano)
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Tomatoes
  • Strawberries

On Rotation:

  • Collard Greens
  • Lacinato Kale
  • Sweet Corn
  • Zucchin

Bulk Sweet Peppers Available by Special Order!

It's that happy time of year when the sweet peppers are coming out of the greenhouse by the bucketload! Now's the time to order up a few bags of red Italian roasters or assorted colored bells. Peppers are available in 5 pound bags for $22. To order, email Bets your name, pickup location, type and quantity of peppers you want, and a phone number. If you can manage to not eat them all raw, you can preserve peppers in a myriad of ways, listed here from easiest to most advanced:

  • Chop and freeze. No blanching necessary. Just cut 'em up and throw 'em in a freezer bag. Adds color and great flavor to soups, stir-fries and other dishes come winter.
  • Roast, peel and freeze. A great addition to soups, quiches, pasta, pizza, sandwiches and more all winter. Here's a quick tutorial on three different ways to roast peppers: https://toriavey.com/how-to/roasted-bell-peppers/
  • Roast, peel and pickle: https://www.freshpreserving.com/blog/pickled-roasted-peppers
    • I make pickled roasted peppers every year but use a brine recipe that doesn't call for much sugar or other spices: For 3.5 pounds of peppers (roated, peeled, cored and seeded), mix 1.75 cups white wine vinegar or distilled white vinegar, 1Tbs sugar, 2 Tbs pickling salt, 1 garlic clove chopped. Simmer all together for 10 minutes before pouring over packed peppers in sterilized canning jars. Leave 1/2" headspace, close jars with hot canning lids and rings, and process jars in boiling water bath for 10 minutes.

It feels awkward to be talking about fire-roasted peppers on this apocalyptic day, when I woke up to the heavy news of so many Oregon, Washington and California towns and forests burned to the ground. Never has fire threat - and climate change - felt so close to home. Temperatures reached over 100 degrees on the farm yesterday, and we were cloaked in low heavy smoke. There was a fire scare up Floras Creek yesterday morning, attended by a bunch of Coos Forest Patrol trucks zooming up the road first thing. Fortunately it was a false alarm. But numerous friends had to evacuate their homes, from the North Bank of the Coquille to the Santiam to Ashland. Our hearts are big and broken thinking about the devastation that is sweeping through our state, and for our neighbors north and south of our state borders.

Yesterday as we labored through harvest under the suffocating skies, I felt a level of disappointment in our species like never before. This is our only planet, our only home, our only chance to be human, and yet we can't quite seem to turn the ship. We watch while the "house" burns down. What does it take for something as big as climate change to finally hit home for enough people that we reach a critical mass to change behavior, shift policy and foment change, and to do it fast? When you live here on the southcoast where the temperatures are amicable, the cool, damp fog is just off-shore, the forests are green, it's easy to think climate change is something that's happening somewhere else. It's hard to imagine our corner of the world engulfed in flames. But yesterday I could imagine it, and east of Bandon some of it was. 

Food and agriculture are major drivers of climate change and I applaud all of you for making the choice to eat locally and to eat lots of veggies (that are grown mostly with solar power, thanks to the 12 kW PV system on the roof of our barn). Twenty years ago my concern about the environment and climate change was one of the motivating factors that led me into organic, regenerative farming: I wanted to do something that was positive for the planet and good for my community. It's great that something delicious can make a difference, but at this point it's going to take more than a local salad to double down on atmospheric carbon. Yes, pile your plates high with plants grown close to home and start your car as little as possible, but also elect leaders who take the climate crisis seriously. And most importantly, hold on to stubborn, purposeful optimism. Because we won't turn the ship unless we believe we can, and will.

Newsletter: 

CSA Newsletter: Week 14 from Valley Flora!

Please note this is NOT our farmstand availability email. This is our weekly CSA newlsetter primarily intended for our subscribed Harvest Basket members who receive a weekly box of produce from the farm from June through December. You cannot order farmstand produce from this email or directly from our website. Rather, farmstand availability emails are sent out on Thursday and Monday mornings to folks who have signed up for Wednesday or Saturday pickup, respectively. To learn more or sign up for a farmstand pickup day, click here.
  • Carrots
  • Cucumbers
  • Eggplant
  • Red Onion
  • Sweet Peppers - all the peppers in your share are sweet Italian types this week; no hot peppers....:)
  • Red Potatoes - the first dig of the season. I have a love-hate relationship with potatoes. I love growing them (it's something we do almost entirely with horses, from planting, to cultivating, to harvest, so therefore I wish we could grow 20 acres of potatoes!). But I hate all the sorting. When you grow potatoes, especially organically, there are a LOT of impefect ones - cracks, holes, scurf, funny knobs, insect damage, greening here and there. So many ugly little tubers that are pefectly fine on the inside but don't meet my produce beauty standards on the outside. I realize that I am perpetuating the supermodel myth of beauty, and that we all know it's what's on the inside that counts, but it's hard to liberate myself from my own vegetable pageant standards. It means we dump bin-fulls of the ugliest spuds, we donate a lot to the foodbank, and finally we try to skim the cream for you. That said, even some of the not-so-pretty ones get by us in the hustle of wash and pack. If that's the case with some of your potatoes this week, I am going to try to not apologize right now and instead encourage you to get out your veg peeler. If any of your spuds have a green spot, it's safe to cut or peel away that spot and still eat the potato. You wouldn't want to eat 5 lbs of greened potatoes in a sitting, but if you're cutting off a spot here and there you'll be fine (greening indicates the presence of solanine, a natural but toxic compound that develops in potatoes when exposed to the sun). You'll see potatoes in your share every few weeks now for the rest of the season. Which, by the way, is halfway over! This is week 14 of 28!
  • Strawberries
  • Zucchini
  • Tomatoes
  • Parsley

On Rotation:

  • Melon - We surprised our Bandon and Port Orford members last Saturday with a melon (and in fact, stumped one member who emailed me to say: "There's something in my share I don't recognize...it's round, dense, tan, and looks like a melon..."). Her hunch was right, this is "Sarah's Choice," a delicious cantaloupe-type melon that Abby grows for us. Supremely sweet and aromatic, we look forward to these all year!
  • Corn
  • Lettuce

Strawberries Still Peaking!

I can't believe I get to say this, but the strawberries are still pumping! What an amazing, quasi-miraculous late season we're having. Usually by now they're slowing down and We the Farmers are glad for it. But yesterday's harvest might just have been the best of the year. When the fruit is that beautiful and abundant it's hard to resent all the crawling on your knees ("oh please sir, can't I pick another row?). That being the case, I'm putting out the call (probably the last time) for special order flats. If you want some, give a holler via email with your name, pickup location, number of flats you want, and your phone number. Flats are $45 apiece delivered to your pickup site.

OR, come u-pick! The u-pick crowd has thinned out because no one thinks of September as strawberry season, but here at Valley Flora it's better than ever! Wednesdays and Saturdays from 11am to 2:30pm.

 

Pickling Cukes on the Horizon

Our late planting of pickling cukes has just begun to produce. I dont know what kind of yield to expect, but if you're interested in pickling, email me your name, pickup location, quantity (in 10# increments), and your phone number. If we have plenty we'll be offering 10 pound bulk bags for $30. They are a small, European-style gherkin, great for pickles or fresh eating.

Newsletter: 

CSA Newsletter: Week 13 from Valley Flora!

  • Rainbow Chard
  • Beets
  • Carrots
  • Cucumbers
  • Eggplant
  • Serrano & Jalapeño Peppers
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Strawberries
  • Zucchini
  • Tomatoes
  • Sweet Corn

On Rotation:

  • Green Beans
  • Head Lettuce

All of this bounty at our fingertips all day long, and then there's this....

The Dirty Secrets of Organic Farmers (a new segment in your weekly CSA newsletter!)

Last week, my mom was deep into her 12th hour of a 14 hour workday, buried in tomatoes, her brain on the fritz from not eating all day, and she dug this gourmet gem of a lunch out of the freezer (left by a houseguest at least a year prior, nicely freezer-burned around the edges...). I walked into the barn at 7 pm for the final stretch of packout and had to take the picture.

Whatever you might imagine about organic farmers sitting around a big lunch table leisurely eating beautiful family-style meals bursting with seasonal produce, yeah, you can pretty much scrub that from your mental imagery. It's leftovers from the night before when you're lucky enough to have cooked plenty of extra quinoa, or it's quick quesadillas and some salad, or in this case, when things get really dark, it's freezer-burned pre-fab pizza that not even the dogs will try to steal off the table. 

We have often mused about the irony that attends this time of year, when we're buried in beautiful produce but don't have any time to cook with it (much less eat it): wouldn't it be great if some chef or inspired cook wanted to take a sabbatical, come camp out at the farm for a summer and make the crew a meal once a day with whatever was ripe in the field? Or in the very least, if we could just get a taco truck to pull up to the barn around 2 pm each day.....Meals on Wheels for farmers!

Ah well, in the meantime, we'll get by with the sweet pepper eaten at a trot in the farmroad while hustling to get the cilantro harvested before the heat of the day presses in. That, and of course, quesadillas.

Split Screen - What our CSA members are doing with their produce:

Bravo!!!!!!

 

Newsletter: 

CSA Newsletter: Week 12 from Valley Flora!

  • Strawberries
  • Carrots
  • Walla Walla Sweet Onions
  • Red Cabbage
  • Sweet Corn!!!!! - Corn season kicks off this week! We have five successive plantings in the field, so expect to see sweet corn in your share pretty often for the next month+! I don't think you'll have too much trouble eating this much corn fresh in a week (or a day) - steamed, grilled, raw! - but if it's too much for you I suggest freezing it. You can either cut it off the cob and freeze it raw, or blanch it for a minute in boiling water and then cut if off and freeze it. I like to spread the cut corn out on cookie sheets and freeze it, then put it into freezer bags (so it's not a solid frozen block when you go to use it in the winter). 
  • Cucumbers
  • Zucchini
  • Tomatoes
  • Cilantro

On Rotation:

  • Eggplant
  • Green Beans
  • Lettuce - Not everyone will get a head of lettuce this week. As the days shorten dramatically in August, our lettuce slows down and we usually have to hit pause for a week or two in order for our successive plantings to catch up. Once it resumes we should have weekly lettuce for you again well into November.

 

Onion Harvest!

This week we completed the harvest of our 2020 onion crop, a process that involves pulling them out of the ground, loading them into the trailer, hauling them to the greenhouse, and finally laying them out on our propagation tables to dry and cure. It was a beautiful year for onions! They got a great start this spring thanks to weekly rainfall in May and early June and ideal growing temps. Every square inch of greenhouse space that isn't dedicated to seedlings and starts is covered in onions now. Once the onion tops are crispy-dry, we'll start cleaning them: snipping off the tops and roots, sorting them by size into bins, and stowing them in our dry storage room. It's the first crop that begins to fill our fall/winter treasure chest of storage crops: onions, winter squash, potatoes. Look for some new varieties of onions in your Havest Basket soon: Cipollinis, yellow onions and red onions coming your way!

Have a great week! Thanks for eating VF produce!

Newsletter: 

CSA Newsletter: Week 11 from Valley Flora!

In This Week's Harvest Basket:

  • Romano Green Beans - flat and wide and tender and deeeeeeelicious! Give them a light steam or sautee for maximal enjoyment (don't overcook!).
  • Kale
  • Carrots
  • Cucumbers
  • Lettuce
  • Walla Walla Sweet Onions
  • Strawberries
  • Zucchini
  • Tomatoes
  • Broccoli - monster heads!!!! And probably the last of the summer harvest, so enjoy. Until fall, Señor Broccoli! (Although this week's heads are so big you might still be gnawing away at yours come September...)

On Rotation:

  • Eggpant

Pickling Cucumber Update, Plus Beans, Plus Strawberries...

I've been getting lots of inquiries about pickling cukes this summer. We had a banner year in 2019, so it goes without saying that we would have a complete crop failure this summer. There are none to offer at the moment, HOWEVER, we replanted and with slightly better luck should have an abundance starting in September. I know that's probably later than many of you usually make pickles but if you're willing to wait we should have lots in about a month. That gives you plenty of time to round up your dill seed and pickling salt and crocks and canning jars. 

Green Beans are pumping and are available by special order in 10# bags at our wholesale price of $50. 'Tis the time for dilly beans, canned beans, frozen beans, or just eating a heap of beans. To order, email us your name, pickup location, the number of 10# bags you want and a phone number.

Strawberries are so lovely and abundant right now it's hard to stop picking on Tuesday and Friday! We're almost caught up with our special order list, so if you'd like to order some by the flat we can probably take care of you this month. Flats are $45 each. Email us your name, pickup location, the number of flats you'd like and a phone number.

A reminder to everyone to check labels carefully on special orders and on salad shares before you take them home. There have been some mix-ups in the past few weeks that could have been easily prevented by taking a few seconds to double check labels. Thanks for your help!

Enjoy the August abundance!

Newsletter: 

CSA Newsletter: Week 10 from Valley Flora!

Week 10!

  • Onions
  • Fennel - at last! Our first planting intended for the CSA baskets in June succumbed to some weird foliar disease, so the fennel has been a long time coming this season. I'm a huge fan of fennel - which I know not to be true of every human on the planet - but it's one of my top ten favorite veggies. It has a mild anise flavor, wonderful cooked down or sliced thinly and eaten raw. The fat, juicy bulb is the main part of the plant we eat, but you can also use the ferny tops as an herb. This week you have all the farm ingredients you need to make finocchio, a wonderful summer dish built around fennel, tomatoes, onions and basil. It stands alone, or you can eat it atop pasta, fish, polenta and more. We have a pretty broad collection of fennel recipes on our website if you want to branch out further.
  • Beets
  • Lettuce
  • Strawberries
  • Carrots
  • Cucumbers
  • Zucchini
  • Tomatoes
  • Basil

On Rotation:

  • Broccoli/Broccolini
  • Eggplant - Just starting to yield in the field! 
  • Heirloom Tomatoes
  • Green Beans

Beautiful Flowers and Handsome Roosters!

Zinnias, dahlias, statice, strawflowers, sunflowers, black-eyed susans and more! The flowers are in full bloom on the farm and open for u-pick on Wednesdays and Saturdays starting at 11 am while the strawberry u-pick is open. If you come to u-pick, you might even get to enjoy the company of our oh-so-social resident farm rooster, Robinson (aka Ricky Bobby). He's really more like a dog than a chicken: he follows at your heels, comes when called and likes to share your lunch. He showed up out of the blue at the farm in June and has stuck around, making himself comfy in our equipment shed. I hate to admit just how fond I've become of a rooster, but really, what's not to love about a chicken that likes to ride in the car, socialize over lunch, and look handsome in the moments in between...

Newsletter: 

CSA Newsletter: Week 9 from Valley Flora!

Please note to all our customers who are receiving this newsletter: this is NOT the list of available farmstand produce for the week. This weekly BeetBox newsletter is primarily aimed at our CSA Harvest Basket members who receive a weekly pre-paid tote of produce for our 28-week CSA season. There has been some confusion among folks who are trying to order farmstand produce from this email. Our weekly farmstand availability emails get sent out separately to everyone who has signed up for a farmstand drive-thru pickup day on our website. All that info - in case you want to source farmstand produce - is here. Thank you!

In the Harvest Basket this Week:

  • Broccoli
  • Chard
  • Carrots - Your carrots will likely be coming loose by the pound from now on. At a certain point in the season bunching gets slow and difficult because the carrot tops get weak. We dig fresh poundage for you every week and leave the tops in the field to feed the soil microbiota.
  • Cucumbers
  • Italian Parsley
  • Head Lettuce
  • Red Long of Tropea Torpedo Onions - a specialty onion from Italy that doesn't cure or store well, but is wonderful fresh! If you had a handful more of them you could set them up as bowling pins....:)
  • Strawberries - they're back!
  • Zucchini
  • Tomatoes - It's on in the tomatoes! Bets, mi madre, is the tomato farmer (she also grows your zukes, cukes, parsley, basil and peppers) and she is now officially neck deep in her busiest, heaviest season. By the way, a sidenote about my mom: she is a badass! She's in the second half of her seventh decade of life and she's still farming full bore, lugging heavy buckets of stunner produce out of the field all week. Thanks, Ma, for adding some bling to the CSA share this week!

On Rotation:

  • Cauliflower
  • Heirloom Tomatoes

Strawberry Update: Best Week Yet!

It's shaping up to be our best week of strawberries so far this season, with lots more on the way in the coming weeks. We're seeing an incredible flush of flowers and new fruit, which bodes well for abundant u-pick in August. We opened up more beds on the u-pick side of the patch this week, and anticipate being able to give even more over to u-pick soon. I wholeheartedly recommend making time to fill your freezer in the next few weeks while the picking is at its peak! The patch opens at 11 am, Wednesdays and Saturdays. If you're coming a long distance with high hopes of bringing home a big haul of berries, aim to arrive when we open.

 

The horses have been throwing their weight around in the field every week, doing their part to keep our crops well-cultivated and weed-free. We worked Jack single this week to get into some tight crops that are just about to close in - Brussels sprouts pictured here, as well as asparagus, artichokes, leeks, kale, chard, and more. Jack is a Belgian/Morgan crossbred, and hands-down the best horse I've ever had. He works beautifully in harness and is also just as willing to saddle up and hit the trail. He's a handsome devil, all heart, with a sense of humor to boot.

 

Newsletter: 

Week 8 CSA Newsletter!

In the Harvest Basket this Week:

  • Carrots
  • Cucumbers
  • Dill
  • Lettuce
  • Red Onions
  • Zucchini
  • Cabbage
  • Broccoli or Broccolini

On Rotation:

  • Tomatoes
  • Cauliflower

Flower U-Pick Opens this Week!

The flowers are coming into full bloom on the farm: dahlias, sunflowers, zinnias, statice, strawflowers and more! The public is welcome to u-pick on Wednesdays and Saturdays during the same hours we're open for strawberry u-pick (11 am until 3 pm, or until the strawberry patch is picked out). We have clippers available, but encourage you to bring your own buckets to keep your flowers fresh on the trip home. Check in with Sarah at the strawberry u-pick for clippers and to get directions to the flower patch.

 

Newsletter: 

Week 7 CSA from Valley Flora!

In the Harvest Basket this Week:

  • Dazzling Blue Lacinato Kale
  • Carrots
  • Lettuce
  • Walla Walla Sweet Onions - big, juicy and sweet!
  • Zucchini
  • Kohlrabi - the last of it until late fall...
  • Cilantro
  • English Cucumbers

On Rotation:

  • Broccoli
  • Broccolini
  • Cauliflower - purple or neon green

Strawberries on Pause this Week

Qué lástima (what a pity), our strawberries are having a minor hiccup right now. We're in the midst of an episode of Type III bronzing in some of our Seascapes: some of the fruit is rough, leathery and seedy, which renders it unmarketable. Type III bronzing is thought to occur after fruit exposure to environmental stress in the form of high heat (over 85 degrees), extreme solar radiation, and low humidity. We're seeing it in our youngest plants primarily, where the leafy canopy is not fully developed yet. It happens every year to some extent, but is particularly bad this week. I'm guessing the culprit was the week of hot weather we had in mid-June. It takes strawberries 4 to 6 weeks to transform from blossom to fruit, so the fruit that was just forming in mid-June is maturing into ugly seedy berries right now. Bummer. It means no strawberries in the share this week, but fingers crossed for a return to beautiful harvests in the coming weeks.

There isn't a lot of research on bronzing, and actually some controversy over whether it is caused by environmental factors or a pest called thrips. I have a call and an email in to the UC organic strawberry expert in Santa Cruz in hopes of shedding some more light on the issue. We did make an interesting observation yesterday during harvest, which was that the June-bearers, which have a huge leafy, protective canopy, show no sign of bronzing, and our most mature Seascapes have very little bronzing. However, the side of the strawberry patch that was planted latest last fall has the worst of it. It suggests that the timing of planting in the fall could make all the difference. We typically start planting our new strawberry crowns in November and finish up by mid-December. If getting them in the ground in November can prevent bronzing episodes the following summer, it argues for dedicating more labor to planting strawberries as early as possible in November. 

The good news is that the strawberry u-pick, which includes our June-bearing varieties and our most mature Seascapes, is mostly unscathed. So if you're desperate for some berries this week, venture out and experience strawberry harvest first-hand. The beds are somewhat limited right now, so plan to get there at 11 am if you have your heart set on filling a bunch of buckets.

Here's a quote I have always appreciated, as someone who has crawled countless miles picking strawberries in this lifetime:

Strawberries are too delicate to be picked by machine. The perfectly ripe ones bruise at even too heavy a human touch. It hit her then that every strawberry she had ever eaten - every piece of fruit - had been picked by calloused human hands. Every piece of toast with jelly represented someone's knees, someone's aching back and hips, someone with a bandanna on her wrist to wipe away the sweat. Why had no one told her about this before.  -- Alison Luterman, What We Came For

 

 

 

Newsletter: 

Week 6 CSA from Valley Flora!

In the CSA Harvest Basket this Week!

  • Chard
  • Carrots
  • Lettuce
  • Purplette Onions
  • Strawberries
  • Zucchini
  • Hakurei Turnips

On Rotation:

  • Broccoli
  • Broccolini
  • Mini Cucumbers

Want More Food?!

If you're getting through your Harvest Basket each week and still wanting for more, remember there are a couple ways to source more produce directly from the farm:

  1. Strawberry U-Pick! Open every Wednesday and Saturday starting at 11 am at the farm. The berries are sweet and red now that our summer weather has arrived. Keep in mind we have some new u-pick systems in place this season due to COVID-19, so be sure to read up about the u-pick before you come.
  2. The Farmstand Drive-Thru: Due to COVID, this spring we pivoted to a new pre-order, online farmstand system with drive-thru pick-up at our barn. We're using a customer-friendly online platform called Cropolis designed for small farms selling to local markets. There is no open-air, drop-in shopping this season. Instead you sign up for a farmstand drive-thru day - Wednesday and/or Saturday - on our website. Once you do that, you'll automatically start receiving our weekly farmstand availability emails and be able to place an order for drive-thru pickup. In addition to our produce, hot sauce and jam, you can also purchase Aguirre Farms local organic eggs, Farmstead Bread and Langlois Creamery sheep milk through our new system.

And, if it's too far for you to come to the farm, you can also find our produce at the Port Orford Community Co-op, the Langlois Market, Mother's Natural Grocery and Coos Head Food Co-op each week.

Thanks for eating locally!

Newsletter: 

Week 5 from Valley Flora!

In your Harvest Basket this week:

  • Carrots
  • Dill
  • Lettuce
  • Strawberries
  • Kohlrabi
  • Mini cukes
  • Beets - some members will get sweet red beets, others will get Chioggia beets (pink skin with a pink and white bulls-eye interior)

On Rotation:

  • Broccoli
  • Broccolini
  • Zucchini
  • Arugula
  • Mizuna - mizuna is a mild, light green, serrated Asian green - wonderful as a salad or alongside a slab of fish

A few quick notes about storing your produce and keeping it perky for as long as possible:

  1. Any leafy vegetable, like lettuce, herbs, bunch greens and baby greens, do best in the fridge in a sealed up plastic bag. They like it between 34 and 40 degrees with high humidity. Broccoli, broccolini and cauliflower are the same way. Best used in the first week.
  2. Root veggies like carrots and beets, and dense veggies like kohlrabi, store the longest if you take the tops off and store in a plastic bag in the fridge. They'll keep for months without tops, but won't taste as good 3 weeks from now as they do today. 
  3. Zucchini and cukes prefer life at around 50 degrees with some humidity, but who has their fridge set to 50?! Nobody, I hope! They'll go soft on the counter, so your best bet is to put them in the fridge in a plastic bag but use them within the week before they get slimy.
  4. Strawberries will last on your counter for a day or two, and will continue ripening as they sit there. However, you can get a lot more life out of them if you keep them in a tupperware in your fridge. Not that anyone is actually making it home with a full pint of strawberries....If you are, you probably don't have kids in the backseat :)

Farm Updates

  • NEW laminated checksheets are going out to all pickup locations this week! Please mark yourself off each week with the dry erase pen!
  • BULK BASIL by SPECIAL ORDER! Primo tops, no stem, $18/pound. Pesto-lovers rejoice! To order, email Bets your:
    • Name
    • Pickup location
    • How many pounds you want
    • Daytime phone number

Farming Improv

I have one regret about college and it's that I didn't take an improv class. At the time I had my schedule packed with other classes: fiction writing workshops, sustainable development in Latin America, ecological forest management, biology, econ, statistics...

The thing I've heard over and over from friends who did enroll in improv is that it was the most valuable class they took. My friend the labor organizer, my friend the OSU farm advisor, they swear that improv has served them in life more than any other course. Darn, I guess I really blew it in undergrad.

But good news, my Stanford alumni magazine came in the mail last month and had a whole spread about the "8 Life Lessons You Can Learn from Improv: How to apply just-go-with-it wisdom to your career, realtionships and well-being." The funny thing is, some of the guiding principles of improv have been guiding the management of the farm without me realizing they had anything to do with improv. Even better news: I didn't have to pay an arm and a leg for the college credits!

  1. Pay Attention: Yup, keen observation is by far the most important skill for keeping a highly diversified farm like ours humming, and for averting occasional disaster. Everyday I'm paying attention to every detail, with eyes, ears and nose cocked to all the sensory information the farm is throwing at us - why is that row of cauliflower an imperceptibly lighter shade of green - is there fertility stress? Why is the pump cycling so often - do we have a leak somewhere in the mainline? How big are the newly budding broccoli crowns and what's the weather forecast and should we pick them today or will they hold until Friday?
  2. Don't Go it Alone: It's all about working together - one giant spontaneous choreography each day to get all the work done between dawn and dusk on the farm. We're all leaning on each other to pull off a successful season, and the energy of every single person on our crew is essential.
  3. Trust that the Scene Will Evolve: Things are in constant flux on the farm, so extremely seasonal is our model of production. It helps to remember that one setback - like symphylans in the spring Brassicas - will give way to some other success, like beautiful June carrots. We are never stuck in one failure for too long, the failures teach us how to be better farmers, and in the end the diversity of the farm carries us through. 
  4. Stay Positive: It's easy to think it's the end of the world, but it never is. The glass-half-full mindset is the place where we proactively solve problems on the farm. The pressure tank exploded? OK, I guess that means it's time to replace it, build a better pumphouse, and plumb the system smarter than we did the first time.
  5. Accept the Offer: Saying "yes" to whatever is going on at the farm lubricates the wheels of creative innovation. COVID-19 means we can't run our farmstand? OK, Coronavirus, we'll turn it into a drive-thru!
  6. The Journey is the Thing: "what makes improvisers so good at creating something out of nothing isn't as much about what they do as it is about how they do it..." We farm because we love this place, we love working together as a family, we love to eat well, and we believe in organic, regenerative agriculture and it's ability to transform communities - from the living community in our gut microbiome all the way up to how humanity interacts with this planet. Yeah, it's about growing carrots, but it's also about a whole lot more.

My advice to you this week: say yes to beets! Accept the offer (even if you are sure you don't like beets), stay positive (they really might taste good!), don't go it alone (share them with friends), trust that the scene will evolve (i.e. you won't get beets next week!), and know that the journey is the thing (you tried them and confirmed for yourself that you really still do not like beets so you decided to carve them into stamps for your kids and you made really cool vegetable art).

A+!!!

 

 

Newsletter: 

Week 4 from Valley Flora!

Happy official summer! It arrived with a bang this week, with temps in the mid-eighties at the farm the past couple of days - dreamy weather for all the eggplant and squash and corn and beans and tomatoes and melons; a little less dreamy for all the sweaty farmers. Grateful to have legs that can march me down to the creek and throw me into the drink late-afternoon!

In your share this week:
  • Red Ursa Kale - at last! Our new plantings of kale and chard are hitting full stride now, which means we can finally leave the bitter taste of spring symphylans crop failure behind us. Red Ursa is an heirloom variety that I love for it's beautiful colors and tender leaves, and it's a great variety to use for kale chips. One of our farmstand customers is a kale chip fiend and she shared her recipe, below, with me. If you don't have a food dehydrator, you can also make kale chips in your oven on low heat: https://minimalistbaker.com/how-to-make-kale-chips/
  • Bunch Carrots
  • Mini Cucumbers - a little sampler of our favorite early mini-cuke. Not enough to make a dish, but enough to get you excited about cucumber season to come!
  • Abby's Spinach
  • Basil
  • Head Lettuce
  • Strawberries
  • Radishes
  • Hakurei Turnips
  • Fava Beans - the big, fat green pods in your tote are fresh favas. This is one of the not-so-common things we grow for you and the season is fleeting. You'll likely only see favas this week and maybe next week. They're a delightful fresh bean but they take a little effort to prepare, which is why I consider them a "weekend" food - one of those things that I'll cook when I have the luxury of a little more time. Ideally it's also one of those things you dig into with a bunch of friends - sit around and shell favas and talk story - but that might not be in the cards this COVID season. So....maybe shell favas while visiting friends on Zoom...? That's how I got 40 pounds of artichoke hearts preserved earlier this spring, in the Zoom company of college buddies around the country. If you're new to favas here's how to prepare them: https://www.epicurious.com/ingredients/how-to-prepare-fava-beans-gallery

On Rotation:

  • Broccoli
  • Broccolini
  • Snap Peas

 

Cory's Kale Chips

2 bunches kale

Dressing:

  • 3/4 cup tahini 
  • 5 tablespoons olive oil
  • 5 tablespoons lemon juice
  • 2 teaspoons nutritional yeast 
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt (or 3/4 if you're a salt fiend like me)

Remove all main stalks from the kale and cut leaves into large pieces. Wash and dry the pieces in a salad spinner so they're fully dry. Make sure they're fully dry.

Whisk all dressing ingredients together.

If you don't have a mixing bowl big enough for all the kale pieces, use a stock pot to toss them with the dressing until all the pieces are evenly coated. This process takes several minutes, using both hands.

Lay out the coated leaves on the food dehydrator trays and set to 135 degrees. For really crispy kale chips, eave them in for 18-24 hours, but best to check on them after 8 hours and play it by ear from there. 

 

The 2020 Valley Flora Crew!

It's high time you met the team that's growing, packing and delivering your food this season! Pictured left to right:

Sarah Snow and Allen Williams joined us this season after 7 years farming in Idaho and Hawaii. Sarah has the hardest job on the farm: keeping track of all four of our kids during the week, along with helping with harvest and running the U-Pick. Allen is a core part of of our harvest and field crew and is in charge of Saturday deliveries. He is also regularly called upon to reach for anything stored up in the stratosphere. We feel so lucky to have these two in our midst!

Bets, Cleo, Zoë, Abby, Jules, Pippin, Uma & Roberto in a not-so-social-distanced clump in the middle. Yes, that's Cleo stuffing her face with homemade strawberry-rhubarb pie. The kids got really into baking during "homeschool" this past spring, which is paying sweet dividends on Fridays now - they've been baking Friday treat for the whole crew. In this picture, taken last Friday, we were celebrating Roberto's birthday! Roberto has been part of Valley Flora since 2010, and what beautiful decade it's been! Roberto has thrown himself into the farm heart and soul and helped make Valley Flora what it is today. 

Jen Faraci on the far right, sporting the latest Valley Flora washline fashion (you wouldn't believe how that neon orange brings out the green in her eyes!). Jen joined us this spring and wears multiple essential hats at the farm: greenhouse manager, field and harvest crew, Wednesday deliveries. She says she's wanted to work for Valley Flora for years so she could get a free VF baseball hat. Mission accomplished. Might have to get some new merch made so we can bribe her to stay forever.

Not pictured is Donna Smith, who is running the farmstand drive-thru this season. Hats off to Donna for taking on a brand new, logistically complicated system and making it run smoothly - with a smile! A round of applause!

This little farm wouldn't chug along without this team working together. And speaking of teams, there are a two more members of the crew who pull a lot of weight around here:

Enjoy the food, have a great week!

Zoë

Newsletter: 

CSA Week 3 from Valley Flora!

In your share this week!

  • Strawberries
  • Kohlrabi - a green one and a purple one. If you're new to kohlrabi, it's the bulbous thing with the up-do of leaves. Cut the tops off and then peel the bulb with a sharp knife or good veggie peeler. It's juicy and crunchy inside, a little bit like jicama. I prefer it raw, but you can also add it to stir fries and other dishes. My five year old goes nuts for it cut up into veggie sticks. Douse it with chili and lime if you like it ala Mexicana!
  • Head lettuce
  • Bunch carrots
  • Sugar Snap Peas
  • Hakurei Turnips - the white roots that look like big radishes. These are a Japanese salad turnip, and pretty much the only turnip I grow because they're so dang good. Munch them like apples, or slice up on your salad. Buttery and tender. If you want an even more refined flavor, peel them.
  • Zucchini
  • Yellow onion

On Rotation:

  • Red mustards greens, bunched - lacey maroon leaves, eat raw or cooked - has a little kick!
  • Tatsoi, bunched - dark green spoon-shaped leaves, eat raw or cooked.
  • Braising mix, bagged - a mix of Abby's baby kale and mustard greens
  • Spinach, bagged - Abby's succulent baby spinach

The Color of Food

Tucked up Floras Creek it's easy to feel far removed from the headlines, from COVID hotspots and urban riots. It's easy to feel like race is not a pressing topic in our quiet, rural (mostly white) community. But this week I found myself really giving that more thought. I recently got my stimulus check in the mail and wanted to donate it to an organization doing good work on racial justice, ideally somewhere close to home. But what I realized is that there aren't any organizations that I know of to give that money to right here in Curry County. Is that because race is "not an issue," or rather is it because race has been such an issue - for so long - that we haven't even gotten to the point of addressing race constructively in our little corner of Oregon? 

I learned for the first time this year about Oregon's Exclusion Law of 1844: a law that banned Black people from living in Oregon. Another black exclusion law was enacted in 1849 that made it illegal for Blacks to to enter or reside in Oregon territory. It meant that when Oregon became a state in 1859 it was the ony state in the Union with a black exclusion law on the books, which was expanded to prohibit Black people from owning property and making contracts. These laws remained in place until 1926. Even though the same racist sentiment pervaded all of the U.S., Oregon was the only place bold enough to write it down. That wasn't part of my Oregon history class in high school.

My mom has an old letter written by a Civil War veteran who moved here in 1885, Samuel T. Malehorn. He settled on Floras Creek and started a fruit farm and nursery on the land where Valley Flora now sits. In 1896 he sent a letter to a friend and fellow war vet, encouraging him to move to the area:

"It is all timber, light and heavy, rolling land, well watered, productive, all of it adaptive to good fruit. I am 4 miles from the beach, which is about right, 15 miles north of Port Orford. There are still good choices for homesteaders near me...Deeded lands can be bought from $5 to $40 per acre now. 40 acres is enough for a family to live on. You can build your houses with one cedar tree by hand. Fish and game everywhere. There is no poisonous reptiles or insects, you can lay out under a tree anywhere safely. It is blessed and glorious country, the best in the U.S."

I've always loved that letter - such an affirmation of this place where we live and farm - but this week I realized another significance of that letter. Samuel Malehorn was a white man, inviting a fellow white comrade of the 29th Regiment to come to Oregon. He could live here - and so could his white friend - because they were white. They had access to cheap homesteads - and therefore land and the means of production - where Black people didn't. Oregon's historic racist exclusion laws set us on a course that put property ownership - and power - into the hands of white folks only. 

This history is no doubt part of the reason that your farmers here at Valley Flora are white, not black - why my family "owns" this land, not a Native American family or an African American family or a Chinese family or Latino family. We are standing on and supported by the very big, broad shoulders of institutionalized, systemic racism.

That's uncomfortable. And it's high time to be uncomfortable, since most of us probably don't have a clue what it's like to be really uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable, as in not able to breathe because a cop is kneeling on your neck because your skin is not white.

It's hard to know what to proactively do with this heavy realization, especially in June when most of my bandwidth is occupied with beating back the weeds, harvesting peas, and planting seeds left and right. But this morning I did something that felt really good. At the recommendation of a friend who has worked on racial justice issues for decades, I donated my $1200 stimulus check to the Movement for Black Lives Fund, a coalition that's made up of over 150 organizations that are working to coordinate actions, messages and campaigns for the Black Lives Matter Movement nationwide, and to funnel resources to frontline organizing efforts where they're needed most: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/movement-4-black-lives-1

Martin Luther Kind, Jr. said, "Everything we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see." It's time to see what's behind the shadow.

Newsletter: 

Week 26 of 28 from Valley Flora!

In the CSA Share this Week:

  • Purple Brussels Sprouts
  • Carrots
  • Rosemary and fresh Bay Leaves
  • Shallots
  • Parsnips
  • Yellow Potatoes
  • Rosalba Radicchio
  • Butternut Squash
  • Lacinato Kale

Thanksgiving Reprise

This week's share contains our standby collection of Thanksgiving vegetables, with a few new guest appearances (fresh bay leaves, pretty-in-pink Rosalba Radicchio, and Lacinato Kale). We had intended to give out a big beautiful head of Winter Crisp Lettuce but the violent hailstorm on Sunday night shredded all of our remaining head lettuce (and spinach) in the field. Fortunately our most tender and beloved of radicchios - Rosalba - survived. Many, many layers of her Barbie-pink leaves had to be peeled away - discarded into pink-petticoat-drifts in the field - but she was mostly unscathed underneath, phew. 

It's been a rowdy week, ticking most of the boxes for late fall/winter weather drama here on the southcoast: hail, high winds, heavy rain. We lost the plastic on one of our greenhouses to 70 mph gusts last night, and the film on a newly-planted strawberry bed took flight, but all in all we weathered the "cyclone bomb" alright. (The new meteorological terminology cracks me up: same old Curry County weather, brand new, headline-worthy name). If you are new to the area, welcome to "normal" on the Southcoast! 

And if you are new to CSA this year, you might not question the arrival of your Thanksgiving produce a week early (I know, all you old dogs are probably feeling out of sorts seeing those ugly Valley Flora parsnips in your tote with Thanksgiving still a week off). That's because (BIG REMINDER), there is NO CSA DELIVERY NEXT WEEK on Wednesday 11/27 or Saturday 11/30. Our kids have the whole week off from school, we have two dozen family members visiting from Saturday to Sunday, and we've finally decided after fifteen years that it's not that much fun to pack all 140 CSA shares, the farmstand orders, and the wholesale orders in 2 days instead of 5 in order to give ourselves and our crew a break on Thanksgiving day! So a Thanksgiving holiday it is for your farmers, in the fullest, most British sense of the word. I think I could get used to this.

Most of your produce this week has a long fridge life (keep your shallots and squash on the counter). Which means that if you want to hoard it for next Thursday's feast, go right ahead! Might I recommend one of my favorite Thanksgiving side dishes that will utilize your parsnips (those especially ugly white roots in your share...do give them a chance, with the help of a vegetable peeler):

Roasted Winter Squash and Parsnips with Maple Syrup Glaze and Marcona Almonds

We also loaded you up with extra spuds for mashing, and a bag of aromatics (rosemary and bay) for roasting/baking/soup-making.

We're wishing all of you a Thanksgiving full of grace and good food, and sending you our deepest gratitude for your commitment to the farm and the CSA this season. We wouldn't bother growing those ugly parsnips if it wasn't for all of you (wink, wink). :)

AND, don't forget that we'll be back in your life the week after Thanksgiving for ONE LAST CSA DELIVERY the week of December 2nd! Week 28 of 28, not to be missed!

Mark your Calendars: Final CSA Pickup for the Season:

  • Wednesday 12/4, Coos Bay and the Farm
  • Saturday 12/7, Port Orford and Bandon

Thank you all!

Newsletter: 

Week 25 of 28 from Valley Flora!

In the CSA Share this Week:

  • Sweet Beets!
  • Winter Carrots!
  • Celeriac (aka Celery Root)
  • Head Lettuce
  • Violet Queen Turnips
  • Spaghetti Squash
  • Treviso Radicchio
  • Fennel

On Rotation:

  • Chard
  • Collards

New Winter Veggies This Week:

  • Celeriac: The gnarly orb-like root with the green buzz cut is celeriac, one of the many under-appreciated winter vegetables that we love to introduce to our CSA members each year. Celeriac is indeed closely related to celery, with a similar - albeit more mild and "rooty" - flavor. You can eat celery raw, but it develops an added sweetness when cooked. Check out this eclectic collection of recipes from Epicurious for ideas. It's a great soup ingredient, adds depth to a sheet pan of roasted fall roots, and brings a special je ne sais quoi to mashed potatoes (boil the celeriac with your spuds and mash all together).
  • Spaghetti Squash: Spaghetti squash rarely garners the glory compared to the ever-popular and super-sweet Delicata or Butternut squash, but it's not an altogether fair estimation. Spaghetti squash does something none of the other squashes do, which is impersonate spaghetti! That's great news if you want a gluten-free noodle alternative, or just a change of pace. Try this Spaghetti Squash Parmesan, which is nothing short of indulgent thanks to some fresh mozz and homemade marinara.
  • Treviso Radicchio: As we roll out our fall radicchio line-up, it becomes clear just how much diversity there is among the Italian chicories. Treviso is a tight, dense, upright, football of a variety with beautiful wine-colored leaves and white ribs. This one is a joy to grow and harvest (and eat) every year. I highly recommend checking out this fantastic collection of radicchio recipes, and in particular you might want to make the Salad with Caramelized Fennel, Apples and Radicchio, given that this is the last juicy bulb of fennel you'll be getting in your share this season.

Thanksgiving Ahead!

A reminder that the farm will be closed the week of Thanksgiving. We will be harvesting and packing your "Thanksgiving Share" next week and delivering it to CSA pickup sites on our usual schedule (on November 20th and 23rd). We'll resume deliveries the week of December 2nd for the 28th and final week of the season. 

Have a great week, and hang onto your hats!

Newsletter: 

Week 24 of 28 from Valley Flora!

In the Harvest Basket this Week:

  • Brussels Sprouts, on the stalk
  • Leeks
  • Delicata Squash
  • Carrots
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Bunched Spinach
  • Head Lettuce
  • Shinseiki Asian Pears

On Rotation:

  • Cauliflower

Asian Pears!

We are certainly rounding the corner into deep Fall, with the weather trending chilly and wet and the food listing towards the dense and durable. This will likely be the final week of sweet peppers (sniff, not sure how I'll carry on without a fridge stuffed full of those sweet snackers). The sugary consolation prize is this week's Asian Pear, a variety called Shinseiki. For years I was convinced this was a dud variety - not very flavorful, kinda meh. I even considered cutting the trees down and replacing them with something else. One year I just didn't pick them - what was the point? - and then noticed that they were still clinging steadfast to the tree in November. I went out to the orchard and sampled one, only to discover a beautifully bronzed pear - sweet, juicy, and pretty dang good! The epiphany was that I had been picking this variety too soon, before they'd developed their full flavor potential. There's always some gusty storm in October that threatens to knock all the Asian pears to the ground, hence a premature scurry to harvest any fruit hanging on the trees. Well, lo and behold, Shinseiki knows how to hang on through high winds so it can ripen to its full, yummy, November goodness. It's also a reliable fruit-setter, which means we usually have a good crop (and often have to thin it in the early summer because it over-sets fruit). Not a bad problem to have when it means fresh Asian Pears in November!

Delicata!

Also new and sweet this week, Delicata Squash! This is probably our most beloved winter squash variety of all, due to its fantastic flavor and ease of prep in the kitchen. It's one of the few squash varieties with skin thin enough to eat, so if you dread peeling your squash before baking/roasting, no need with this one. That said, it's pretty easy to strip them down with a regular veggie peeler if you want a smoother eating experience (my preference). We often make "Delicata boats" the centerpiece of dinner - cut in half, scoop out the seeds, bake face down on a cookie sheet with some water in it (to create steam) at 400 degrees until soft. You can enjoy them plain, with melted butter, or fancy it up with any kind of stuffing: meat, grains, sauteed veg. Our other go-to prep is "Delicata smiles:" peel (or not), cut in half, scoop out the seeds, cut into half-moons, toss with olive oil and salt, and roast at 425 until soft and slightly browned (flip and stir with a spatula occasionally to get all sides browned).

If you want to take it to the next level, this is a fantastic recipe that knocked our socks off last year (and which we had for dinner last night, and lunch leftovers again today - hooray!). It'll use any kind of winter squash, or a mix of types, and you can sub spinach for kale if you want to make it with what's in your share this week: Winter Squash and Kale Pasta 

Brussels Sprouts!

And finally, those Dr. Seuss-inspired stalks of Brussels sprouts! If you don't have much fridge space, I recommend snapping the sprouts off the stalk and storing them in a plastic bag in your fridge. Like a tiny cabbage, they'll keep for weeks, but why wait?! I know, there are some people out there who have reasons - they think they hate Brussels sprouts - and that's most likely due to the fact that they've only ever had them boiled or steamed, and probably overly-so. Overcooked grey Brussels sprouts are indeed bleh! So instead, roast! The magic formula of high heat + fat + salt + VF veggies works wonders on Brussels. We usually cut them in half first, toss with olive oil and salt and roast at 450 on a sheet pan until they get crispy-browned. Or peruse this collection of recipes to get other inspiration: 42 Best Brussels Sprout Recipes Even Haters Will Love. There's something for everyone in that smorgasbord of recipes.

Newsletter: 

Week 23 of 28 from Valley Flora!

In the CSA Share this Week:

  • Head Lettuce
  • Marinanta Radicchio
  • Sunshine Winter Squash 
  • Yellow Potatoes
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Carrots
  • Red Onions
  • Purple Mini Daikon Radish
  • Curly Parsley

On Rotation:

  • Cauliflower

New This Week: Radicchio! Sunshine Squash! Purple Daikon!

  • Marinanta Radicchio is the first of our radicchio varieties to come out of the field. Marinanta is highly expressive, and by that I mean she's a shapeshifter. Some of the heads look like tight cabbages; others look like upright torches of light green streaked with pink; and still others form crunchy whorls of twisted leaves. I always think this variety must somehow be a distant cousin to iceberg, given her light green-to-blanched coloration, crispy-crunchy texture, and often squatty stature. You can certainly eat her like iceberg, and depending on whether you want to experience that telltale hint of bitterness that all radicchios have, you can either pre-soak her or not. If you DON'T like bitterness, cut up your head of Marinanta and soak it in cold water for about ten minutes. Then spin dry and use just as you would regular head lettuce. The cold water soak pulls all of those bitter compounds out, leaving you with very tame "winter lettuce." This works for any radicchio variety, so as they come your way during these final few weeks of the season, you can always use that trick to mellow the flavor. You can also cook with radicchio and that will reduce its bitterness. I'm a huge radicchio fan, both from a farming/food production standpoint and as an eater. Radicchio is tough as nails when it comes to weathering the rough weather of late fall and early winter (cold? wet? stormy? snowy? Bring it on, says the radicchio!). A plant that can handle all that, and better yet, THRIVE through all that, earns my deep respect. But my tastebuds and eyeballs love radicchio as well: it has more interesting flavor than lettuce, all the many varieties present a mind-blowing array of colors and shapes and textures, and it dances in a salad bowl with bold dressings, strong cheeses, salty nuts, roasted winter squash, and dried fruits like nothing else.
  • Sunshine Squash is a scarlet kabocha. If I had to choose one adjective to describe it, it would be "tropical." Easy to peel, deeply sweet and flavorful, and versatile as all get out, this is one of my top three faves in the winter squash realm. Peel, cube and roast with olive oil and salt. Slice into watermelon-like wedges, veer towards the agrodolce, and never look back. Peel, chunk and pressure cook into delectable squash soup. Make pie. Mash. You can do it all with this one. 
  • Purple Mini Daikon is a stunner of a fall radish. All the spice is in the thick rind, which peels easily if you want to keep it mild. The interior is a sweet, crunchy, juicy starburst of lavender surprise. Slice these on your salad and ogle their beauty.

Winter CSA Sign-Ups Begin this Week!

Lots of you have been asking about the Winter CSA. We plan to get sign-ups going this week, so if you are a current CSA member keep an eye out for a direct email from us with details and sign up info. We offer half as many winter shares as summer shares (70 spots versus 140), so we always give our existing summer membership first dibs before opening it up to the wider public. We'll be doing sign-ups through Local Line (the online platform we use for farmstand orders) instead of via our website, so if you haven't registered your CSA Local Line account yet, now's the time! We just sent out a reminder email to our 27 unregistered folks today, so if you get that email you are still not registered with our Local Line platform. :)

Thanks for your year-round support of the farm! We love that these fields can feed so many people 12 months of the year!

Newsletter: 

Week 22 of 28 from Valley Flora!

In the CSA Share this Week:

  • Savoy Cabbage
  • Carrots
  • Winter Kohlrabi
  • Lettuce
  • Yellow Onion
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Sugar Pie Pumpkin
  • Beets
  • Hot Peppers - Serrano & Jalapeño

On Rotation:

  • Eggplant
  • Romanesco

Short and Sweet this Week!

We're in the final push before the rain to get ​​​​​​​
our last winter cover crops in, and to form up the new beds for the 2025 strawberry patch. Every dry hour counts right now, so this newsletter is going to be brief! Mainly, a little coaching on two of the big, hefty orbs in your share this week: Winter kohlrabi and Sugar Pie Pumpkins.
  • The winter kohlrabi are colossal, as they always are, but you can carve on it for weeks if you store it in the fridge in a plastic bag. The cut edge will discolor in storage, so just shave it off each time you go to cut off a new slab. This variety is the sweetest, crunchiest, yummiest kohlrabi of the whole year, so enjoy!
  • Like I mentioned last week, the Sugar Pie Pumpkin in your share this week is multi-purpose: it has hull-less seeds that will roast up into tasty little snackable pepitas, AND it has sweet meat ideal for homemade pumpkin pie. OR, of course, you can carve it for Halloween. It is a pumpkin after all...

Be it known that this is the last of the eggplant for the year (whether you are cheering or depressed at that news, it is a fact, seeing as I flail mowed the plants down to stubs on Monday in preparation for cover crop).

Next week, get ready for those delicious purple daikons, potatoes, and the first radicchio of the season! (I know I'm excited about that, and I will do my best to help you become excited, too.)

Until next week!

Zoë

 

Newsletter: 

Week 21 of 28 from Valley Flora!

In the CSA Share this Week:

  • Hakurei Turnips
  • Acorn Winter Squash - Starry Night and Night Shift
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Fennel
  • Red Onions
  • Eggplant

On Rotation:

  • Chard
  • Collards
  • Romanesco
  • Purple Cauliflower

Winter Squash, Pumpkins, Gourds, Oh My!

The first of our winter squash varieties are landing in the Harvest Basket this week: two diferent kinds of Acorn squash called Starry Night (the stripey one) and Night Shift (the green/black one). We had actually planned to send them your way last week, but there's been so much other fresh food coming out of the field of late (broccoli, cauliflower, turnips, fennel, peppers!), we decided to hold off so as not to overwhelm the share. From here on out, however, you can count on seeing some sort of squash in your tote each week, including different varieties of Delicata, Kabocha, Spaghetti, Butternut, and pie pumpkins. ALL of the squash you are going to receive are edible and delicious, so while they will make for a festive seasonal centerpiece, we encourage you to eat them eventually (most of them will store for months on the countertop). I always like to remind our CSA members about knife safety with winter squash: it can be hard to hack through those tough shells. Chainsaw? Hatchet? Bandsaw? Nah, you'll be fine with a sharp and pointed kitchen knife and some common sense. Watch this little video on how to cut winter squash without an ER visit if you want to brush up on some practical knife skills. And remember, if you don't want to wrestle with cutting them up, you can always bake squash whole or pre-soften them in a microwave before going on the attack. Just be sure to poke a few holes in them first before you toss them in the oven/microwave.

Squash are lovely in that they give you permission to keep it simple: cut in half, bake at 375 until soft, eat with a little butter (and maple syrup, if you wannna go for full indulgence). Or, you can dress them up, like this Savory Herb Roasted Acorn Squash with Parmesan, or this recipe from one of my favorite cookbooks (gifted to me by a longtime CSA member many years ago), Six Seasons: Roasted Squash with Yogurt, Walnuts and Spiced Green Sauce. Depending on what you're doing with them, many of the squash varieties are interchangeable in recipes. Most of them will roast up wonderfully (Acorn, Delicata, Kabocha, Butternut), so feel free to substitute if you don't have whichever variety is called for in a recipe. Your Kabocha and Butternut are your soup-making superstars. Your old friend Spaghetti squash is really the only one with a slightly more limited repertoire, but it does its own thing well (and I promise to share some recipes with you when it's spaghetti squash time). And next week, on the eve of Halloween, we'll be sending you a pie pumpkin that is a multi-tasker like none other: edible hull-less seeds, sweet meat for pie-making or savory dishes (feel free to hang onto it until Thanksgiving for that homemade pumpkin pie), or carve it into a mini jack-o-lantern (but save the seeds for roasting!).

But why go mini when you could go MAXI with one of Pippin's carving pumpkins, now available at the farmstand while supplies last! You can also find Cleo's wacky gourds at the farmstand (and I give you full permission to use those for centerpiece decor so that your edible winter squash can be put to work in the kitchen instead). The farmstand is open every Wednesday from 11:30 to 2:30. Come by for some produce, or place an order online between Thursday and Sunday and have your goodies waiting for you on the following Wednesday (pre-order offerings include Farmstead Bread, Aguirre Farms Eggs and Wild Coast Brew Tea, in addition to Valley Flora hot sauce and produce). The farmstand will continue to be open every Wednesday until December 11th, with the exception of Wednesday, November 27th (the farm will be closed the week of Thanksgiving). And while you're here, you might try some pumpkin rolling, Uma's new seasonal sport (just kidding, and please don't sue us if you try it and break something). :)

 

Newsletter: 

Week 20 of 28 from Valley Flora!

In the CSA Share this Week:

  • Spinach
  • Lacinato Kale
  • Asian Pears
  • Carrots
  • Eggplant
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Tomatoes
  • Yellow Onion
  • Broccoli

On Rotation:

  • Romanesco
  • Purple Cauliflower

Dinner, Last Minute

Dinner in our household is usually dictated by whatever new vegetable is coming out of the field on that particular day, and I often come up with (or don't come up with) a meal idea on my five minute drive home from the farm at around 7 pm. I've always wished I could be that kind of put-together person who figures out the entire week's menu on Sunday and have half of it already prepped for lightning fast weeknight meals. But alas, I've never been able to pull that off. Maybe because I've already spent all of my planning energy on the farm crop plan for the whole year, which in a way becomes the family dinner plan as the season unfolds. Or maybe because I'd rather use my Sunday to go on an adventure with the kids, or tackle a project around the homestead. The result of this extemporaneous, last-minute approach to making dinner is that it's always vegetable-dominant, the whole thing is built around what's in season, and we never eat early. I like to justify it by explaining that we're on an old world schedule, ala España, where they never eat dinner before 9 pm :). Part of what makes the 11th hour dinner plan work is that we have a deep pantry at home, plus a big chest freezer, so we're fairly well-equipped to make meals from whatever we have on hand. And good thing, because I'm rarely (er, never) home in time to pick something up at the Langlois Market before they close at 6 pm. 

Tonight I'm inspired to do something with the purple cauliflower that's just starting to come out of the field and this is exactly the kind of recipe that I gravitate to: Roasted Purple Cauliflower with Crispy Chickpeas and Lemon Herb Tahini. It's all about vegetables, but has the added protein from the garbanzos, plus a zesty sauce (gotta love a good sauce!). I'll probably make a pot of quinoa and a spinach salad studded with sweet peppers to go along with it. You can use whatever herbs you have on hand, and if you don't have the middle eastern spice blend known as za'atar, there are various subsitutions you can use instead. You'd probably consider most of what we eat "slow food" - homegrown, prepared from scratch - but canned chickpeas are one of the "fast food" staples we keep on hand in the pantry. They can transform a chopped salad of tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers from a side dish into a hearty main course, or add dinnertime heft to roasted sheet pan meals like this one. I think of them as a secret weapon for vegaholics like us who also need to slip some extra protein onto the plate. I especially love them "spiced" and then roasted or fried. 

Believe it or not, strawberry u-Pick is still going! Flowers, too!

Yup, it's true. This warm, dry weather is encouraging the strawberries to keep pumping out sweet red fruit, and our u-pick flowers (especially the dahlias) are the best they've been all summer. U-pick is open on Wednsdays only from 11:30 to 2:30 during our farmstand, and the crowds are minimal. This is your moment ot have the run of the patch and to fill buckets to your heart's content. If you still want to make jam, fill your freezer, or make a batch of strawberry fruit leather, come on down! We'll be tearing out the berry patch by late October in time to get our cover crop planted, so get 'em while you can!

Newsletter: 

Week 19 of 28 from Valley Flora!

In the Harvest Basket this Week:

  • Yellow Onions
  • Romaine
  • Violet Queen Turnips
  • Eggplant
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Hot Peppers: Jalapeño & Serrano
  • Poblano Peppers
  • Carrots
  • Tomatoes

On Rotation:

  • Romanesco Cauliflower
  • Broccoli
  • Cilantro
  • Italian Parsley
  • Zucchini

This is the Last Week of Abby's Greens Salad Shares...

Sad but true, the Abby's Greens Salad Share season comes to an end this week for our CSA members. Outdoor salad production becomes more and more challenging as we dive headlong into Fall, due to slower and slower growth in the greens field. Abby will continue to supply a handful of outlets as best she can in the coming weeks, including our Wednesday Farmstand, the Port Orford Co-op, the Langlois Market, and McKay's Market in Bandon. If you'd like to source them through our farmstand, we recommend pre-ordering through our online store (our online "store" is open for ordering from Thursday morning through Sunday evening). Huge thanks to Abby for her unparalleled dedication to the production of beautiful salad greens. There's no other salad like it on Earth!

Bulk Sweet Peppers and Storage Onions Available by Special Order!

If you just can't get your fill of sweet, juicy peppers (or want to preserve some for winter - freeze, roast, can), or you want to stock your pantry with some long-keeping storage onions (red or yellow), our CSA members are invited to place a special order for delivery to your CSA pickup site. We should have an abundance of peppers for the next few weeks, and plenty of onions for the next month or two. Choose the delivery date that best suits your schedule and we'll do our best to get them to you on that day. If we can't fill your order on that date, we'll reach out to arrange for an alternate day.

Enjoy the rainbow of food this week! And if you need a recipe to inspire you, this Crispy Poblano Taco recipe caught my eye for using your cilantro and poblano and jalapeño peppers. You could easily jazz it up by adding some sauteed sweet peppers to the filling, or replace the chicken altogether with roasted romanesco and/or mixed veg.

Buen Provecho!

 

Newsletter: 

Week 18 of 28 from Valley Flora!

In the CSA Share this Week!

  • Fennel - here's a yummy frittata recipe that uses your onion, fennel and parsley - a favorite in our house!
  • Head Lettuce
  • Carrots
  • Eggplant
  • Red Onion
  • Sweet Peppers Galore! (Read all about it below!)
  • Tomatoes
  • Zucchini

On Rotation:

  • Italian Parsley
  • Cilantro
  • Broccoli
  • Romanesco

Our Fall crops are starting to make their debut, kicking off with broccoli, romanesco cauliflower, and a whole host of autumn root crops (turnips, radishes, daikon, and more). Broccoli and romanesco will be on rotation in the coming weeks, and everyone will be seeing some lovely Hakurei and Violet Queen turnips soon. 

At this time of year it all adds up to a blazing cornucopia of color: purple eggplant in juxtaposition with wine-red onions, next to traffic-cone-orange carrots, jumbled together with sunset-colored sweet peppers.

And oh, the peppers!! Yes, my favorite food (I have already munched two this morning and it's not even 11 am yet). You're starting to see some orange and yellow varieties in the mix, which are from our outdoor production (versus all of the red peppers you've received to date, which are grown by my mom, Bets, in protected high tunnels where they mature earlier). Our field-grown peppers are hitting their stride big-time this week, and I had to admit to my crew yesterday that my crop planning around peppers was perhaps a tad bit driven by produce favoritism. No, we probably shouldn't have planted four full rows of peppers (maybe two would have been enough?), and no, we probably shouldn't put ten peppers in the CSA tote (although if I was a CSA member I'd LOVE that idea). So what in the world was I thinking last January when I decided to plant a thousand peppers in 2024?

Well, here's the backstory: all these years Bets has been the primary pepper grower at Valley Flora. We're all in charge of different crops, and since the beginning of time, peppers were her purview. This year, at the spry age of 72, she decided to scale back a little and ceded the yellow and orange pepper production to me (she's still growing the reds). It was like winning the lottery, or inheriting the throne, being bequeathed permission to grow peppers at scale. And like a lottery-winner, I guess I went a little wild. We planted out six kinds of yellow and orange sweet peppers (including a couple new trials), plus a bunch of poblanos and a novelty patch of padróns. That should have been plenty but I couldn't leave out reds altogether, so we threw in two red varieties, equals four long rows of peppers, equals a whole lotta pepper picking right now.

Even thought Bets has been the official pepper person all these years, I've always grown a small experimental patch of outdoor peppers, driven by a curiosity about what varieties can perform well for us without greenhouse protection (peppers like heat), and to ensure that I have an endless personal supply of peppers to gorge on come fall. Those outdoor trials led us to discover a sweet pepper named Glow F1, which we fell in love with. It was an orange pepper, somewhere between a bell and an Italian type (Italians, or "cornos," are cone shaped with thinner flesh, great for fresh eating or roasting). Glow had the the thick juicy flesh and incredible sweet flavor of a bell, the problem-free nature of an Italian (less prone to sunburn and rot), and it was also early, consistent, and high-yielding in our coastal climate. In other words, a five star pepper in every way. It soon became a core part of Bets' commercial production in her greenhouses, where it also thrived, and I grew it outside for sheer pepper piggishness come September/October.

And then one terrible day in 2022, Glow was discontinued in the seed catalogues. It's not clear why - the economics and politics of seed production can be very opaque from the outside. It was a hybrid (a variety that is the result of cross-pollinating two different parent varieties), so we were reliant on some far-off seed company to produce the seed for us each year (versus saving our own seed). Crestfallen and frustrated by the fickleness of the hybrid seed industry, I made two decisions last year:

  1. To trial as many potential Glow replacements as possible in the 2023 growing season, in hopes that we might discover an off-the-shelf replacement, and
  2. Plant our last one hundred Glow F1 seeds and grow them out in isolation on the farm apart from the rest of our pepper production, thus embarking on our first-ever seed breeding project. The goal? To de-hybridize Glow in hopes of breeding it back to a stable open-pollinated variety with all the awesome pepper traits we loved, and to never have to depend on a seed company again for my favorite pepper! Amen!

Last year's pepper trials taught us mostly what we don't want to grow, but they also revealed a couple of peppers we liked. We're growing some of those at scale this season and they're starting to show up in your tote - a yellow Italian variety called Escamillo and a few smaller orange and yellow varieties called Cornito Arancia, Cornito Giallo and Oranos. They're good - 4 stars! - but not quite the 5 star caliber of Glow. 

Meanwhile, we're growing out the F2 generation of Glow from seed saved last year. Breeding back to a stable open pollinated variety can take upwards of seven years and must be done in isolation from other peppers so they don't cross-pollinate. Typically you see a lot of genetic diversity in the F2 generation, when all the traits from the two parent lines of your hybrid start to be visibly expressed. I expected to see a rainbow of diversity in the Glow F2 patch this year - I imagined there would be peppers in every shape, size and color and I'd get to play a fun game of plant selection as I went about saving this next generation of seed. But alas in actuality we're getting surprising uniformity: of our forty F2 plants, all the peppers are orange, and many have the same shape and wonderful flavor of the original hybrid. From a pepper-eating and pepper-farming perspective, it's great news! From a gene-selecting, seed-saving, plant geek perspective, it's kinda boring. But not to complain: having a pile of delicious Glow F2 peppers on my kitchen counter feels like reuniting with a dear old friend who you're happy to discover is still pretty much the same person you knew way back when.

Maybe the best thing about saving pepper seeds is that you get to eat the pepper - and in doing so, justify your sweet pepper gluttony in the name of science. It's become a participatory plant breeding project in our household: my girls each take a whole Glow F2 pepper to school with them every day for lunch and if it's an especially good one, they bring home the pepper top with it's stubble of white seeds and scrape them into the bowl on the kitchen table where the seeds dry on a paper towel before getting transferred into a little jar for next year's planting. Last night one of five Glow peppers I sliced up to put on our salad (yes, five peppers on a single salad - I'm not kidding about the gluttony) blew me away with its flavor and juiciness. I was inspired to pull out a separate bowl from the cupboard, line it with a paper towel, scrape those little seeds into it, and make a special label: "Super Duper Deliciosa." 

We'll see what Super Duper Deliciosa does next season - may she be orange and sweet and productive and disease-free (!!!) - but you never know. In the meantime, I will doggedly continue in my plant-breeding pursuit of pepper perfection: twist my arm as I eat another Glow, making it a baker's dozen for the day.

Enjoy this pepper peak, AND if you want more of them we'll be offering bulk sweet peppers by special order to our CSA members very soon! (Because we have so many! Because 1000 pepper plants is too much! Please order some and put them in your freezer/mouth/canning jars so that my crew will stop making fun of me!)

:-)

 

Newsletter: 

Week 17 of 28 from 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! 

Newsletter: 

Week 16 of 28 from Valley Flora!

In the CSA Share this Week:

  • Sweet Corn (the final harvest!)
  • Leeks (the first harvest!)
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Poblano Peppers
  • Napa Cabbage
  • Tomatoes

On Rotation:

  • Zucchini
  • Eggplant
  • Tomatillos
  • Lettuce
  • Rainbow Chard

We're setting you up with some of the key ingredients for a little Mexican feast this week: sweet corn, mild Poblano chiles to make homemade chile rellenos or stuffed Poblanos, and tomatillos to make a batch of roasted Salsa Verde (which is deeeeeelish on top of both!). The stuffed Poblano recipe is a vegan one, but you can easily sub in a different protein and regular cheese if you prefer to go non-vegan. If you still have your hot peppers from last week in the fridge and an onion on hand (red or Walla Walla will work great), you'll just need to drum up a little cilantro, lime and garlic for your salsa verde. In our household, I make a huge batch of salsa verde every Fall and can it by the quart, so zealous is the fan club around here. It livens up our burrito bowls year-round. 

I've never laid eyes on Poblanos quite so large as the ones we plucked off the plants this week, so they might require an XL slab of cheese when you stuff them for your rellenos. :) Poblanos are the traditional chile used for chile rellenos, picked when they are green and fresh. If you let a Poblano ripen to chocolatey-red and then dry it, it's known as an Ancho chile, which has a sweet, smokey, complex flavor with a little spice. We've always grown them on a smaller scale for the farmstand, but decided to scale up production to supply our CSA this year because they're such a beautiful pepper.

Napa cabbage and leeks are also new this week, and both are harbingers of Fall. If you look up napa cabbage recipes online, mostly you'll get recipes for cooked or stir-fried napa. All good, but for some reason I always lean into raw napa salad recipes like this instead, and love to throw in sliced sweet pepper for extra color and seasonal flair. It's such a light, tender, mild cabbage with just the right amount of mid-rib crunch. Napa is also the foundation of traditional Korean kimchi.

Leeks are one of the hardiest crops we grow, and they get the prize for living the longest life of any annual vegetable on the farm. We seed them in early February in the greenhouse, they get planted outside in mid-April, and they spend all summer slowly sizing up in the field until our first variety is ready for harvest in early September. We'll be pulling our early and mid-season varieties throughout the Fall until we're left with only our big, girthy winter leeks, which can last until April. They withstand every kind of weather - snowstorms and hail beatings - stolid and steadfast. But what do you do with a leek? My simple answer is that you can do anything with a leek that you would do with a cooked onion. The are in the same family of Allia as onions and will impart a similar flavor profile to any dish. If you're new to them, here's a great how-to on cleaning, cutting and cooking leeks.

Enjoy this shift into Fall food, the long evening shadows, and this lovely little rain!

Newsletter: 

Week 15 of 28 from Valley Flora!

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!

 

Newsletter: 

In a Landscape Coming to Valley Flora September 7th!

Get Your Tickets!

Join us for a magical evening at Valley Flora on Saturday, September 7th at 5 pm.

Hunter Noack returns to the farm with his grand piano to play a benefit concert for the Wild Rivers Land Trust!

 

Good Neighbor Program

IN A LANDSCAPE’s Good Neighbor Program provides access to those who might not otherwise be able to afford a ticket to this outdoor classical music experience.

Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) Cardholders use promo code: “inalandscape” (EBT card required at check-in)

To request a Good Neighbor ticket for another reason, please email gnp@inalandscape.org

 

Newsletter: 

Week 13 of 28 from Valley Flora!

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!

Newsletter: 

Week 12 of 28 from Valley Flora!

  • Head Lettuce
  • Red Beets
  • Green Beans
  • Cucumbers
  • Orange and Purple Carrots
  • Red Long of Tropea Torpedo Onions
  • Tomatoes
  • Zucchini
  • Basil

On Rotation:

  • Broccoli
  • Cilantro
  • Eggplant

In a Landscape Coming to Valley Flora September 7th!

Hunter Noack returns to the farm on September 7th with his Steinway concert grand piano! 

Founded in 2016 by classical pianist Hunter Noack, IN A LANDSCAPE: Classical Music in the Wild is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit outdoor concert series where  America’s most stunning landscapes replace the traditional concert hall. A 9-foot Steinway grand piano travels on a flatbed trailer to State and National Parks, urban greenspaces, working ranches, farms, and historical sites for classical music concerts that connect people with each landscape.  

To meet the acoustical challenges of performing in the wild, music is transmitted to concert-goers via wireless headphones. No longer confined to seats, audiences explore the landscape, wander through secret glens, lie in sunny meadows, roam old growth forests - and at Valley Flora, walk throughout our organic farm fields.

In the spirit of the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) Federal Music and Theatre Projects, which presented thousands of free concerts and plays in theaters, public spaces and parks across the country during the Depression, IN A LANDSCAPE events are offered primarily in rural communities for free or on a subsidized basis. 

Since 2016, IN A LANDSCAPE has presented 275 concerts in Oregon, Washington, Montana, Idaho, New York, Utah, Wyoming, and California to over 55,000 people. Guest artists have included poets, visual artists, dancers, and musicians playing everything from banjos to pianos.

Join us at the farm on Saturday, September 7th for this transcendent experience!  Get Tickets Here!

Bulk Basil Still Available by Special Order! - Order your bulk basil and we'll deliver it to your CSA pickup site in the coming weeks!

No Beet Box Newsletter Next Week - Heads up, we will not be sending out a newsletter next week. You can look forward to the first sweet corn of the season next week (!!) along with a pile of other peak-of-season produce. Hope you're enjoying the bounty!

Newsletter: 

Week 11 of 28 from Valley Flora!

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. 

Newsletter: 

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