The Valley Flora Beetbox

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

Week 4 from Valley Flora!

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

On Rotation:

  • Zucchini
  • Broccolini

Coming Soon!

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

 

Newsletter: 

Week 3 from Valley Flora!

  • Purple Kohlrabi
  • Strawberries
  • Mizuna
  • Kale
  • Head Lettuce

On Rotation:

  • Zucchini
  • Broccolini
  • Cilantro
  • Hakurei Turnips

For some of you this might be your first encounter with kohlrabi. Those pretty purple bulbs are edible from top to bottom: you can use the leaves as a cooking green, just as you would kale or collards. The bulb requires peeling (¡que lástima! you have to peel away that plum-colored exterior). But the interior is a crisp, white, crudités delight, not unlike jicama or the tender peeled stem of broccoli. There are various recipes that call for cooking kohlrabi, but personally I think it's at its best when eaten raw. If you want to keep it simple: peel it, cut it into sticks or slices, and dip it in your favorite dressing. Or try a kohlrabi slaw recipe - there are lots of variations on this theme, so take a gander on ye olde internet and search for "kohlrabi slaw" to find the flavor profile that sings to you.

 Mizuna might also be a new one for some of you (the bagged baby green with light green, serrated leaves). Mizuna is a mild Japanese mustard green and can be enjoyed raw as a salad base or sauteed. This Mizuna Salad with Ponzu Dressing is the kinda thing that makes my mouth water. It's also a recipe that will most likely require you to improvise a little, since it might be hard to track down shiso leaf and Japanese ginger. But no worries, even if you just make the ponzu dressing and toss it with naked mizuna (and/or try some of the recommended substitutions) you'll have a lovely little flavor bomb.

Kale is finally showing up in your tote this week, a little behind the normal curve for us. Our spring planting came under attack by root maggots and symphylans, but we've been singing encouragement to the plants for the past month and all of our kale, chard and collards are finally taking off. If you want to get yourself addicted to kale, make some kale chips. You can also throw raw kale into a smoothie, steam it, sautee it, or make any number of riffs - from deluxe to monastic - on raw kale salad.

Easing into Summer: Our Current Farmstand and U-Pick Schedule

We are slowly easing into our summer schedule with the farmstand and strawberry u-pick. The farmstand is currently open on Wednesdays only from 11:30 to 2:30 pm and strawberry u-pick is open on Saturdays only starting at 11:30 am (the berries are still limited while the patch comes into full production). We plan to add our Saturday farmstand to the schedule in the next couple weeks, and Wednesdays to the u-pick schedule once there are enough berries.

If you want to shop the farmstand, we strongly encourage folks to pre-order their produce in advance via our online store. We do stock the farmstand with limited produce for drop-in shoppers, but you have the widest selection and best guarantee if you pre-order.

Finally, a quick heads up that next week's newsletter will be either 1) very short, or 2) non-existent because I won't have muy usual office time on Wednesday to spin farm yarns for you :).

Have a great week!

 

 

Newsletter: 

Week 2 from Valley Flora!

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

On Rotation:

  • Broccolini
  • Zucchini

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

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

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

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

Salad Shares Begin this Week!

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

Enjoy the early summer harvest!

Newsletter: 

Week 1 of the 2024 CSA Season!

In your first share this week:

  • Red Spring Onions - a labor of Allium love, planted last fall and finally ready for harvest this week!
  • Purple Radishes - juicy with a little kick; if you like it less spicy, peel them!
  • Bunched Arugula - a mildly spicy green, wonderful in salads or alongside a slab of fish
  • Bunched Tatsoi - a dark green, spoon-shaped leafy green with white ribs, great sauteed or stir-fried
  • Head Lettuce - red butter, red oakleaf or redleaf plus a mini romaine
  • A SunOrange Cherry Tomato Plant - see below for planting tips!

On Rotation:*

  • Hakurei Turnips - our favorite salad turnip, buttery-sweet and good enough to eat like an apple
  • Zucchini - the first tender harvest out of our field tunnels
  • Strawberries - starting to come on strong in the field! We'll try to get you as many pints of these over the summer as we can! :)
  • Cilantro 

*These are crops that we don't have enough of all at once to put in every CSA tote in the same week, usually because they are just coming into production and aren't yielding fully yet. Some pickup sites will receive them this week, others in a future week - we keep track so it's even-steven all year :)

Hello CSA Members and Welcome to our 2024 Season!

We're tickled that you all have decided to embark on this 28-week seasonal eating adventure with us! The CSA is the biggest ever this year, thanks to a tsunami of unprecedented interest, so THANK YOU for being a core part of it! We are especially delighted that we have more SNAP members participating than ever before, thanks to the Double Up Food Bucks Program, which covers half the cost of the CSA for folks with SNAP/Oregon Trail benefits. Our CSA membership is the backbone of our farm economy and community (some of our members have been with us for 15 years!) and we make you our absolute first priority, ahead of our other sales channels (wholesale and farmstand). Some CSA's are managed the other way around: sell everything you can to other outlets first and then dump the leftovers on your CSA. Not at Valley Flora. Our commitment to our CSA is what drives the crop diversity at Valley Flora - we want to keep those totes interesting and abundant for you every week! - which has a beautiful ecological ripple effect on the farm: hundreds of different crops and varieties growing in coloful, organic polyculture, and supporting all kinds of vibrant life (other than the vegetables themselves), like this baby Pacific tree frog that greeted me in the lettuce yesterday:

For  those of you who are new to the Valley Flora CSA, an extra special welcome. It takes a certain adventurous spirit to commit to 7 months of the unknown, but we promise to do our very best to keep you stoked and stocked with peak-of-season, fresh-harvested produce every single week from now through December. As returning members can attest, it can be a lot of food! We hope it motivates you to eat more plants, and I, Zoë, will also do my best to offer tips, recipes, and backstory for all that produce in this here weekly "Beet Box" newsletter. These days the internet is rife with great recipes - easily searchable by ingredient - so I trust that many of you can find inspiration online or in your own collection of cookbooks. That said, I'll try to do some extra coaching when we throw something more unusual your way. There is also a collection of recipes on our website organized by vegetable: check out our Recipe Wizard, and feel free to contribute your own favorite recipes there! If you make something that knocks your socks off, share it with me and I'll pass it along to the rest of the CSA membership in the next newsletter.

A little housekeeping: if you haven't already familiarized yourself with our Pickup Instructions and Protocol, PLEASE DO THAT BEFORE YOU PICK UP YOUR FIRST CSA SHARE this week! Our CSA sites are all essentially unstaffed, which means they are run by YOU! Help us avoid SNAFUs and mix-ups by brushing up on how things run, and make sure that anyone else in your circle who might pick up your CSA is briefed as well. We thank you, and so do your fellow CSA members!

Also remember that Abby's Greens Salad Shares start NEXT WEEK. There is no salad this week.

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

Thanks again for being a part of this beautiful thing called community supported agriculture. 

P.S. In addition to cute little tree frogs, the farm also supports other wildlife, such as invasive garden slugs. Because we don't use any chemicals (herbicides, pesticides, etc), you might say we're an equal opportunity habitat haven. Despite our best efforts, you might find one of these in your head lettuce this week, and I'll let you decide what you want to do with it when it plops into your sink. Me, I know I'll be getting reincarnated as a slug in my next life, and in that life an organic farmer will come along on a lovely May morning and cut me in half or stomp me flat, which is what I deserve after 20+ years of slug-slaying (never Banana slugs though, they eat nothing but detritus and are a wonderful native species!). If nothing else, the slugs that might be lurking in your head lettuce are good motivation to wash your produce well (we "field rinse" everything, but you should wash it at home before eating it).

Newsletter: 

The LAST week of "Winter" :)

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

On Rotation:

  • Artichokes

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

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

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

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

  • Our first CSA totes will be delivered to our 2024 main season members:
  • Our farmstand will go to weekly Wednesdays starting May 29th. We'll be adding Saturdays to the schedule by the summer solstice, if not sooner.
  • We will open strawberry u-pick as soon as the patch is ready. Please don't call or email if you are wracked with strawberry fever; we promise to get the word out via email, on our website, in this newsletter, and through our Instagram/Facebook feed once the patch is ready for the eager public. Remember, the strawberries produce ALL SEASON LONG, into October, so there are many good months of u-picking ahead of us. 

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

Credits: Naz Deravian, NYT Cooking

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

Newsletter: 

Week 9 of Winter/Spring from Valley Flora!

  • Redleaf Lettuce
  • Baby Pac Choi
  • Bunched Bellezia Arugula
  • Bunched Fava Greens
  • Rainbow Chard
  • Pea Shoots
  • Red Cabbage
  • Purple Sprouting Broccoli (final harvest!)
  • Yellow Onions
  • Purple Potatoes
  • Purple Radishes
  • Tetsu Winter Squash

On Rotation:

  • Artichokes

Happy Mayday!

Your "winter" CSA share is listing hard towards "spring" this week, with the arrival of head lettuce from our field tunnels, pac choi, fava greens, young radishes, and a wild-type arugula that is aptly named "Bellezia." As Allen put it as he and Roberto packed the totes yesterday, "we couldn't have fit a single leaf more in there." It's not all fluff, though. Some dense winter goods are still anchoring the bottom of the bin, with purple potatoes, the last of the jumbo yellow onions, a Guiness-book sized Tetsu squash, and purple cabbage. We've been genuinely impressed with this cabbage variety, which got planted last August, was harvested in late March, is storing like a champ, and is still winning cabbage beauty pageants. 

And if you are groaning at the sight of that big kabocha squash, here's some inspiration from a fellow CSA member in Port Orford who was moved to email me last time we put Tetsu in your share:

The oven was on today, so I went ahead and baked the Tetsu whole before I decided for sure what to do with it. Seems that’s a moot point because it is SO DANG GOOD that I keep eating it right out of my refrig container with a spoon! Yumm!! Thanks for the introduction!

Alternatively, you can procrastinate and leave that Tetsu on your counter for another month or two. We've had CSA members eat them a whole year after they were harvested - that's how crazy-long they can store. 

If you want a yummy way to disappear your arugula this week, along with that stash of red beets that I know are piled up in the back of your fridge, I highly recommend some version of this salad from Ottolenghi: Beetroot and Walnut Salad. Danny made it for dinner last night. We didnt' have half the ingredients - cilantro, leeks, tamarind water, pomegranate seeds, walnut oil - but it didn't matter. Skip all the things you don't have and use olive oil instead of the other oils. The main point is that roasting those beets in tin foil, then peeling them, gives them a wonderful, deep flavor. We crumbled some feta on top and doused the arugula (known as "rocket" in the U.K.) with a little more olive oil and reduced balsamic. Wowza.

Also, before I go, you probably need some pointers for those fava greens. Right. Favas are mostly known for their beans (which will be part of the CSA share come early July). But the tender young leaves are a lesser-known delicacy with a wonderfully nutty flavor. I think they shine the most when you lightly sautee them in butter or olive oil with a little salt, but you can also eat them raw as a salad ingredient. Snip the leaves and tender tips from the plant, removing any tough or woody stem. Wash well to remove any field dirt and spin dry. From there, the world is full of fav-ulous possibilities. Here's a creative spin on basil pesto, using fava leaves instead: Fava Greens Pesto. This is a once--a-year-only harvest for us, when we thin our fava bed to make room for the bean-producing plants. So give 'em a try - it'll be your only chance in 2024!

Newsletter: 

Week 8 of Winter/Spring from Valley Flora!

  • Spring Lettuce Mix
  • Arugula
  • Bunched Spinach
  • Cebollitas
  • Micro Mix
  • Potatoes
  • Green Cabbage
  • Shallots
  • Red Bets
  • Purple Sprouting Broccoli & Spring Raab

On Rotation:

  • Caulliflower

If our wifi signal was a little stronger here at the farm today, I'd be attaching a photo that might make you ponder the order of things at Valley Flora: picture the whole crew bent over in the field, five hours into a marathon day of transplanting. The ground is freshly turned, each of us doubled over at the waist, trowels flying like pistons as we chip away at the 7,000 seedlings that are going into the ground on this first day of our outdoor planting season. Meanwhile in the foreground: a black Lab lying fully sprawled on the back of the flatbed amidst scattered half-empty transplant trays and crew water bottles, her head draped over the edge of the truck in our direction. The look she is casting at the camera is one of purest indolence, as if to say, "All this, for kale?"

Yes, Juno, all this for kale. And for chard and collards and lettuce and pac choi and beets and peas and favas and radishes and turnips and even for that one vegetable you genuinely love, carrots. (It is a good thing, by the way, that your farmers here at Valley Flora are not dogs because if we were your CSA membership would consist of paying us to mostly lie around all day, dig holes, swim in the creek, and maybe, occasionally, once in a very blue moon, do something useful by catching a field mouse for you.)

Instead your human farmers have been taking full advantage of this sunny spell to kick the season off with gusto, rapidly transforming the farm into row upon planted row of early crops that will be making their way into summer CSA baskets in six short weeks (spring is the antithesis of indolence when you file a Schedule F for a living)! Meanwhile, our winter CSA members are starting to see some signature seasonal edibles in their share right now - arugula and spring lettuce mix - and will soon be dining on tender fava greens and artichokes. All the while the farm dogs snooze in the shade, perhaps vaguely mystified at the hustle-bustle. But then again, why ask questions when the napping is ample and the kibble is sin fin?

Happy spring, whether you are out there napping or out there bustling.

 

Newsletter: 

Week 7 of Winter/Spring from Valley Flora!

  • Purple Sprouting Broccoli 
  • Cauliflower 
  • Ruby Streaks Mustard Greens
  • Pea Shoots
  • Yellow Onions
  • Painted Purple Potatoes
  • Spring Raab
  • Bulk Spinach
  • Tetsukabuto Winter Squash
  • Cebollitas 

Week 7 Produce Notes:

It was a fun week of harvest abundance at the farm: the purple sprouting broccoli at max production, spinach leaves the size of baby elephant ears, and our first harvest of "cebollitas." Cebollitas (little onions) are the green tops of our onion seedlings, which are currently sizing up in trays in our propagation greenhouse. We start all of our own onions from seed in early February and as they germinate and size up we have to give the seedlings periodic "haircuts" to encourage the plants to girth up ahead of transplanting. We've learned to save the green tops and put them to culinary use since they make a great substitute for chives or green onions. 

This week's motherlode of purple sprouting broccoli (aka "PSB" in farmer parlance) is worthy of center-of-the-plate attention. You can cook PSB the same way you would regular broccoli or broccolini. It will lose its vibrant purple color in the process, but the flavor is unbeatable. It's also mild and sweet enough to munch raw if you don't want to lose that vibrant purple hue (the stem in particular is oh-so-tender and sweet). Check out this diverse collection of purple sprouting broccoli recipes for inspiration.

Cauliflower: I got home late from the farm on Monday with no idea what I was making for dinner. I had a couple big heads of cauliflower that needed to be eaten so I did what I often do when I'm at a loss for a dinner idea but have produce staring me down in the fridge: I got online and searched "cauliflower recipes." I landed on this one: Kung Pao Cauliflower, and it was a hit. Quick, easy, tons of flavor, one single sheet pan to wash at the end of the night, perfect alongside a pot of rice. I didn't have any green onions on hand so I subbed thin-sliced leeks and roasted them with the cauliflower to crispy them up. Made for great leftovers the next day, too. I highly recommend, especially if you've got a cauliflower backlog.

Tetsukabuto Winter Squash: One of our favorite and longest-keeping squash, "Tetsu" is a cross between a butternut and a kabocha. They can be intimidating for some folks because of their tough-as-nails bumpy skin, but they are worth the effort ("tetsukabuto" translates to "steel helmet" in Japanese). The OSU winter vegetable project has created a great collection of videos on how to cook with lesser-known winter vegetables, including Tetsu: https://www.eatwintervegetables.com/videos

You can also find some delish recipes and videos for purple sprouting broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, celeriac, radicchio and more on their site. Eat it up!

Mustard Greens: The variety that most of you are getting this week is a mild, lacy-leafed variety called "Ruby Streaks." If this is the vegetable that predictably ends up yellow and half-rotten in a slimy bag at the back of your fridge, I'd suggest cooking it up tonight alongside that Kung Pao cauliflower. In fact, the sauce for the cauliflower would work perfectly splashed over a pile of sauteed mustards (and I promise you, it will be a very small pile once it cooks down). You could also try this teriyaki-inspired recipe: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/218501/asian-inspired-mustard-greens/

Let the Planting Begin!

In spite of the near-relentless rain the past many months, the skies have afforded us enough of a window that we'll be starting our outdoor planting season on time this week. This first week of transplanting is a bit like boot-camp for farmers, with thousands and thousands of transplants staged in the greenhouse right now, ready to hit the soil. The way they get there, from greenhouse tray to fertile field, is human hands. We hand-transplant every last seedling on the farm, flat-backed, bent at the hips, leaning into our glutes. Even with our baseline fitness, we'll all be sore by this weekend, guaranteed. We'll be transplanting kale, collards, chard, head lettuce, kohlrabi, cabbage, broccolini, broccoli and pac choi. And by light of headlamp last night, I was able to get carrots, beets, turnips, radishes, arugula and spinach direct-seeded before the rain started. Spring is manic like this: rainy lulls followed by sunny weather sprints.

Good thing there are 12 hours and 50 minutes of daylight now, because there are times when we need every last second of it (and then some, courtesy of Petzl headlamps and an arsenal of rechargable triple A batteries :)...

CSA Shares Almost Sold Out, Sign Up Today!

We have a few spots left for the upcoming CSA season. Sign-ups are now open to the general public so spread the word! Remember, anyone with SNAP food benefits is eligible for Double Up Food Bucks (DUFB) when they sign up for our CSA. That means they only pay half the cost of the CSA with SNAP and DUFB covers the other half. It's a great way to get a season of fresh produce from Valley Flora at a 50% discount.

Sign up on our website at https://www.valleyflorafarm.com/content/valley-flora-harvest-basket!

Newsletter: 

Week 6 from Valley Flora - Happy Spring!

  • Bunched Spinach
  • Cauliflower
  • Leeks - last harvest of the year!
  • Butternut Squash
  • Shallots
  • Spring Raab - a mix of tender buds from our kale, cabbage, collards and Brussels sprouts this week
  • Purple Sprouting Broccoli
  • Red Beets
  • Purple and Yellow Potatoes
  • Parsley - Curly or Italian
  • Resurrection Celery - These flavor-packed stalks are winter regrowth from the celery plants we logged for you last fall. In a mild winter, the plants can send up new shoots after being harvested, giving us a a special harvest of mini "resurrection" celery come spring. Great sauteed up as a flavor base, added to soup, or even munched raw.
  • Micro Mix - radish and mesclun blend
  • Purple Cabbage

Spring!

Spring sprang yesterday amidst a frenzy of activity on the farm as we tried to cross everything we could off our list before the next wall of rain arrives. Jack and Lily had their first day back in harness after a winter's rest and they earned an A+ for good behavior and tireless work ethic. The horses spread mountains of compost on the field, cultivated the new artichoke patch, and helped unearth the rhubarb, which was choked with winter weeds. Meanwhile all the Valley Flora two-leggeds were putting their opposable thumbs to good use pruning fruit trees, weeding perennials, mowing cover crop, transplanting greenhouse starts, and putting row cover on all the beds that got seeded over the weekend: favas, peas, carrots, beets, turnips, radishes and arugula, oh my! Might we actually be a little relieved when it starts raining again, if only to get through the unruly pile on this neglected desk? Perhaps....

Sign Up for the Valley Flora CSA with SNAP, Double Up Food Bucks Pays Half!

Spread the word to anyone you know who has SNAP food benefits! SNAP members who sign up for our CSA pay half the cost and Double Up Food Bucks covers the other half. It's a fantastic program that makes fresh produce more accessible to everyone in our community. Help us get the word out! You can read more about it and sign up on our website here.

 

Newsletter: 

Week 5 of Winter from Valley Flora!

  • Autumn Frost Winter Squash - wonderfully flavorful specialty butternut, great roasted or turned into soup
  • Celeriac - aka "celery root," also a great soup ingredient, or mash it with potatoes, or grate into hashbrowns, or roast with other root veggies
  • Yellow Onions (not pictured)
  • Micro Mix - a blend of pea shoots, radish and mesclun (not pictured)
  • Bunched Mustard Greens  - semi-spicy cooking greens....here's a collection of 8 eclectic recipes to help you use them: https://www.foodandwine.com/vegetables/greens/10-ways-use-mustard-greens
  • Baby Leeks
  • Red Potatoes
  • Purple Mini Daikon Radish - beautiful sliced and added to salads or snacked on raw...peel the outer skin for milder, more tender munching.
  • Winter Salad Mix - a blend of 8 lettuce varieties and asian greens from our greenhouses
  • Bunched Spinach - as loved by slugs as it is by humans, pardon the holey leaves!
  • Savoy Cabbage

On Rotation:

  • Cauliflower
  • Spring Raab
  • Purple Sprouting Broccoli

Happy March, and happy few days of much-needed sunshine! This past week of frigid, relentless rain/hail/sleet wasn't a problem for any of our hardy overwintering field crops, but ironically it put a major damper on the growth of our pea shoots in the greenhouse. The cold and the grey slowed them down significantly, such that our usual Monday harvest was postponed. All day Tuesday I was popping in and out of the propagation house to see if they had put on enough top growth. Finally at 6 pm, with all the CSA shares already packed and in the cooler and the crew gone, I took the electric knife to them and harvested all 30+ trays by headlamp. Because we were short on poundage (due to the diminuitive stature of those preemie peas), I mixed in all our radish and mesclun to create a lovely little fancy-pants blend. It'll make a nice garnish on that winter salad mix this week.

It was fun to finally dive into some of our much-anticipated greenhouse crops this week: spinach, cut lettuce, baby greens. All of it was seeded/planted as early as last Thanksgiving and is only now ready for harvest. It's a myth that plants don't grow during our winter; they do, just very, very slowly. We transplanted a new bed of cut lettuce into a greenhouse yesterday and it will likely be ready for harvest in a month or so (instead of the three months it takes when it grows through winter). We have a steady succession of spinach on the horizon (hopefully the slugs won't ravage it all, apologies for those holey leaves!), and even have a bed of baby carrots up and growing indoors.

With any luck, we might be able to get some outdoor peas, favas, carrots, beets, radishes and turnips seeded this week before the next deluge. And while we wait for it to dry out, we'll be pruning in the orchard like madwomen, transplanting artichokes, and mowing mowing mowing! 

All to say, office tasks are on hold until it starts raining again!

CSA Sign-Ups are Now Open for our Waiting List!

If you are on our CSA waiting list, you should see an email from us this week with an invitation to sign up! If you were a member last year and didn't sign up during our priority window - but want to - grab a spot before it's too late! To sign up, visit our website: https://www.valleyflorafarm.com/catalog/7

Newsletter: 

Week 3 of Winter from Valley Flora

  • Bulk Kale
  • Celeriac
  • Autumn Frost Winter Squash
  • Red Potatoes
  • Pea Shoots
  • Cauliflower
  • Curly Parsley
  • Goldrush Apples
  • Onions
  • Leeks

There are two extra-special things that made their way into your tote this week: Goldrush Apples and overwintering cauliflower. The former is our favorite apple variety (which is saying a lot, given the 35+ different varieties of pommes growing in the our orchard). It's a late-harvest apple, never coming off the tree before Thanksgiving and it stores well into May with refrigeration. The flavor is sweet-tart and complex with firm texture that lends itself to fresh eating or baking. A big thanks to Abby, the apple queen, for adding these to the share this week!

The overwintering cauliflower is one of four varieties that come on in a staggered succession throughout the winter and spring. I've waxed poetic about overwintering cauliflower before, because it astounds me every time we harvest it: how did this plant make a perfect white dome of dense curd through the darkest months of the year? Quasi-miraculous in my botanistic opinion. The plants were seeded in early July and transplanted in eary August, so they did most of the work of growing a large frame of leaves in late summer and fall. But the actual heading of the cauliflower doesn't get triggered until this moment, after the Persephone period when the days start to stretch longer. Our mild winter means that this variety is almost a month earlier than it was last year, so enjoy the unexpected!

Also, there's quite a stash of leeks in your share this week. There was a little communication mishap with the crew, which resulted in lotsa leeks for all this week! :)

London Bridge is Down

The reigning queen of Valley Flora, Maude (my Belgian draft horse), died on Sunday at the farm. She was 25 years old and a founding member of our crew since Valley Flora hatched in 2008. Maude was part of my first draft team; I lost her partner, Barney, to colic over a decade ago but Maude soldiered on, working every season in harness to help us coax vegetables out of the field. In 2017 she gained a new herd when I brought Jack and Lily home. By then she had earned her retirement, but she ruled the roost as lead mare until her very last day. Which, as it turns out, was a beautiful last day: Saturday, sunny, out on grass, eating with gusto, rainbows flying overhead. The next morning when I came to feed her, she was gone.

Maude helped make my farm dream come true, a Valley Flora icon through and through. I thank her for everything she gave to make it possible, and for everything she taught me along the way.

All hail the queen, she will be missed dearly.

 

Newsletter: 

Week 2 of Winter!

  • Rainbow Chard
  • Bulk Winter Kale Mix
  • Radish/Mesclun Micro Mix
  • Beets - Red, Gold & Chioggia
  • Purple Mini Daikon Radish
  • Leeks
  • Cipollini Onions
  • Yellow Potatoes
  • Savoy Cabbage
  • Candystick Delicata Squash
  • Pie Pumpkin

A Few of My Favorite Winter Meals...

I generally assume that if you're signed up for our Winter CSA, you're pretty adept at the seasonal-eating thing. I'm routinely impressed by the inspired concoctions our CSA members come up with in the kitchen using VF produce. In our household we eat well and we eat farm-forward (we've been teased many a time about our over-sized salad bowl), but meals typically err on the side of simple and straightforward in order to juggle busy schedules, kids, and all the rest. If you have the time to get gourmet with this week's share, do it! But if you don't, here's how I'd go about eating through that hefty tote of produce without much fuss:

  • Candystick Delicata: Cut in half, scoop out the seeds, bake it face-down on a sheet pan with some water in the pan @ 375-400 until soft. Put a pat of butter in each boat and eat with spoon, for any meal. This is a special variety of Delicata bred by Oregon's own Carol Deppe, selected for longer storage life (we don't normally still have Delicata at the end of January!) and exceptionally sweet date-like flavor. It's nicknamed the "dessert delicata." We've noticed some variability in flavor depending on size, so would love it if you'd do a side by side taste test of your larger and smaller squash and let us know what you find out.
  • Kale & Chard: Most likely we'd steam the greens and eat a big pile of them drizzled with olive oil and ume plum vinegar (tangy and salty) or reduced balsamic vinegar with a sprinkle of salt. But I also love this quick soup: Lemony White Bean Soup with Greens. I usually omit the ground turky and use kale instead of collards.
  • Micro Mix: I'd be putting this all over a radicchio salad, or cabbage slaw, or the beet recipe below - unless it got pilfered for smoothies first.
  • Beets: Roast, roast, roast! That's usually our go-to. There's also a great winter salad courtesy of Joshua McFadden (Six Seasons cookbook): Beet Slaw with Pistachios and Raisins that I love. It takes a little more time, but is 100% worth it.
  • Daikon: I love these diced up on burrito bowls, or sliced thinly in any kind of salad, or cut up for snackable veg. I usually peel them.
  • Leeks: Also great roasted sheet-pan style alongside beets, spuds, squash. They get crispy and caramelized in a 400 degree oven, with a little help from some olive oil. Also obviously a go-to ingredient for potato leek soup, or any soup. We just had them in a frittata last night - excelente!
  • Cipollini Onions: Use them anywhere, but be sure you caramelize them down first to bring out their wow factor. Perhaps the best pizza topping there is.
  • Potatoes: They were in said frittata last night. We made roasted potatoes last week. And we're having mashed spuds tonight.
  • Cabbage: This is a January King type cabbage, mostly savoy in its expression. Certainly great for fresh slaw, but I have to say the most unctuous cabbage is the one that is cut into wedges, tossed with olive and salt, and yes - you guessed it! - ROASTED at 400 (the magic oven temp) until soft and crispy and browned. Really good with leeks in the mix on the same sheet pan.
  • Pie Pumpkin: I egregiously forgot to mention when all of our CSA members got one of these last fall that this variety is called "Pie Pita" and is mulit-purpose: it has hull-less seeds that can be roasted into pepitas, and tasty meat that can become dinner or dessert (dinner: Thai Pumpkin Curry; dessert: Pie!). My sister, Abby, loves to bake and is the pumpkin pie queen of the family. I like being on the receiving end of all her experimentation and efforts.

So that's the farmer quick and dirty on how to grub down this tote. I guess the main takeaways are: stock up on olive oil and make sure your oven runs at 400 :). If so, you're golden.

Newsletter: 

Week 1 of Winter!

  • Red Cabbage
  • Chioggia Radicchio
  • Winter Kale Mix
  • Red Onion
  • Celeriac
  • Fennel
  • Butternut Squash
  • Yellow Potatoes
  • Parsnips
  • Leeks

Back at It in the Field!

It's all too fitting that our first winter harvest lined up with the first week when we finally get some real winter weather! Snow level is licking the top of White Mountain above the farm right now, making for some nice "41 degrees and raining, er, make that hailing" conditions (the coldest cold there is). We've been truly grateful for insulated boots and waterproof harvest gloves this week. Our winter get-up does slow the whole show down a bit: gloved hands lose dexterity, sensitivity and nimbleness, and big warm boots mean more slogging and stumbling than hopping and skipping. Then there's the head-to-toe impermeable membrane we cloak ourselves in (aka Grundens and other brands of vinyl raingear). All to say, it's not exactly ballet or high fashion out there as we're bringing in the bins of bulk kale and muddy parsnips, but at least we're semi-warm and getting the job done.

This week's share is the epitomy of winter eating: hearty leeks, durable spuds, sweet butternuts that are begging to become soup, our wintry kale mix, long-keeping cabbage, ugly-as-usual parsnips (but you're practiced with VF parsnips and a veggie peeler by now :)). I was also delighted to forage up some "resurrection fennel" for all the totes this week. This is second-growth fennel, sprouted from the stump of an already-been-harvested-last-summer fennel plant. As a fennel lover - and I acknowledge that not everyone is - it's one of my favorite winter treats. The bulbs themselves have an intensified sweet flavor due to winter frosts, and from a harvest persective it's kinda like the free prize inside the cereal box: a total bonus. I love to slice the little bulbs up thinly and add them to radicchio salad, along with some orange slices and maybe some candied pecans and a little bleu cheese. Whip up a sweet-tangy-citrusy vinaigrette and then call me and invite me over for dinner.

A big, big thank you to all our Winter CSA members who are on board for our 2024 winter season. We appreciate your year-round support and love the challenge you create for us: to fill up those totes - amply and colorfully - through the darkest, coldest months of the year. We hope you enjoy this first installment!

Newsletter: 

Week 28: Your Final Harvest from Valley Flora!

  • Beet Medley - Red, Gold and Chioggia
  • Carrots
  • Red Potatoes
  • Chioggia Radicchio
  • Purple Brussels Sprouts
  • Curly Parsley
  • Leeks
  • Spaghetti Squash

I am not one to toot our own horn, but after 15 years of packing CSA totes I think this was the prettiest Week 28 share we've ever put together. In spite of it being December, those bins are somehow still full of cheerful rainbow vegetables. (Rainbows, by the way, are the standard by which my 8 year-old Uma judges the merit of all things, and I think we might have done her proud this week.)

I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed the entire rainbow arc of the season, from those first June shares of leafy green-ness, to the reds-oranges-yellows of September Solanums, to the pretty-in-pink and cabernet-red radicchios of late fall. Farming for us is not unlike paint by number: fill in the rows of purple eggplants here and the golden squash there; the deep blue lacinato kale in this corner, next to the fire engine red strawberries.

For us, head down and hustling, it can feel like a blur. Which is why I love to take a minute to appreciate the year in review and be reminded of all the bounty that passed through our hands and into yours over the past 7 months:

We are forever grateful for our CSA membership that inspires and drives the diversity of plants we grow on our little farm. YOU are the reason for our season!

And, I am deeply thankful to the team of people who make it all possible: Roberto, Allen, Sarah, Alexa, Jen, Bets, Abby, Donna, John, Danny, Jack and Lily (the horses), and our goofy kids. What a team we had this year, dare I say BEST EVER?! Yes, I dare.

For those of you who have signed up for the Winter CSA, we'll be back in a month with more rainbow veggies! And for those of you who want to be part of our 2024 June-December season, look for an email with signup info in late January or February. We'll be reaching out directly and giving you first dibs on the 2024 season. We hope we have the honor - and delight - of feeding you again next year!

Happy Holidays to all, savor the cozy time.

-Zoë

 

Newsletter: 

Week 27 of 28 from Valley Flora!

  • Kale
  • Carrots
  • Celeriac
  • Winter Kohlrabi
  • Leeks
  • Lettuce
  • Mini Daikon Radish - pink and purple
  • Butternut Squash
  • Green Cabbage

This penultimate CSA share is a dense one, loaded with veggies that will store for weeks (leeks, carrots), or months (butternut, celeriac, daikon, cabbage, kohlrabi). The only two things that you need to eat soonish are your kale and head lettuce (this, by the way, is your final little head of lettuce for 2023, after seven straight months of harvest - thanks be to a productive lettuce year!). Next week's share will also be laden with more storage crops, in hopes of stocking you up so that you might still be carving off a VF cabbage come January (yes, these late season cabbages are lunker-esque)! If you're having a hard time getting through them I highly recommend roasting wedges at high heat on a sheet pan: Roasted Cabbage Wedges. A little olive oil, salt, and a 450 degree oven will take cabbage to the next level, turning it into a mouth-watering, warm winter comfort food. 

Next week will be our 28th and final CSA delivery for the season:

  • Last pickup for Farm and Coos Bay members: Wednesday, December 6th 
  • Last pickup for Port Orford and Bandon members: Saturday, December 9th

AND, if you find yourself headed into an end-of-CSA seasonal depression (wah, no more VF veg until next June!), don't despair because.....

Winter CSA Sign-Ups are Open!!!

We have a limited number of Winter CSA shares available, sign up now to secure your spot!

This winter we are also delighted to be offering UpsideDown Egg Shares, which you can sign up for and have delivered with your Winter CSA box.

If you live in Coos Bay, we are considering the possibility of adding a winter Coos Bay CSA pickup option at Coos Head Food Co-op (Wednesdays, as usual). If you like that idea, let us know via email so we can determine if we have enough interest to justify the drive to Coos Bay this winter.

I'm headed out the door to do one last scurry around the farm before the evidently endless rainy forecast settles in on us, but you'll hear from me again next week in our final 2023 Beet Box newsletter. In the meantime, go clean those gutters, quick!

Newsletter: 

Happy Thanksgiving from Valley Flora!

  • Brussels Sprouts
  • Celery
  • Rosemary
  • Head Lettuce
  • Shallots
  • Parsnips
  • Yellow Potatoes
  • Rosalba Radicchio
  • Autumn Frost Winter Squash
  • Cleo's Gourds!

Smooth sailing this week as we pushed through our big Thanksgiving harvest, thanks to easy weather and our all-star farm team. The delivery van has been on the road since 8 am, dropping CSA totes at the farm, in Port Orford, Bandon and Coos Bay. Be sure you pick up your produce today! One final reminder about pickup times:

  • For members who pick up at the Farm and at Coos Head Food Co-op, it's business as usual: same time, same place today.
  • For Bandon Members: Pick-up is on Wednesday, November 22nd between 10:30 and 5 pm at Well Within
  • For Port Orford Members: Pick-up is on Wednesday, November 22nd between 8:30 and 5 pm at the Port Orford Co-op (please try to pick up before 11 am or after 3 pm to avoid congestion on the loading dock at POCC)
  • REMEMBER: NO CSA PICKUP on SATURDAY, 11/25 in BANDON or PORT ORFORD!

My favorite radicchio is in the share this week: Rosalba. In the past I've described it like a quinceañera dress - layers and layers of pink petticoat. But this year, a new name: it's Barbie salad.

Wait, correction: it's Barbie Salad and it's Ken Salad (because some of my favorite men love eating Rosalba as much as me and my girlfriends). And if you haven't seen the new Barbie movie yet and are wondering what in the world I'm talking about, here's your very un-pop, very un-pink, very un-Barbie farmer telling you to go rent it this holiday weekend! Here on our women-owned and run farm, we freaking loved that movie.

To go alongside your pretty Rosalba, you have our annual dig of ugly Thanksgiving parsnips. Actually, not quite as ugly this year, and whatever blemishes you encounter are only skin deep, so get out your veggie peeler and make 'em shine! I always plug this one recipe, which has become an unshakeable tradition on our Thanksgiving table: Roasted Winter Squash and Parsnips with Maple Syrup Glaze and Marcona Almonds.

The Autumn Frost winter squash is a specialty butternut, equally well-suited to baking, roasting, or souping. It has a fantastic apple-y flavor that I love, with more complexity than a standard butternut.

And for the first time ever in the history of the Valley Flora CSA, there's something inedible in your share this week: Cleo's whimsical gourds! Cleo is my 12 year old daughter and she's been growing and selling decorative gourds for a number of years. She had a bumper crop this year and I figured they'd make for some lovely adornment on your Thanksgiving table. I bought a few hundred of her choice specimens (every single one is different and unique) to help fund her miniature donkey breeding (and feeding) project. 

All of us at Valley Flora are wishing you a Happy Thanksgiving, with gratitude that you are a part of our little farm on Floras Creek. Thank you!

Newsletter: 

Week 25 of 28 from Valley Flora!

  • Red Beets
  • Carrots
  • Celeriac
  • Lettuce
  • Yellow Onions
  • Pie Pumpkin (in advance of Thanksgiving so you can make that homemade pumpkin pie!)
  • Apples (Topaz for Wednesday CSA sites, Fuji for Saturday CSA sites)
  • Garlic

On Rotation:

  • Collards
  • Kale
  • Violet Queen Turnips
  • Pink Daikon
  • White Cauliflower

Thanksgiving CSA Deliveries - PLEASE READ!

Thanksgiving is sneaking up fast this year! Our CSA delivery schedule will be different next week, so PLEASE READ the following:

Here's the dealio: Because all of us here at the farm don't want to be working on Thanksgiving day, and because most of you might want to be eating your VF veggies on Thursday, we do a crazy thing next week. We smoosh our entire 5 day work week into 2.5 days, Monday through Wednesday. I can't remember who's terrible idea this was many years ago (that's a lie, it was mine), but basically our team doubles down and pulls off an unimaginable feat of industrious efficiency to get all 130 CSA shares, all farmstand orders, and all wholesale orders packed and delivered by Wednesday. 

The takehome is twofold: 

  1. Next week ALL CSA SHARES GET DELIVERED ON WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 22nd (that includes you, Port Orford and Bandon, see below for times!).
  2. There is NO CSA DELIVERY TO BANDON OR PORT ORFORD ON SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 25th!

Please mark your calendars with big bold Sharpie so that you don't miss out on your food next week!

  • For members who pick up at the farm and at Coos Head Food Co-op, it's business as usual: same time, same place next week.
  • For Bandon Members: Pick-up is on Wednesday, November 22nd between 10:30 and 5 pm at Well Within
  • For Port Orford Members: Pick-up is on Wednesday, November 23rd between 8:30 and 5 pm at the Port Orford Co-op (please try to pick up before 11 am or after 3 pm to avoid congestion on the loading dock at POCC)

And for once, and just this once, I will attempt to tell you exactly what will be in your share next week so you can plan, scheme, flip through cookbooks and shop for other ingredients as needed at our farmstand. We're open this Saturday and next Wednesday 11:30 to 2:30 pm. You can pre-order online (highly recommended) via our online store, or drop in to shop.

The Week 26 Thanksgiving Share:

  • Brussels Sprouts - 1 stalk
  • Carrots - 0.75 pound
  • Rosemary
  • Shallots - 1+ pound
  • Parsnips - hopefully 2+ pounds, won't know until we dig them next week
  • Yellow Potatoes - 3 pounds
  • Rosalba Radicchio - 1 very pink head
  • Head Lettuce (unless we get a hard freeze before next week, unlikely)
  • Autumn Frost Winter Squash - great for roasting or soup-making or anything that involves squash. Also beautiful decor for the Thanksgiving table
  • TBD: Celery - 1 bunch

OK, everyone repeat after me: "I will pick up my Thanksgiving CSA share next WEDNESDAY!"

AND finally, if you are going to be out of town next week we are more than happy to hold your Thanksgiving share in our cooler for late pickup from the farm when you return. In order to do this, I need you to email me by this Sunday, November 19th with your NAME, PICKUP Location, and the DATE you plan to retrieve your tote from our cooler at the farm. We ask that late pick-ups come between 8 am and 5 pm, during daylight hours. Thanks!

Get ready to feast!

Newsletter: 

Week 23 of 28 from Valley Flora!

  • Dazzling Blue Lacinato Kale
  • Carrots
  • Fennel
  • Italian Parsley
  • Head Lettuce
  • Red Onions
  • Mini Daikon Radish
  • Butternut Squash

On Rotation

  • Cauliflower
  • Romanesco
  • Tomatoes

November and Beyond on the Farm...

Happy first day of November! We are six weeks from the end of our 28-week CSA season, and although we are headed into the final chapter there is still a lot of good food yet to come! In hopes of ensuring that everyone continues to get their CSA produce until the very end, here are a few important dates for you add to your calendar:

  • November 22 (the Wednesday before Thanksgiving): we will be delivering ALL CSA totes to ALL pick-up locations, to ensure that everyone has their produce in time for Thanksgiving. If you usually pick up on Saturday in Bandon or Port Orford, your pick-up for that week will be on 11/22 instead of 11/25 (no CSA delivery on 11/25). We'll send out more info about this schedule switcheroo the week before Thanksgiving.
  • December 6th and 9th: This will be our final week of CSA deliveries for the season (12/6 for VF and Coos Bay pick-ups; 12/9 for Bandon and Port Orford).

And for those of you who want to keep the party going, we will be offering Winter CSA Shares again this year. Our winter season runs from mid-January to mid-May on an every-other week delivery schedule (10 CSA deliveries over 20 calendar weeks). We have limited space in the winter - shares are capped at 60 members - so we give first dibs to everyone who is part of our current, 2023 CSA membership. If there are still spots available after our current membership has had a chance to sign up, we open up the winter sign-ups to the general public. If you are a current CSA member, look for a direct email from us in the next week or so with sign-up details!

Heads up, I will not be sending out a farm newsletter next week (I have a 15-year anniversary to celebrate with my darlin' dear Danny!).

Enjoy that big butternut squash this week. If ever there was soup-making weather in the forecast, here it comes! :)

Newsletter: 

Week 22 from Valley Flora!

  • Bunched spinach
  • Garlic
  • Sweet Sixteen Apples
  • Carrots
  • Kohlrabi
  • Head Lettuce
  • Radicchio

On Rotation:

  • Tomatoes
  • Cauliflower
  • Romanesco

New Veg!

Garlic: Beautiful heads grown by Bets. This is a softneck variety that stores well, in case it takes you awhile to work through an entire head of garlic.

Winter Kohlrabi: A colossal variety specially adapted to fall/winter, which stores extremely well in the fridge. Peel the tough outer skin and then slice it up for easy snacking: tender-crisp and juicy!

Spinach: We could never grow enough spinach to keep the world happy, but at least this week we're making the world a little bit happier. 

The first radicchio! I realize that my personal excitement might eclipse that of our entire CSA membership combined, but never was a salad-lover like me so ready to walk away from lettuce and into the arms of radicchio instead. The variety you're getting this week is a specialty type called "Marinanta," which visually resembles a head of variegated iceberg. I like to introduce radicchio season with this variety, along with the reminder that radicchio is the best winter "lettuce" there is. If you are resistant to that idea because you think radicchio is bitter, all you have to do is slice up your cabbage-like head of Marinanta and submerge it in a bowl of cold water for 10+ minutes. Spin dry and give it a taste. Blindfolded, you might wonder if it isn't iceberg itself: mild, crisp, juicy. THEN, toast up some croutons and make my favorite dressing, a recipe pirated from Nostrana (a fantastic farm-to-table restaurant in Portland), see hand-scrawled recipe card below. This is what my family will be eating as often as possible from now until February when radicchio season comes to a sad end. But why dwell on that when there is the fabulous present moment at hand, aka TONIGHT when we celebrate the 2023 radicchio kickoff at our house with an enormous bowl of Insalata Nostrana (my kids made me promise I'd make it for dinner, if that says anything about learning to love radicchio).

 

Apples! Apples! Apples! 

What a year for apples! Not only are you getting some in your share this week, we also have 10 pound bulk boxes of apples available that can be delivered to your CSA pickup site by special order.  The three varieties currently at their peak are Liberty, Honeycrisp, and Cox's Orange Pippin.

Liberty are deep red with exceedingly white, juicy flesh.  They have a sweet-tart flavor suited for fresh eating, baking, cider, and sauce.  The red skin produces beautiful pink applesauce if the apples are cooked in chunks with the skin on and then strained/pureed to smoothness.

Honeycrisp are golden and red streaked apples that are known for their light and snappy crispness.  They are sweet and refreshing.  Similar to Liberty, Honeycrisp apples are multi-purpose and can be eaten fresh or used in baked goods, cider, or sauce.

Cox's Orange Pippin are unsurpassed for their richness and complexity of flavor.  One connoisseur says, "Almost all other apples taste one-dimensional alongside a good Cox's Orange Pippin."  They have attractive orange/red coloring and an aromatic flavor.  Cox's Orange Pippins are multi-purpose, but fresh eating is the best way to enjoy the incredible flavor.

We are selling 10 pound bulk boxes of each variety for $25.  If you would like to get some, please click here to email your special order.  Your email should include the following information:

  • Apple variety(ies) you would like
  • Number of 10 pound boxes per variety
  • Your email address, phone number, and CSA pickup site

Checks for special order apples can be made out to Valley Flora and mailed to PO Box 111, Langlois, OR 97450.

Fall tastes so good!!!

Newsletter: 

Week 21 from Valley Flora!

  • Gold Beets
  • Carrots
  • Head Lettuce
  • Yellow Onions
  • Painted Purple Potatoes
  • Spaghetti Squash
  • Black Winter Radishes
  • Eggplant
  • Tomatoes

On Rotation:

  • Broccoli
  • Cauliflower
  • Romanesco

All kinds of new things showing up in the totes these days: purple cauliflower, black radishes, spaghetti squash, painted purple potatoes, and gold beets (so sweet!)!!

The black winter radishes, aka "black Spanish radish," look like a bunch of charcoal briquettes topped with pretty green leaves. They have the skin of a rhino and some serious kick. I saw a little piece online about black radishes, entitled: "Ode to a Difficult Food" and thought, "eep, time to do some CSA hand-holding this week....," especially when I got to the part where the author writes:

Thanks to heirloom seeds and small farms, I’ve enjoyed many types of radishes in the last few years, realizing that they vary so greatly from the crisp, magenta balls that recall fishing bobbers. These include the striking watermelon radish, dense and spicy Chinese green radish, elegant French breakfast radish, finger-shaped purple and white radishes, and smaller varieties of daikon radish with mint-greenish shading at the top of the root... None put up more barriers to being loved than the coarse-surfaced, rotund black radish. These stringently bitter bulbs are coated in a thick skin that resembles a rhinocerous. Their dense, fibrous flesh has a fierce lick of horseradish. Why the hell did anyone cultivate this, when the cheery sparkler radish was just as easy to grow?

The author goes on to answer their own question, historically, by explaining that black radishes were great survival food in Medieval times in Europe because they store well through the winter and can squat outside in the ground through the harshest freezing weather, thanks to "their thick, tar-like mask of skin [that] protects the icicle-white flesh like armor built for function over fashion."

So WHY are we growing them at Valley Flora, circa 2023? I'm not sure I have a great answer to that question, other than: they looked cool in the seed catalogue? Which is also another way of saying "diversity! diversity! diversity!" Also: sorry?

Given that they might too easily fall into the "difficult" category among all your CSA foods, and thereby land too easily in the compost pile, here are the previously quoted author's top three recommendations for getting them down your gullet:

1. Chopped and roasted with olive oil, sea salt and chili flakes

I don’t know too many root vegetables that don’t taste great like this, and the crisped peaks of the wedges are delightful contrast to the softer, mellowed flesh inside. I preheated the oven to 400 degrees, then peeled and chopped the root to equal-sized pieces. Coated lightly with olive oil, sea salt, and flakes of chili, they were roasted about 20 minutes, with one break to toss them around in the pan in between.

2. Shredded raw with apples, carrots, lemon and mint

Black radishes are a bit spicier and tougher than most types, but combined with the sweetness of carrots and tartness of fresh apples, they’re a pleasant complement. I used lots of fresh lemon juice and let it soak in for a while, along with good olive oil, and finished it with a few mint sprigs for extra refreshment.

3. Roasted in skins, peeled, and mashed with butter

A spin on Mike’s suggestion, with simply butter, salt and pepper. This could lend a hint of flavor if blended with mashed potatoes, or it could be the start of a creamy radish soup if simmered with stock. To concentrate its flavor more, I roasted the radishes in their skins, sliced in half flesh side-down on a pan (like I would a winter squash). After a good 40 minutes or so, the flesh shrinks back and allows the skin to be easily peeled off the bulb once cool (like with beets).

Pickling will also beat them into submission.

I could be convinced not to grow them again, but they just look so weird and spooky...kinda perfect around Halloween.

Oh! That's it! You can hand them out as trick-or-treat "candy!" As mentioned, they'll store in your fridge well into 2024, so no problem keeping them until October 31st!

 

Newsletter: 

Week 20 from Valley Flora!

  • Dill
  • Carrots
  • Head Lettuce
  • Red Onions
  • Collard Greens
  • Serrano and Jalapeno Peppers
  • Sweet Pepper
  • Delicata Winter Squash

On Rotation

  • Eggplant
  • Broccoli
  • Romanesco

Our most beloved single-serving winter squash is in your share this week: Delicata! These thin-skinned, delicious squash are so sweet they can double as dessert. The easiest way to appreciate their delectable flavor is to cut them in half the long way, scoop out the seeds and place them face down in a baking dish. Put a half inch of water in the dish and then bake at 400 for a half hour+ until the squash is soft. When you pull them out of the oven, let a pat of butter melt in each squash boat and then find a spoon! You can eat the skin of Delicatas if you like, or just use your spoon to scrape out the soft-baked squash meat. I find that once the Delicatas are ready, I go on a bit of bender: Delicata every night (and it's still not enough Delicata!)...

Farm-to-School Field Trip Season in Full Swing at the Farm!

After a three year hiatus due to the pandemic, we are once again welcoming busloads of school kids to the farm for weekly field trips! Valley Flora has been involved in Farm-to-School efforts since 2008, hosting thousands of kids from Coos and Curry schools on experiential tours of the farm. We love engaging the kids on the farm at this time of year, in particular because there is so much to taste in the field (including the late season strawberries, which are always a hit as the grand finale of a tour, see pic below). We also get kids sampling some of the lesser-known fruits and vegetables: raw beets, fennel, romanesco, turnips, peppers, asian pears, hardy kiwis and more. For a lot of students, it's their first time on a farm altogether, and for most of them it's definitely their first taste of fennel! It's so fun to watch them light up with surprise as they taste a slice of gold beet, pause, and then say "yum" with a big, incredulous grin. It's even more fun when they ask for seconds. :)

This year, many of our field trips are coordinated with the support of the Beet Food Systems Consortium, a community-based coalition that works to increase access, engagement and education about our local food system in Coos County. Their Farm to Child Coordinator, Lindsey Bellefeuille, has been spending time in classrooms teaching food system lessons, prepping kids for their field trips, and joining us on tours at the farm. These field trips are a chance for students to see a working, diversified farm in action and to learn about organic agriculture and local food systems in a hands-on way: compost piles, draft horses, cover crops, and a real live crew of passionate farmers there to answer their fantastic, curious questions. As one fourth grader quipped last week while loading her shirt with strawberries: "This is the best day of my entire career." I couldn't have agreed with her more.

 

Newsletter: 

Week 19 from Valley Flora!

  • Curly Parsley
  • Leeks
  • Sweet Peppers from our 2023 Pepper Trials:
    • Rio Grande - colossal, thick-walled green-to-red pepper
    • Petit Marseillais - small, thin-skinned yellow frying pepper
    • Tatli ücburun - small, thin-skinned red frying pepper
  • Head Lettuce
  • Tomatoes
  • Hakurei turnips
  • Acorn Winter Squash
    • Starry Night
    • Night Shift

On Rotation:

  • Eggplant
  • Broccoli
  • Romanesco 

2023 Sweet Pepper Trials in Full Swing: the Story of a Pepper Named "Glow"

Joy and heartbreak are built into the fabric of farming in roughly equal parts. Crop failures lay you flat but a surprise rainbow arcing over the farm lifts you back up. You delight in the miraculous germination of seeds and then find yourself crestfallen when you walk into the greenhouse one morning to discover that all your seedling babies were decapitated by a mouse the night before. You fall head-over-heels in love with a specific variety, and then the seed company discontinues it without warning for no apparent reason.

That last bit is the story of "Glow," my all-time favorite sweet pepper, which we discovered years ago after doing a round of outdoor pepper trials. Outdoor pepper production is possible at the farm, but given our cooler climate we have to be selective and choose shorter days-to-maturity (DTM) varieties (ones that will ripen in, say, 60 days as opposed to 90 days). This means that heavy-walled bell peppers (which can take at least a month longer to color up) are not so much our forte, but Italian and roasting types thrive at Valley Flora.

Bets does most of the pepper production on the farm in high tunnels, which gives her a month+ jump on the season. She starts picking some of her indoor peppers as early as July, with the peak of pepper season hitting by September (ahem, as you may have noticed in your CSA share the past month). But meanwhile, I also have a smoldering passion for peppers (the colors! the flavors! the mind-blowing array of genetic diversity! the snap of them coming off the plant; the plunk of them landing in the bin; the snack-time perfection of biting into a juicy ripe pepper anytime, anywhere!). As a result, I usually plant a bunch of outdoor peppers each season, in order to have my own endless supply of pepper snacking AND to see if I can discover any new varieties that do well in our coastal conditions, specifically outdoors. It was one of those trials that led us to "Glow," a variety that, true to its name, shone forth with everything I crave in a sweet pepper: juicy, flavorful, sweet, productive, early and orange. (What can I say, I've got a thing for orange peppers above all.) Not only was Glow the first to ripen of any of the outdoor peppers, it was also the last to give up its final fruit, often yielding into November. 

We all started growing it and Glow became a staple variety in Bets' hoophouses, in my outdoor beds, and we turned lots of farmer friends onto it as well (including friends who farmed in much warmer climates and didn't need a "cheater" pepper with short DTM like Glow). Nevertheless, Glow became their favorite variety as well, eclipsing the rest of their pepper lineup with its beauty, reliability, flavor, and juiciness.

And then, just like that, it disappeared from the seed catalogues this year. None of our seed reps could explain why, and we couldn't source it anywhere on the big world wide web. Because it's a hybrid we also couldn't save our own seed and expect to get the same pepper. It was like losing a friend.

And so were born two connected initiatives: The Great Pepper Trial of 2023, and my first-ever seed breeding project to try to dehybridize Glow into a stable, open-pollinated variety. 

The Great Pepper Trial of 2023, currently in full swing, is an effort to try to identify a substitute variety for Glow (and an excuse to try out a bunch of other peppers we've never grown as well). Jen, who joined us last spring through Rogue Farm Corps, has taken on the pepper trials as her special project and is waist deep in Capsicum annum these days: harvesting, recording yield data, sorting, making observations and setting up taste tests with the crew (October is the peak of outdoor pepper season for us, which times out well for the CSA totes as greenhouse pepper production peters out). We're glad to announce that we think we've found a temporary replacement for Glow, a variety called Corinto Arancia (slightly smaller and less lobed than Glow, but similarly early and productive with great flavor and sweetness). We've also been having fun with a dozen or so other varieties, some of which are showing up in your share this week. You've got a couple of frying peppers - one from France and one from Turkey. Thin-walled peppers are not well appreciated in the States, but you'll find that they shine in culinary applications: great for seasoning rice, sauteeing, stuffing, pickling, and frying. 

Simultaneously, my Glow dehybridization project is underway. We grew out our last 100 seeds of Glow F1 that we had on hand and planted them in isolation in our far-west field, a quarter mile from any other pepper plants. I've been selectively harvesting the ripe fruit for seed-saving, and next year we'll grow out the F2 generation. It will likely be a year of dramatic genetic instability, when all kinds of traits are expressed. My job will be to select for the best Glow-like traits I'm looking to preserve and save the seed again, with the end goal being to stabilize the genetics to the point that our saved seed reliably produces a pepper like Glow. It's a process that can take anywhere from a few years to fifteen. For the love of a pepper, stay tuned for the next decade! And in the meantime, you'll likely be enjoying Corinto Arancia in your Harvest Basket this time next year :)

P.S. Enjoy the first of the winter squash, leeks and romanesco this week! The two acorn squash varieties are also the result of ongoing variety trials at VF. Let us know which one you like better: stripey Starry Night or the ink-black Night Shift!

Newsletter: 

Week 18 from Valley Flora!

  • Fennel
  • Celery
  • Eggplant
  • Yellow Onion
  • Red Potatoes
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Tomatoes
  • Asian Pears 
  • Carrots

On Rotation

  • Head Lettuce
  • Broccoli

It's our first full week of Fall, everything all around softened by rain and hope: less smoke, grass resurrecting, soil moisture, encouraging news from Elk River. The CSA share reflects the shift of seasons, with Asian Pears making a shy appearance, inaugural celery, the return of broccoli (on rotation this week), big fat red potatoes, and the first of our yellow storage onions (this variety knows how to stick around - until April if you keep them cool and dry and dark). Your sampler of Asian Pears includes Nijiseiki (yellow skin, sweet and a little tangy, crazy juicy) and Chojuro (bronzen skin, denser, rich butterscotch flavor). One of my favorite fall snacks is slices of Chojuro dredged in crunchy hazlenut butter. Enjoy these new flavors as you savor the slide into autumn. Feelings of renewal and reflection always piggyback on Fall for me, and I find that my body intuitively starts to crave new flavors - winter squash for one! It's coming soon to a CSA share near you (next week!). I've got a few baking in my oven as I type - taste testing is underway in your CSA farmer's test kitchen :)

Last Week of Abby's Greens Salad Shares

Hello soup season, goodbye salad greens (I guess it's true, the choice always is one or the other on the menu). This is the 18th and final week of Abby's Greens salad shares for our CSA members. Abby's Greens will still be available for awhile longer at our farmstand, various restaurants, and at the stores and co-ops we supply (Port Orford Co-op, Langlois Market, Coos Head Food Co-Op, McKay's in Bandon). Thanks as ever to Abby for keeping us in salad heaven all season.

Please Join Us: A Memorial for Bill Bradbury, October 15th at the World Forestry Center

Many of you responded with heartfelt (and deeply appreciated) condolences when our dad, Bill Bradbury, passed away unexpectedly in April. There will be a memorial for him on October 15th at the World Forestry Center in Portland, starting at 2 pm. If you would like to attend, please RSVP here. Everyone is welcome as we gather to remember a beautiful and remakable man who cared deeply about the Southcoast, Oregon, and the world.

Newsletter: 

Week 17 from Valley Flora!

  • Beets
  • Napa Cabbage - light in texture, mild in flavor. Makes a great raw slaw or salad, or cooks up in infinite ways. Try this "Melting Napa Cabbage" recipe!
  • Purple Carrots
  • Sweet Peppers, LOTS of sweet peppers!
  • Tomatoes
  • Cipollini Onions - pungent when raw, incredibly sweet when caramelized.
  • Serrano and Jalapeño Peppers

On Rotation:

  • Eggplant
  • Cilantro

A Man and a River: Grieving them Both

Many, many of us are preoccupied by and grieving the fire on Elk River right now. For those of you who don't know the Elk, it's an incredible place on earth: a steep watershed full of old growth forest and cold crystalline water, home to wild salmon and marbled murrelets. If you were familiar with spectacular Opal Creek in the Cascades (before it burned catastrophically a couple years ago), the Elk is the Opal Creek of the southcoast. For many of us, it's a pilgrimage kind of place - where you go for renewal and reconnection to the wild. It's the place where I retreat to recharge, the place that fills me back up with life force, the place that I'm always melancholy to leave after a weekend of hot rocks and cold turquoise water and ripe thimbleberries. I spent large chunks of my childhood up the Elk River - camping for days at favorite swimming holes, and even rafting sections of the river during high water in the winter (imagine champagne bubble flood waters - clear, not muddy like the rest of our coastal streams in winter). We've swum/crawled/scrambled every mile of the canyon from Butler Bar to the fish hatchery, exploring like wet-suit clad river otters. It is a place beloved, and currently engulfed in flames.

The Anvil fire started a couple weeks ago with the rumble of midnight thunder. I remember waking up to the sound of it, then the flashes of lightning, and thinking "Please let that be to the west, over the ocean. Not inland." My very next thought lying there in bed was, "Jim. Oh no. Jim is gone. Who will protect the Elk?"

Jim Rogers, lifelong guardian of the Elk, had died just a week earlier due to complications related to Parkinsons disease. I had just learned of his passing, feeling the loss of him and my dad as a dual blow (they were friends, and two peas in a conservation pod who worked together to gain protection for the Elk). Sometimes described as a “logger-turned-environmentalist,” Jim started his career as a young forester working for the timber industry. In his timber survey work, he recognized what a special place the Elk was and turned his energy towards conservation, at a time when most of the Coast Range was being leveled by clearcut logging. From his little cabin on the Elk, to Salem, to Washington, D.C., he circled tirelessly to organize political support for protecting the watershed. Over his lifetime, that unflagging dedication to Elk River led to the designation of two wilderness areas—the Grassy Knob (1984) and Copper Salmon (2009), and to designation of the Elk River (1988) and its tributaries (2019) as "Wild and Scenic." All told, he protected more than 30,000 acres of old-growth forest and over 75 miles of wild and scenic river (if ever there was an example of the oft-quoted Margaret Mead quote, Jim was at the center of it: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”). 

I laid there listening to the rumble-flash of the sky, hoping Jim's legacy was not in harm's reach, trying not to worry myself out of a good night's sleep.

But by mid-morning there were reports of four spot fires up the Elk. Fortunately we had a stretch of high humidity and light winds on the heels of the Labor Day rain, but that all changed last week as temps rose and winds picked up. The fire has grown to almost 15,000 acres, many residents on the lower Elk have been evacuated, air quality is abysmal to the south, and it's considered 0% contained. As grim as all of that feels, the forecast has me hanging onto hope. The growing promise of rain next week can't come soon enough (even though in the farming realm we are maximizing every last shred of daylight to get potatoes, winter squash, and dry beans out of the field as quickly as possible while we have dry weather).

I have spent quite a bit of time in new wildfire burns the past few years on my horsepacking trips: the Trinity Alps, Jefferson Wilderness, the Gifford-Pinchot, the Wallowas. Fire scars are a ubiquitous - and ever-dominant - element in the landscape nowadays with climate change. Every time I enter a recent burn on horseback there is an emotional reckoning - so much sadness for the cool, dark, beautiful forest that is no longer there, but also amazement as life resurges out of the char and ash. Last year in Jefferson, two years after the huge fires that almost reached Portland and scorched Opal Creek to cinder, we saw fir seedlings 6 inches tall, wildflowers, early-succession shrubs - the thinnest scrim of green against a black backdrop of burn. You had to look, but it was there. The forest that returns - in Jefferson Wilderness, and on the Elk - will probably look different than the one it replaces, especially as conditions get hotter and drier. And it will never be a mature, towering old growth forest in my lifetime again. But maybe for my kids, my grandkids. I would like to think that they might head up the Elk on a summer day 50 years from now and see a river canyon filled with green, shading that incredible clear water. And before they leap off the high rock at Jumpoff Joe's, give thanks to Jim Rogers for the legacy he left to us all.

To learn more about Jim's life, there is a great Oregon Field Guide episode about him from about 10 years ago: https://watch.opb.org/video/oregon-field-guide-jim-rogers/

To read his full obituary, go to https://www.westrumfuneralservice.com/obituary/James-Rogers
 
A celebration of Jim's life event will be held on Saturday, October 28 at 2pm in Port Orford, location TBD.

Pray for rain. Lots of it.

Newsletter: 

Week 15 from Valley Flora!

  • Baby New Potatoes
  • Purple Carrots
  • Sweet Corn
  • Eggplant
  • Serrano and Jalapeno Hot Peppers
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Zucchini
  • Tomatoes
  • Head Lettuce

On Rotation:

  • Cantaloupe Melon
  • Italian Parsley
  • Cilantro
  • Heirloom Tomatoes

It's a produce bonanza this week! Historically, the first week of September is usually the peak of the season on the farm, resulting in CSA totes that are quasi-ridiculous in their heft and value. I bet with a little creativity and concentration you can get through it all, though. And if you can't, things like carrots and potatoes will keep just fine in your fridge for a week or three. The melons that are on rotation are called "Sarah's Choice," an Abby-grown cantaloupe that is scenting our walk-in with ambrosia this week! 

In a Landscape at the Farm This Evening!

In a few short hours, Hunter Noack will be arriving at the farm with his 1900's Steinway piano and setting up for this evening's In a Landscape concert in the field! Proceeds from concert will go to the Wild Rivers Land Trust, our local non-profit that works to protect watersheds, open space, and working ranches, farms, and forests for future generations. The concert is sold out and we strongly encourage all ticketholders to carpool since parking is limited.

If you are a CSA member who picks up at the farm on Wednesdays, please note that we will be taking all CSA items back to our walk-in cooler at 3 pm today due to the concert. You should have received a direct email from us last night with instructions for picking up if you're coming after 3 pm. We expect there will be plenty of congestion on Floras Creek Road by 4pm (it would be best to pick up earlier in the day if you can)!

If you are coming to In a Landscape this evening, we look forward to seeing you! We're anticipating a magical evening on the farm. :)

Please note there will not be a newsletter next week (CSA deliveries will occur as usual, just no Beet Box dispatch). Look for the next Beet Box in your inbox on Wednesday, September 20th.

 

 

 

Newsletter: 

Week 14 from Valley Flora!

  • Collard Greens
  • Carrots
  • Sweet Corn
  • Cucumbers
  • Head Lettuce
  • Walla Walla Sweets
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Zucchini
  • Tomatoes

On Rotation:

  • Eggplant
  • Heirloom tomatoes

The Halfway Mark!

We are 14 weeks into our 28-week CSA season, tipping headlong into the peak of the late summer harvest: tomatoes by the bucketload, peppers by the bin-full, eggplant spilling out of totes, apples and melons making their first appearance. On Tuesdays and Fridays, we find ourselves staggering out of the corn patch under the weight of 80-pound harvest backpacks overflowing with fat ears of corn. This is that moment when my countertop is covered in a glorious rainbow of tomatoes and peppers, and making dinner is as simple as cutting them all up, tossing in some spiced chickpeas and pouring a lemony dressing over the top (my go-to Wednesday night meal plan for late August/September/early October: Spiced Chickpeas and Fresh Vegetable Salad from Ottolenghi).

But simultaneously while we revel in the glory of late summer produce, our every spare moment is now turning towards bringing in the storage crops. We are at once bears (gorging in the moment to put on fat for a long winter's nap) and squirrels (racing around maniacally stashing food for winter). All of the onions and shallots are out of the field as of last week, curing in the warm environment of our propagation greenhouse right now. Once the tops have dried down completely, we have hours of onion cleaning work ahead of us: clipping the tops and the root hairs, filling bins to a standard weight, and stashing them in our climate-controlled dry room for long-term storage.

We begin digging storage potatoes in earnest tomorrow, with the help of the horses who will undercut and "lift" the beds with our horsedrawn potato digger. The crew will fall in behind them, filling bins with red, yellow, and purple potatoes that will will get stashed in our new walk-in cooler (built just for storage potatoes, beets and other root crops this year). If yields are on par with past years, we have about 10,000 pounds of spuds sitting underground right now, and every last one of them will be sorted, lifted, stacked, washed and packed by hand. (If you join our Winter CSA, you will be still be enjoying VF potatoes next April.)

And also near on the horizon, winter squash harvest. Way out in Molly (that's the name of our western-most field), we have a beautiful half acre of winter squash finishing off. It's been a great squash-growing season this year and my latest fieldwalk revealed big over-sized Delicatas, bright orange Kabochas, deep-dark Acorns, sunny Spaghettis, and an abundance of buff-tan Butternuts. It's a good thing we're all farm-fit, cuz the squash deadlifting is about to begin. It's a physical test for everyone, including our little 1/2 ton flatbed farm Toyota :)

All to say, even though summer is waning, school is resuming, the days are shortening - we're only halfway through the season and there is much, much more still to come. Your CSA tote will continue to get heavier and denser (watch out in October, whoa!). The one good thing about the days getting shorter from the tired farmer's perspective is that there's a little more time in the evening to cook, at least come November. But for now, the marathon continues: it's mile 14 and we're digging deep. Thanks for all your cheering; it keeps us motivated and inspired.

Newsletter: 

Week 13 from Valley Flora!

  • Carrots
  • Sweet Corn
  • Cucumbers
  • Dill
  • Head Lettuce
  • Red Onion
  • Zucchini
  • Tomaotes
  • Sweet Pepper
  • Serrano & Jalapeno Peppers

On Rotation:

  • Japanese Eggplant
  • Italian Eggplant

Eggplant season! Which means that any day now we should begin to see free boxes of Valley Flora eggplant kicked to the curb in front of CSA members' houses (true story, photo taken last fall at an anonymous location in Bandon).

Eggplant is one of those things - like fennel - that struggles to gain traction with some folks. I'm not sure if it's a texture thing (it can be rubbery if undercooked), or a flavor thing, or the sheer overwhelm of "what do I do with it?" But for whatever reason it's not the most appreciated of vegetables (er, fruits actually) in the CSA. Me personally, I swoon over eggplant. The colors, the shapes, and the fact that it's a fantastic vehicle for olive oil and salt. My go-to weekly eggplant indulgence at this time of year is to slice the Italian ones into 1/4" thick rounds, brush them on both sides with olive oil, and then put them under the broiler for a few minutes until they begin to get crispy brown. Flip them and brown the other side equally. I sprinkle them with salt and then eat them a million ways: slathered with homemade pesto; in sandwiches with fresh tomato and basil; in lasagne (instead of noodles, or in addition to); next to caramelized fennel and Walla Walla sweets; chopped up with cukes, tomatoes and peppers to make a deluxe greek salad. Something about the char-broiling brings out an umame flavor explosion that sends me. Like, who needs steak?

Last night I cut up a pile of the Japanese variety into 1/4" rounds and did a hot-wok cook with olive oil and salt, letting the rounds get browned and crispy in places. Super fast and easy if you don't want to hassle with the broiler and the brush and the flipping. 

If you want to take eggplant to the next level, and without a lot of effort, Eggplant Chermoula might be the best recipe ever. We discovered this dish in Yotam Ottolenghi's incredible cookbook, Jerusalem, and it's become a go-to "fast food" for us in August/September. It riffs on North African flavors with a blend of spices that infuses the eggplant as it becomes silky with baking.

I'd say that if you are someone who needs eggplant inspiration in general, Ottolenghi needs to become your new best friend. He's got a bunch of cookbooks you could buy (chock full of all kinds of incredible recipes), but I also discovered this morning that he has a website with all his best eggplant recipes from his various cookbooks in one place! Go there, be inspired! And maybe with Ottolenghi's help we can keep VF eggplant off the streets of Bandon.

And in parting: corn as high a draft horse's eye. (Actually, much higher! It's towering over Jack this year, and he's one tall horse!)

Enjoy those super-sweet, super-fat ears this week!

 

 

Newsletter: 

Week 12 from Valley Flora!

  • Bunch Beets
  • Carrots
  • Sweet Corn!
  • Cucumbers
  • Walla Walla Sweets
  • Strawberries
  • Zucchini
  • Tomatoes

On Rotation:

  • Purple Peppers

Corn, sweet corn! It's on this week, our first big pick of a bicolor aptly named "Sweetness." We plant five successions of sweet corn, so you'll be seeing it on a regular basis between now and mid-September. And hark! The first tomatoes of the season! Those two little red slicers in your tote portend one of the best moments of the season, when all the much-anticipated late summer Solanums collide: peppers, tomatoes and eggplant. Combine them with your zucchini and onions, some basil, throw in a little salt, and you have one of our favorite meals, ratatouille. My mom makes vats of it in September and freezes it so that she can thaw out a little bit of summer and eat it over polenta come winter. For the time being, we're too busy farming to do much cooking (uh, salad and quesadillas for dinner anyone?), but we hope you're making the most of the VF bounty in your own kitchen. We'll live vicariously for the time being, and look forward to that thawed ratatouille once the pace slows in the field.

Thanks for giving us a reason to grow all this food!

Newsletter: 

Week 11 from Valley Flora!

  • Walla Walla Sweets
  • Carrots
  • Cucumbers
    • Slicers
    • Mini Cukes
  • Basil
  • Head Lettuce
  • Austrian Crescent Fingerling Potatoes
  • Strawberries
  • Zucchini
  • Beet Greens

On Rotation:

  • Green Beans
  • Purple Peppers

Here comes August, hitting us upside the head with a rainbow of abundance. Instead of trying to figure out what to put into the CSA share each week, the challenge now is deciding what NOT to put in it! The cucumber glut continues, the green beans are still giving, the strawberries are on the rebound, and when we went to thin our beds of red storage beets we realized that the greens were too tender and beautiful to not share with you (beet greens are delicious and deeply nutritious - use them like kale/spinach/chard).

All this, plus Bets just hinted that tomatoes might be on next week, we harvested our first bin of eggplant, AND, drumroll, we just unwrapped our inaugural stick of "corn butter" last night, which means that we ate the first ears of a bicolor named "Sweetness" for dinner (slathered in said butter). I'm pretty sure you'll be seeing sweet corn in your tote next week! As my irrepressibly enthusiastic father, the late Bill Bradbury, would say: WOOHOO!

Hold onto your hats and get ready for some quality chewing: the heart of harvest season is here!

Also here - and almost a month early: Uma's watermelons! Ask my 8 year old daughter what she wants to be when she grows up and she will instantly reply: "a watermelon farmer." By the looks of this year's melon patch, she seems to have a pretty good knack for it (although I will continue to gently suggest that, longer-term, variety is the spice of life, and more to the point, that diversity is your best friend in the unpredictable world of farming :). You can find her watermelons at the farmstand piled high in the red wagon, and if you happen to catch her there at her lemonade stand you can ask her all about watermelon whispering: how do you know when a watermelon is ripe and ready for picking?! I think she knows the answer, see Exhibit A below.

Have a great week, savor it all!

Newsletter: 

Week 10 from Valley Flora!

  • Green Beans
  • Purple and Orange Carrots
  • Cucumbers
  • Curly Parsley
  • Red Long of Tropea torpedo onions
  • Strawberries
  • Zucchini

On Rotation

  • Lettuce
  • Kale

Strawberries are back in the Harvest Basket after a two week hiatus! We've been pulling teeth trying to get enough berries out of the patch this year: yields have been two to three time lower than usual - in spite of giving the plants even more TLC than usual - and the bronzing episode we went through in July was demoralizingly long and widespread. Fortunately we've popped out the other side of the bronzing and the berries are back to being shiny, bright, and sweeter than ever these days. It also appears that we're having a little bump in production as of this week, so although we had to disappoint all of our wholesale accounts we were able to get the berries back into the CSA totes, harvest for the farmstand, and give a couple more beds over to the u-pick. Predicting the future on a farm is usually a terrible idea, prone to jinxing the whole outcome, but could it be that August/September might just be when our strawberry season finally hits its stride this year?

A depressed strawberry season has big economic ramifications for the farm, because even though the berries only occupy a humble half acre of space, they contribute disproportionately to the bottom line. Low yields make us ever-grateful for the abundance elsewhere on the farm, all of which helps make up for the strawberry income shortfall we're experiencing this year. But it also begs the question, what's going on out there in the berry patch to cause such a drastic reduction in yields? I've been casting about looking for answers this past month and from all the other farmers, gardeners and university strawberry experts I've spoken with, it appears to be a West-Coast-wide phenomenon. Even the mainstream commercial growers in California are having a rough year.

I got on the phone with Mark Bolda, a cooperative extension farm advisor with the University of California (and widely considered to be the THE guru when it comes to all thing strawberry), last week and he described a pretty grim season on the California coast. His theory is that our whopper of a winter - with so much prolonged rain - leached out too much nitrogen from the soil so the strawberry plants (which have a long and intense production season from June through September) are deficient in N and are firing on one cylinder instead of four. He said that among his growers on the Central Coast, those who increased their application of summertime Nitrogen are doing better than those who stuck to their standard fertility plan. It so happens that we've been feeding our plants twice the usual amount of organic fish emulsion since June (we run it through our drip irrigation lines every other week to stimulate the soil biology and support the plants). The problem is, there is a 6-7 week lag-time from application to ripe fruit (you get a flowering response from the strawberry plant two weeks after application, and then it's 4-5 weeks from flower to ripe fruit). So if we started doubling our rate of fish emulsion in mid-June and it's now early August, there's your 6-7 weeks. All to say, maybe we have reason to be hopeful that the berry patch is kicking into gear at last and will be more productive for the remainder of the season. Most of the plants look pretty healthy and vigorous - save for the zone that had to endure standing water for many weeks this winter during the worst of the weather - so I chose to be optimistic (it's kinda your only choice in farming, really....in fact, if there's one thing we farmers have in common, it's something that should be called "Perverse Optimism Disorder"). How else could we play this huge gamble each year?

Long story short, enjoy that little pint of strawberrie this week AND stay hopeful there will be more! 

Newsletter: 

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - The Valley Flora Beetbox