• Rainbow Chard
• Rainbow Carrots
• Sweet Corn - the first pick of the season! This is a slightly diminuitive but extremely tender and sweet organic variety called "Sweetness," which ripens first in our sweet corn line-up. We grow five successive plantings of corn each year, the last four all being a variety called "Allure." Allure makes big, fat bicolor ears and huge towering plants, which become an essential feedstock in our compost production in the fall after we're done harvesting all the ears. This week's share is a little teaser of what's to come in the corn universe over the next 6 weeks :)
• Cucumbers
• Red Long of Tropea Onions
• Strawberries
• Tomatoes
• Heirloom Tomato
• Serrano Pepper

On Rotation:

• Green Beans - Folks are receiving either French filets (long and squiggly) or Romanos (wide and flat). Both delicious lightly steamed or sauteed.
• Head Lettuce - Every year in August we experience a marked slowdown in lettuce growth until it regains its stride for fall. We might have enough heads for everyone this week, but if not it will be on rotation this week and next.
• Fennel

August + Strawberries = Yum

Mostly as a farmer I feel like I don't know things. All kinds of things. Why the chard is taller than me this year, and how those pesky symphylans made their way into that one field, and if we're going to have an early fall, and which of the overwintering onion varieties will bolt and why. But there is one thing that I think I reliably know: our strawberries taste the best in August. Why? I don't know. But I could wager a Male Answer Syndrome kind of guess: Warmer days, cooler nights, fully-mature well-established plants that can support the whole-hearted production of berries with higher brix levels? Whatever the reason, they are really good right now. A little fragile on Tuesdays when we go to pick because they're dead ripe after a warm weekend of ripening, but loaded with extra sugars. Incidentally, we also see more bug damage in August. Why? Maybe the invertebrate population knows a good thing when it tastes it. Once again, pure conjecture. But I'm good with all this unknowing; it keeps a person perpetually humble and in awe of the many forces at work in the natural world that are much, much smarter and more amazing than us. Or at least me.

The point is, the moment has come to u-pick! The crowds have thinned out (we are no longer getting picked out within 45 minutes of opening the gates) and the berries are abundant, so please come revel in the glory of bountiful red, glossy, super-sweet strawberries in a more relaxed setting (I need to re-brand them as "August-bearers" to try to quell a little bit of that early season strawberry hype).

Also, if you are a CSA member and are on the list for a special order flat, we will get to you this month! We failed at filling any special orders for today because we are down one person on the crew this week, but hope to start sending out more flats again next week (and maybe even this Saturday for all you Bandon and Port Orford members who are patiently waiting).

If you are not on our special order strawberry list and would like to be, email us you name, pickup location, a cell number we can text to (if possible) and the quantity of flats you'd like. We'll try to take care of as many orders for CSA members as possible between now and the end of the berry season (which is usually mid-late September).

Enjoy the August food! It doesn't get much better.

• Zucchini
• Cucumbers
• Carrots
• Italian Parsley
• Lettuce
• Walla Walla Sweets
• Strawberries
• Kale
• Red Potatoes - the potatoes we're harvesting this week are "new," meaning their skins haven't cured and set yet. New potatoes are extra tender, juicy and appealing, wonderful for potato salad or steamed and dressed simply with olive oil, parsley (any fresh herb will do the trick!) and salt.
• Broccoli - the last of the summer harvest. You'll see it again in the fall.

Trinity Alps Spectacular

I made it home (just barely) from my Trinity Alps horsepacking trip: rolled up the driveway at 1 am on Tuesday morning, unloaded the horses, caught 3.5 hours of sleep and then pulled on my Xtratufs for our big Tuesday harvest. Fortunately I was still "riding" the mountain high of the past five days of alpine horseback sublimity, at least until 2 pm yesterday when the yerba mate wore off and I found myself stumbling around the barn ineffectually, a total liability to the rest of the crew as everyone tried to fill orders and pack CSA totes without making mistakes. I slept like a rock last night. 

It was the trip of a lifetime. The horses showed bottomless heart and courage and try. They climbed huge granite steps on the way to hanging cirques cupping emerald green lakes. They scaled three high alpine passes, picking their way through talus and scree at the top of the world like champion mountain goats. They came face to face with a very healthy bear and didn't bolt for Langlois. They ate a whole new diet of high alpine grasses and forbes and drank from countless lakes and bubbling brooks. They chiseled new muscles under the weight of their saddlebags, only threw one shoe, and accepted their new environs and the daily rituals of camping as if they were old hats at the whole thing. I'll let a sampling of the trip photo album fill in the rest of the 10,000 words I could gush onto the page. But first: another huge round of thanks to the entire farm team for helping make this happen. They did such a stellar job in my absence it seems like I'm pretty much superfluous around here, which means I might as well re-supply and head back to the mountains for the rest of the summer...right guys?

• Fennel
• Fresh Thyme - a good sized bunch. If you don't use it all fresh, dry it for later use!
• Red Cabbage
• Lettuce
• Zucchini
• Strawberries
• Carrots - We've gone to bulk carrots for the rest of the season due to the fact that the green tops become weaker in the summer and bunching becomes painstaking. Rest assured we still dig fresh carrots for you every week; they are not from storage.
• English Cucumbers
• Sugar Snap Peas - bonus week! We usually only put them in the Harvest Basket for three weeks, but the pea patch is still yielding so we're sharing the bounty!

On Rotation

• Walla Walla Sweet Onions
• Red Long of Tropea Torpedo Onions
• Broccoli

Strawberries and the Big Picture at Valley Flora: Cultivars, Crop Rotation, Diversity, Year-Round Food, and the Plastic Problem

At this time of year when people are in the fevered delerium of strawberry lust - when u-pickers are stripping the berry patch clean within 45 minutes and we're struggling each week to fill all the strawberry orders - we get asked one question all the time: "Why don't you plant more strawberries?" 

It's a great question. We could probably plant the whole farm to strawberries and for a few weeks in June and July sell every last berry. We'd pump a barrel-full of fructose into the collective veins of Coos and Curry counties and for a brief moment in time give people exactly what they wanted. 

But what would that look like for the farm? Inevitably as the strawberry zeal fades a little and the blueberries come on to divert u-pickers' attention, we find ourselves sitting on a big field of underpicked strawberries (ask my crew: none of us want to pick more strawberries than we currently do :)...). Solution: plant June-bearing varieties!? We've trialed many different June-bearing varieties to try to boost our production at the start of the season to meet the demand, but have never found an ideal cultivar that meets all of our criteria: it needs to hold up to the inevitable May/June rainstorm, be easy to pick, not be mushy, and have great flavor. Time and time again we come back to our standby variety, Seascape, a day neutral that yields steadily all summer long, is red all the way through, and flavorful. But it's a slow burn with Seascapes. A June-bearing strawberry plant will produce the same amount of fruit in one month as a Seascape plant will produce all summer. It's this unusual characteristic of Seascapes that has put us in the position of trying to re-educate the public about strawberry season on our farm: it lasts all summer, come in August! The fruit gets sweeter and more abundant! (For all of you on my special order list right now, late July/August is probably when you'll start getting your flats.) But it's proven challenging to re-program sugar-crazed humans who associate strawberries with early summer.

But let's just say we did decide to plant more strawberries. We have limited space on the farm, so planting more strawbs means less space for all the hundreds of other things we grow to feed folks year-round: greens, carrots, broccoli, cucumbers, potatoes, fennel, cilantro, tomatoes, overwintering cauliflower, and scores of other things - not to mention all the cover crops we grow to feed our soil so that our soil in return can feed us. It would throw our careful crop rotation out of balance and the farm would become less diverse. In losing diversity the farm would also lose resiliency. It's because we grow hundreds of different crops that we can grow hundreds of different crops. That diversity creates mini-ecosystems on the farm that support complex biology above and below ground so our plants can thrive.

There is another dirty reason we don't plant more strawberries. They are the only crop on the farm that relies on plasticulture. We shape beds in September, lay down drip tape, and then wrap them in 1 mil agricultural black plastic. We then plant new crowns through the plastic in November and the plants slowly establish over the course of the winter until they start fruiting in May/June. We get a summer of production and then tear them out in October. The plastic goes to the dump (and for this I will surely be condemned to one of the nine levels of Dante's hell....perhaps the one full of organic farmers who are being tortured with hot melting plastic). Tragically, there is no longer an agricultural plastic recycling option in Oregon. There are some corn-based bio-plastic mulches on the market now, but they don't hold up for more than 6 months, which isn't long enough for the life cycle of strawberries. We've tried many times to grow strawberries without plastic, but we lose to the weeds every time. So here we are, part of the global plastic problem. I've capped our production at 20 beds, no matter how indignant our u-pickers get, because I can't bear to throw out more plastic each year when it's already too much.

So if you are among those clamoring for more strawberries from Valley Flora in early July, you have to stop and ask yourself: do I want them so much that I would forego the winter CSA or farmstand? At the expense of those sweet carrots? Would I sacrifice the diversity in this week's Harvest Basket? Do I want the farm to send more plastic to landfill each year? Or, might I in fact be able to have it all if I trust that there will be ample berries into September and I plan to fill my freezer in August instead of June (yes! fill your freezer in August!). I know we're pushing against some ancient biological hard-wiring (the human lust for sugar), and that as a species we aren't particularly prone to patience or delayed gratification, but if our customers practiced those two traits in the context of strawberries, it would help our farm maintain it's balance, it's complexity, and year-round abundance - and allow us to make the most of of the 20 beds of berries we put in the ground each year at the peril of my soul. 

Enjoy your VEGETABLES this week, and also that little pint of berries. :)

• Dill
• Broccoli
• Carrots
• Lettuce
• Spinach
• Sugar Snap Peas
• Strawberries
• Zucchini

On Rotation:

• Dazzling Blue Lacinato Kale
• Collards
• Broccolini

This is the final week of Abby's "spring" greens in the Harvest Basket. All those lovely bags of baby spinach, arugula and braising mix that you've gotten in your share the past month have been thanks to Abby's meticulous hard work. Never was there a farmer who grew such beautiful baby greens as my sister, who is wholly dedicated to the unswerving pursuit of perfection. I feel obliged to tell you that many a week in June she was out in the field past dark (you know how late that is in June, near the summer solstice!) harvesting with a headlamp in order to fill the CSA totes. For every leaf to be so perfect, so beautiful, it all has to be hand cut with special attention to stem length and leaf quality, which takes hours, and hours, and hours. And hours. Then, she'd bring the harvest up to the barn and wash all those greens until one in the morning. Just another eighteen hour day making the best salad on earth....:). So enjoy that spinach knowing it is truly a labor of love (or, as I diagnosed it this week: compulsive masochistic farming syndrome). Lucky for the rest of us, we get to enjoy the results of it all: the finest greens to be had. Thanks Ab!

CSA Member Exclusive: Strawberry Flats Available by Special Order!

In case you missed it in last week's newsletter: If you are a Harvest Basket or Salad Share member at any of our four pickup locations, strawberry flats are now available by special order. Flats contain 12 dry pints of ripe Grade A strawberries and are $45 apiece. We will fill requests in the order received as surplus berries become available throughout the summer. To order, email us your name, pickup location, daytime/cell phone number (ideally a number we can text to), and the quantity of flats you would like to order. Please note we may not be able to fill your order immediately, depending on how many orders we have ahead of you and how abundant the berries are each week.

If you are not a CSA member but would like to order strawberry flats, you can do so through our online farmstand ordering system. If you have never place a farmstand order, go to https://www.valleyflorafarm.com/shopthefarmstand to learn how to set up an account. It's quick and easy and will give you full access to all of our fruit and produce for the season.

Have a Happy 4th of July weekend!

• Beets
• Carrots
• Braising Mix - the bagged mix of baby Asian greens, great in salads or steamed/sauteed/stir-fried
• Kohlrabi
• Head Lettuce
• Zucchini
• Hakurei Turnips

On Rotation:

• Broccoli
• Broccolini

Rain, Sweet Rain!

Never in my whole entire life have I been more grateful for water falling from the sky as I was this weekend. Almost 4"!!! And such a sweet, warm, steady, succulent rain, preceded by a day so sultry and tropical I experienced some geographic disorientation: Am I on the east coast? The tropics? My t-shirt is sticking to my back two miles from the beach on the Oregon coast. Has that ever happened before? Then, by Saturday afternoon the unusual sound of fat, heavy raindrops hitting soft green leaves - a sound we're not as attuned to in Oregon, where most of our rain falls on conifers and bare-branched deciduous trees during our rainy winters. It was glorious. Wondrous. It lasted all night and all day. The creek rose, moss turned neon green, the dry knobs on the hills softened, temporarily unparched. Some latent pagan instinct made me want to throw my face skyward and let it soak me to the bone, then make some offering to the rain gods.

The sacrificial lamb - and well worth the sacrifice - was the strawberry patch. A half inch of rain is enough to do some damage, so 3.7 inches pretty much sealed the deal for a sloppy clean-up harvest yesterday. We fed the compost pile well with 150+ pounds of mush-ball, rotting berries, but we got the patch back in order which means we should be back on our berry feet by next week. It means no strawbs in your Harvest Basket this week, but I hope you'll agree that forfeiting a pint of strawberries is a small price to pay for desperately-needed precip.

We're anticipating a week of explosive growth on the farm - on the heels of so much rain, with fifteen+ hours of sun a day as we near the summer solstice. It's a good week to be a plant. And not such a bad week to be a human who eats plants...

Beets this week! Try loving them! They are not the canned beets of your childhood nightmares, or the sicky-corn syrup pickled beets from the Sizzler salad bar. They are earthy and sweet. Roast them! Grate them raw onto a pile of salad. Steam them and toss them with a little salt, pepper, vinegar and olive oil. Fancy it up even more by throwing some fresh herbs and goat cheese on top. Get down with beets this week. They want to get down with you.

Hello CSA Members!

This is our kickoff week for the 2021 CSA Season! We'll be delivering lots of food to our CSA Members this week, so be sure to pick up your Harvest Basket and/or Salad Share! 

(If you need a refresher on the when/where/how of your pickup, all that info is always on our website at https://www.valleyflorafarm.com/content/valley-flora-pick-locations. Scroll down for specifics on each site.)

What's in the Harvest Basket this week?

• Artichokes
• Kale 
• Arugula - 1/2 lb bagged
• Head Lettuce
• Spring Onions
• Tokyo Bekana Mustard Greens - lime green heads with white ribs, deliciously mild and lettucey (not a spicy mustard)
• Pea Shoots - great on salads, lightly sauteed, or tossed into smoothies
• Spring turnips
• Zucchini
• Cherry Tomato Plant 

On Rotation (this means that some locations will receive it this week and others next week):

• Radishes

Cherry Tomato Plants!

If you're a Harvest Basket member, you'll be taking a cherry tomato plant home this week in addition to your produce! We don't grow cherry tomatoes for the CSA, but we provide you with our all-time favorite variety, SunOrange, to grow in your own garden or pot. It's an improved Sungold the produces tons of tangerine-orange fruits from August through the fall. The flavor is exquisite - tropical/tangy/sweet. For best results, plant your tomato as deep as possible in a warm, protected location (it's ok 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. Give it a balanced organic fertilizer (Nutririch 4-3-2 is great at the recommended rate) and water deeply. You'll need to provide some kind of trellis or support because this variet is an indeterminate, which means it'll climb, and climb, and climb. Prune excess leaves as it grows, leaving all fruiting/flowering stems. 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.

Too Much Sun!

That's a rare thing for a farmer to say, but this spring it's been true. We would gladly trade some of these sunny days for more rain, and some of our crops agree. It has been a tricky spring for certain cool season veggies that we typically rely on in our early crop mix. In the past month we've lost whole plantings of radishes, turnips and pac choi due to excess heat, we had to till under a bed of greenhouse carrots because they bolted prematurely, and we're seeing more flea beetle damage on things like this week's Tokyo Bekana, the kale and our broccoli plants. Flea beetles show up on the farm once it gets warm and dry and they love to feast on Brassicas, pocking them up with lots of tiny holes. Normally we don't see them until later in May but they arrived in April this year. Our artichoke season was also abrupt - it started late and ended early - because of the weather.

Climate change poses some interesting challenges for us farmers. For instance, should we be planning for this kind of spring from now on and change our planting dates and crop mix accordingly? Or is that a bad strategy, since next spring could be crazy cold and wet? We've all learned that what's going on is not just "global warming," but "global weirding." And "weirding" is a lot harder to cope with when your whole gig relies on the weather and some ability to predict that weather...

As always, I'm grateful for our diversity, which has been the backbone survival strategy on our farm since the get-go: grow a little bit of everything, so that if something croaks there's still plenty of food to fill those Harvest Baskets. I hope you enjoy your first taste of the 2021 CSA season this week!

In the share this week:

• Artichokes
• Shallots
• Beets
• Carrots
• Redleaf Lettuce: Big mondo heads out of our high tunnels! This was a winter trial that turned out better than planned!
• Sunflower Shoots: Our micro/shoot yields shot through the roof this round of production, so you're getting a full HALF pound of sunflower shoots this week instead of the intended 1/4#. They're great on salads, in sandwiches, in smoothies, or by the handful straight out of the bag.
• Mixed Greens
• Yukina Savoy Tatsoi: This is a glossy, dark green pac choi with spoon-shaped leaves that might almost fool you into thinking it's spinach....
• Pink Radishes

The first artichokes of the season! Many of you have heard the story of these artichokes - that they've been propagated in our family for over 50 years - and I am so excited to share them with you this week. The original plant came out of a friend's yard in Bandon in the early 70's, which my Mom grew and divided in her garden throughout my entire childhood. Many a spring dinner centered wholly around these artichokes when I was a kid (and the requisite butter/mayo that must attend them). I took plants to Portland when I lived there in my 20s and grew them in my own garden. When I returned in 2008, I divided my garden plants and brought home 40 starts that I planted into the first Valley Flora field. Simultaneously I started a few hundred Green Globe chokes from seed. It was obvious after the first year of production that our family artichoke outstripped the Green Globes in every way: hardier, more productive, more beautiful, more delicious, and nearly choke-free (not very much hair around the heart, especially in the small baby chokes). Harvesting these artichokes this week made me feel so lucky to live on this planet, surrounded by swooping swallows and apple blossoms amidst a canvas of electric spring green everywhere! I'm thinking that when the time comes to "retire," I'll revert to 100% horse powered artichoke production and keep it simple: me, my trusty steeds, some simple antique farm equipment, and a patch of thistles. Sounds like heaven.

I also spent some of my artichoke-harvest-time trying to tame the gnawing egg of anxiety I'm feeling about drought and climate change. I find that my daily sense of well-being is inextricably linked to the 10-day weather forecast. When I see an inch of precip on the horizon, I am awash in good feelings that all is well on planet Earth. But when the inch turns into a half, into a quarter, into a tenth, and then vanishes altogether - with nothing but more sun in the forecast - I feel despair. All this sun has been amazing for getting the season off to a great start, but I am desperate for it to rain (running irrigation at this time of year is downright wrong). This is not the Oregon of my memory, of my childhood. This is California, creeping north. This is the creek getting lower. Is this the beginning of the end of farming on Floras Creek (no water = no farm)?

I found myself thinking about what we can do: so far we have invested in solar so that almost the entire farm runs on the sun; we rely on horses instead of tractors for some of our fieldwork; we don't drive very much; we re-use our harvest and delivery bins for years and years; we bought a used Sprinter van that gets 25 mpg to curb our fuel consumption on the delivery route (wish it was electric, plugged into our solar panels!); we get on an airplane maybe once a year and buy carbon offsets when we do; we eat a plant-based diet for the most part, with local meat only making an occasional appearance; we buy bulk; we wash and reuse and eventually recycle our plastic bags; we vote.  

All of these things are built into our daily behaviors, but I wonder what more we could do, shy of quitting the farm and throwing ourselves headlong into climate activism. It seems unlikely that many of us are going to quit everything and go on the stump with Gretta Thunberg, so probably we should ask ourselves every single day: what can I do today to make the planet less hot? I do love a nice hot shower at the end of the day. Maybe I should try to make it shorter. I do drive my pickup back and forth around the farm; maybe I could rig a bike trailer that could haul my seeds and tools instead. I do donate to climate change efforts; maybe I should give more. And then the tiny little things combined with the big gigantic things (like the Paris climate agreement) - maybe it adds up to a future where my little Uma, who, at 6 years old, proclaims she wants to be a "watermelon picker" when she grows up, will be able to do just that? (Watermelons do require quite a bit of, er, water.)

In the meantime, I'd better get a prescription of anti-depressants because the Thursday rain forecast just got downgraded (again) from 0.15" to 0.09."

Big sigh. Don't let me ruin your week, but maybe it'll motivate you to ask the same question every day: What can I do today to make the planet less hot?

In Your Share this Week:

• Cauliflower
• Tetsu Kabocha Squash
• Radishes 
• Beets
• Carrots
• Purple Sprouting Broccoli
• Spring Raab
• Cebollitas
• Baby Butterhead
• Radish Micro Mix
• Chard

This has been the most striking change of season from winter to spring that I can remember on the farm. As if on cue around the spring equinox, the sun came out, the swallows returned in a cacophony of birdsong, and the north wind started to blow. This past week we've been in overdrive mode: mowing down all the cover crops, opening up ground for spring plantings, spreading pallet-loads of soil amendments, and getting thousands of starts into the field. I've lost track of what day it is, in the blur of blue skies and hours of squinting into bright sun from the tractor seat. Ironically, despite the countless inches of rain we've had all winter, we had to drop our irrigation pumps into the creek this week and put pipe in the field to help all the new transplants along. 

Nothing embodies our emergence into spring better for me than the first tender heads of lettuce from the greenhouse. Butterhead salads again, whoopeeee! You're also getting chard hearts this week, the final harvest from plants that we set out in the field a whole year ago. For some of you, the radishes are coming in bulk (for whatever reason the tops didn't grow tall, which makes bunching tricky). This is round 3 of 4 in the miraculous, frost-sweetened, overwintering cauliflower department (our last variety is still to come, next time).

Hope you're enjoying it all - the food and the weather - and feeling lucky to be alive.

Thanks everyone,

Zoë

What's in your share this week:

• Yellow Onion
• Purple Sprouting Broccoli
• Savoy Cabbage
• Arugula
• Pea Shoots
• Yellow Potatoes
• Spring Raab
• Autum Frost Winter Squash
• Cauliflower

There are a couple winter miracles in your share this week: purple sprouting broccoli and cauliflower! Both of these crops were seeded last July, planted in August and have been weathering winter for the past many months. Even after years of growing it, winter cauliflower never fails to amaze me. We have a mild enough climate here to pull it off - usually successfully - but nevertheless I'm always surprised when those pearly white heads start to show themselves, at a time when it doesn't seem like there could be anything to eat out there in the field. Winter cauliflower is also the tastiest of all the cauliflower we grow because it matures in cold weather, which sweetens up those Brassicas like nothing else. We grow four different overwintering cauliflower varieties that mature in succession, so hopefully you'll get to enjoy another two or three rounds of cauliflower before May.

Similarly, the purple sprouting broccoli in your share is a special thing. It requires patience and a lot of space, but what a treat once those neon purple florettes start to shoot skyward. We grow three varieties that mature between February and April, so it'll also make a few more appearances as we head into spring.

If pea shoots are a novelty to you, this is a great chance to become buddies with them. You guys are getting a full half pound this week - twice as much as planned - because our seeding did so well in the greenhouse this time around. Lengthening days and some sunshine are making all the difference in growth rates in the propagation house right now. I like to eat pea shoots raw in salads, or as the main body of a salad, but you can also sautee them or try making a pea shoot pesto. Here are two different riffs on that notion, one with pistachios and lemon juice and the other with toasted walnuts.

https://www.loveandlemons.com/pea-tendril-pistachio-pesto/

https://www.fresh52.com/recipes/pea-shoot-pesto

I wish I could say that the peas were bagged in the biodegradable cellophane bags we were so excited about last time, but we had a major disasco (disaster + fiasco) this week with the new bags. On Monday we harvested and bagged up all the CSA and farmstand pea shoots and micro mix and then put them in our walk-in cooler for the night so we'd be ready for packout on Tuesday. When we pulled them out of the cooler on Tuesday, we discovered that the new bags were practically melting and anything in contact with the bag was soggy AND wilted. It seems that those marine-degradable bags were already well on their way to breaking down and not doing our produce any good at all. We had to unbag everything (yes, hundreds of bags), toss the wilty shoots, and rebag them all in good ol' turtle murder poly bags. Sigh. The bag vendor has never heard of this problem and is trying to figure out if we got a faulty batch, or....?

So in the meantime until we can resolve the bio bag issue, please do your best to reuse the plastic bags we give you (as many times as possible!) and then recycle them when their life is over (McKay's in Bandon has a plastic bag recycling bin in their foyer; it's worth asking at Ray's in PO and Bandon, and anywhere else you shop for groceries).

Have a lovely week! Celebrate winter cauliflower!

Zoë

What's in your Winter CSA share this week:

• Costarossa Radicchio - the last of the season. I am crying bitter radicchio tears because I have to wait unti next November to make that Tasty n Sons salad again.
• Hakurei Turnips
• Carrots
• Italian Parsley
• Celeriac
• Yellow Potatoes
• Autumn Frost Winter Squash - a new variety we trialed this year that I'm falling in love with. It's a specialty butternut with extra-long storage superpowers, thanks in part to that natural "frosty" wax layer on the skin (which also makes it look extra pretty while it sits on your counter waiting it's turn to jump in the soup pot). The flavor is stellar. I made the best squash soup of my life out of this variety a couple weeks back. Squash soup is six-year old Uma's favorite dinner, which is good news for mom cuz it's a 10 minute meal in the pressure cooker: chop up a couple leeks and saute them until soft and slightly browned. Peel and cube your winter squash and add it to the leeks. Dump in two cans of coconut milk, a couple cups of water, and a big spoonful of Better than Bouillon chicken stock. Lock the lid in place and cook at high pressure for 6 minutes. Quick-release the pressure and use an immersion blender to puree it smooth. If you don't have a pressure cooker, you can do the same thing stovetop at a slightly mellower pace. And if you don't have an immersion blender, you can use an egg beater or transfer the soup in batches into a regular blender to render it silky-smooth. And then, 10 minutes later, you're wearing the "best mom ever" badge, handmade by your six-year-old. It's a great feeling. 
• Bulk Kale
• Savoy Cabbage
• Yellow Onion
• Micro Mix
• Baby Winter Greens

The bag of winter salad in your share this week marks the almost-end of the Persephone period here at our latitude. Gardeners and farmers talk about the "Persephone days" to refer to that part of the year when there are fewer than 10 hours of daylight. For us, here at 42 degrees N, the Persephone period begins around November 7th and ends around the first of February - aka, "winter." It takes its name from the Greek myth in which Hades, king of the Underworld, falls in love with beautiful maiden Persephone when he sees her picking flowers in a meadow. He kidnaps her in his chariot and carries her off to the dark underworld to be his bride (some say with the blessings of her father Zeus...yeah, the women's movement still had a long way to go back then). Persephone's mother, Demeter - goddess of vegetation and grain - is beside herself and searches the earth for her daughter, to no avail. At that point she withdraws into her temple and causes a great drought - a nice tactic to strongarm Zeus into releasing her daughter. But Hades tricks Persephone and gives her a pomegranate seed to eat, which seals her fate to remain in the underwold forever. Meanwhile up on earth, plants are shriveling and the ground is parched and Demeter is playing her cards well. In the end, a deal gets brokered where Persephone is released but has to return to Hades for three months of the year - winter, or the Persephone period.  

As a farmer, it's significant because most plants require 10 hours of daylight for active growth, so the Persphone period is a time of dormancy (and the greatest mental relaxation for those of us who tend plants). I used to think it meant that things don't grow at all. But that's really not true here in our climate where it doesn't get that cold. Plant growth simply slows down dramatically. Once I realized this, I started playing around with somewhat bizarre planting dates in our unheated field tunnels. The greens you're getting this week were seeded on December 3rd. In the summer, they'd be ready for harvest within three weeks, but through the Persephone period it took 2 months. The good news is that I've been seeding greens in our tunnels every other week since December 3rd, so we have tender baby greens - mizuna! arugula! kale! mustards! tatsoi! - to look forward to all season.

Enjoy your last week of the Persephone period in all it's icy rain glory. The wild plum just broke into brave bloom outside my window, and our first daffodils are showing their heads. Persephone will be climbing up from the Underworld any day now and delivering us into our long, drawn-out, wonderful, Oregon springtime - and the end of mental relaxation for farmers!

• Beets
• Green Cabbage - very long keeping in the fridge (months!)
• Carrots
• Leeks
• Shallots
• Potatoes
• Pea Shoots
• Hakurei Turnips - for Wednesday members this week (Saturday members got them last week)
• Tetsukabuto winter squash - The squash of choice for the apocalypse! This kabocha/butternut cross stores FOREVER. As in, I once ate one that was over a year old and it was still delish. Tetsu has sweet nutty flavor and wide-ranging versatility in the kitchen: roastable, mashable, curry-able, soup-able, stuffable.

A Short Winter's Nap...

Winter is a fleeting thing around here - about two weeks in December, flanked on either side by spring and fall, which go on for months and months. By January the daffodils will already be blooming and by February green things will be growing like mad again. It doesn't add up to much dormancy - or make for much of a mental break from farming. But rather than chafe against our quasi-Mediterranean climate and its botanical repurcussions, I've embraced the opportunity to grow food year round. Hence, the Winter CSA and farmstand. For those of you signed up for our winter CSA season, we'll see you in a month! The farmstand will likely be back in action that same week on January 13th. It turns out I really enjoy winter production, but I'll admit I'm also quite keen on the little break ahead - a chance to dive into extracurricular projects, hunker in with family, and relish winter.

A mighty mountain of thanks to all of you for your CSA commitment the past 28 weeks. It's been an anxious year, but once again the CSA and our beloved cadre of loyal local customers - farmstand shoppers! co-ops and stores! restaurants! - kept the farm humming. Back in college while I was studying agroecology as an idealistic 20-year old - penning my honors thesis about the pitfalls of the global economy and making the case for local food systems - one of the arguments was always that local food systems are more resilient in the face of a system shock. Like, for instance, when a global pandemic shuts down institutions like colleges and universities, shutters restaurants, forces people into lockdown, and brings the economy to a grinding halt. Sure enough, industrial-scale ag was sent reeling last spring as it struggled to adapt to the abrupt new COVID-19 landscape. Truckloads of zucchini were getting dumped in farm fields because there was no market; slaughterhouses were shut down due to COVID outbreaks among workers so that you couldn't buy chicken for weeks; small blocks of cheese were sold out everywhere but there was a glut of 10 pound cheddar bricks - because everyone was cooking at home instead of eating at the restaurants that buy in volume.

That "resilient-in-the-face-of-system-shock" theory was exactly that, a theory. But I'd never really seen it tested. Last March we weren't sure what the pandemic would mean for us on Floras Creek, but as it turned out more people sought out Valley Flora than ever before amidst this crisis. Restaurant sales slackened predictably, but sales to stores jumped, our CSA membership was up 25%, and our farmstand fed more folks than ever before. We had to expand our crew to get all the farming done each week. We befriended new customers who had never been to the farm before who no longer wanted to shop for produce at the supermarket. People wrote us notes and sent us emails thanking us for helping to keep them safe and healthy through all this, and for nourishing them in more ways than calories alone. And when all was said and done, you guys ate every last stick of food we could grow! At least this time around, the farm weathered a major system shock with flying colors thanks to all of you. 

I have always loved the diversity we tend on the farm (the season's not even over yet and I'm already thumbing through my seed catalogues and notes, excited for the new varieties I want to trial next year). It's been clear to me for a long time that diversity equals resilience when it comes to crop production. That theory has been proven time and time again on the farm in the past twelve years. But diversity also equals resilience when it comes to market channels. If we had been geared to sell to only restaurants when COVID-19 hit, we might have gone under. But the fact that we had all of you supporting the farm in various ways - as CSA members; as farmstand customers; as cafés and delis and restaraunts; as co-ops and stores and caterers - that allowed us to keep on going and to feed more of our community than ever before. Thank you so much.

So here's to our next trip around the sun. I'm optimistic that we have a lot to look forward to in 2021, if nothing else then more of those hot pink mini daikons we trialed this fall! It's what I love about farming: every year is a new beginning, a new adventure, another chance at doing life well. 

Wishing you all good health and a happy solstice. And as always....Eat your vegetables!

Love,

Zoë

• Purple Brussels Sprouts on the stalk
• Carrots
• Celery
• Rosemary
• Shallots
• Yellow Potatoes, great for mashing
• Winter Crisp lettuce, which miraculously survived last week's hail storms!
• Delicata Winter Squash
• Parsnips - the prettiest ones we've ever grown! I suppose it's a stretch to call a parsnip "pretty," but if you've been a CSA member in the past then you're familiar with our persistent parsnip struggles. It's the only vegetable I've ever threatened to divorce - year after year of disappointment! But like that ridiculous disfunctional relationship that everyone rolls their eyes at, we stay together and keep trying. So much effort for so little reward. So much heartbreak (and so many broken shovels digging the damn things out of the sucking November mud)! I can barely believe it, but the somehow the trying actually paid off this year. We grew nice parsnips for the first time ever. But here's the embarassing thing: the solution was so easy. Row cover. That's it. Just cover the beds with insect netting - the same stuff we use to protect our carrots from rust fly, and our turnips and radishes from cabbage maggot, and our baby greens from flea beetles - and instead of ugly, blemished, tarnished, hideous-but-still-tasty parsnips we got pretty-pearly-white-tasty parsnips. Amazing. So I guess the moral of the story is, if you're stuck in a disfunctional relationship, try.....row cover? Good luck! Oh, and as for eating your parsnips: if you fall into the parsnip-skeptic category, I always suggest this recipe to woo you over to the parsnipophile side of the aisle. It goes great on the Thanksgiving table: Roasted Winter Squash and Parsnips with Maple Syrup Glaze and Marcona Almonds. Your Delicata squash or Butternuts would be a great sub for the Sunshine kabocha squash, in case you don't have one of those lying around.

Our Heartfelt Thanks

In Spanish, "Thanksgiving" translates to "El Dia de Acción de Gracias" (the day of action of thanks, more or less). I love that translation, because it suggests that giving thanks and expressing gratitude are actions. It's easy for Thanksgiving to be about eating too much, falling into a tryptophan-induce food coma, and collapsing onto the couch to watch the football game. But thinking of this holiday as a day of action inspires me to experience it differently, with a little more intention. 

I want to say a huge thank you to the farm crew - Roberto, Jen, Allen, Donna, Sarah, Bets & Abby - for all their hard work. The Thanksgiving harvest always strikes me as a special culmination of our collective effort all season. The CSA tote is full of long-season crops like Brussels sprouts and parsnips and celery - things that we seeded way back in March, April & May and are only just now harvesting. That represents months of labor: transplanting, weeding, irrigating, covering with row cover, weeding again, until finally it's time to harvest, wash and pack the totes here at the end of November. I'm grateful to work with such a competent, dedicated and fun crew. They make my life better in every way. We laugh a lot.

I'm also infinitely grateful to all of you, our CSA members, farmstand customers and wholesale customers who support the farm week after week, year after year. Many of you send us little notes of thanks each week, expressing your appreciation for the produce and the hard work. Well, it's mutual: thank YOU for choosing to buy from this little local, family farm and keeping us in business. But honestly, you're not just keeping us in business; you're supporting our livelihood, which is about a lot more than a business. Valley Flora is what feeds us - yes, financially and nutritionally - but also spiritually and emotionally. We love this valley, this little reach of bottom land along the creek, and we are so grateful to get to spend our days here coaxing life and beauty out of this deep, loamy soil. Thank you for being the bellies that clamor for the fruits of our labor. We are delighted to oblige all your vegetable cravings :).

Have a very Happy Thanksgiving, as diferent as it might be this year. In spite of it all - oh 2020! - there is always something to be grateful for. I hope you find that thing and hold it close tomorrow.

Love,

Zoë

• Brussels Sprouts - on the stalk, alá Dr. Seuss. For easiest and longest storage in your fridge, snap the sprouts off the stalk and store them in a plastic bag. We were excited to harvest them this week on the heels of a couple sweetening frosts at the farm. Freezing temps stoke sugar production in Brussels sprouts - and all its cruciferous cousins (kale, broccoli, collards, cauliflower, etc). The sugar in the plant cells acts as antifreeze, making them winter hardy and extra delicious.
• Carrots
• Lettuce
• Yellow Onions
• Black Winter Radishes - Hailing from Germany (variety name: Runder schwarzer; translation: round black; sometimes also called black Spanish radish), this is one tough radish! It's hardy for fall and winter harvests and long storage. The rough black exterior contrasts with bright white flesh that has moderate spice. A fun new trial for us this season, if only slightly macabre in appearance...
• Butternut Squash - oh glorious soup-making squash, smooth, sweet, delicious, easy to peel, meaty and dense, inspirer-of-so-many-great-adjectives-to-throw-into-a-run-on-sentence!
• Kohlrabi - Meet Kossack, our biggest, baddest, sweetest, yummiest kohlrabi variety. Peel it, slice it, eat it raw. This is Uma's favorite vegetable (that's my five year-old daughter; she gets exceedingly excited when I bring one of these home from the farm. Kossack has inspired from her all kinds of spontaneous improv dances-of-joy in the kitchen...).
• Cauliflower

We have arrived squarely in the "Germanic" phase of the season: guttural vegetable names, heavy blunt things you could lob off the castle wall to fend of barbaric intruders, vegetables that will store forever and see you through the potato famine (if need be, although I encourage you to eat them this week, plus we had a good year for spuds so we don't anticpate any famines of that sort this year). 

Thanksgiving CSA Schedule - Mark Your Calendars!

Thanksgiving is two weeks away - time to alert you to our Thanksgiving delivery schedule!

The week of Thanksgiving we will deliver ALL Harvest Baskets to ALL pickup locations on Wednesday, November 25th. We do this for two reasons:

1. To ensure that everyone has their Thanksgiving veggies before Thanksgiving, and
2. To give everyone on the farm a Thanksgiving holiday break.

That means that if you are a Port Orford or Bandon member, your pickup will be on WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 25th instead of Saturday, November 28th. There will be no pickup on Saturday, November 28th. Pickup hours will be the same as usual.

For Farm and Coos Bay members, there is no change to the pickup schedule: Wednesday as usual, same time, same place.

Mark your calendars now to avoid any confusion!

For menu-planning purposes, you can expect to see the following in your Thanksgiving share: Brussels sprouts, Carrots, Celery, Rosemary, Shallots, Parsnips, Potatoes, and Delicata Squash.

Have a great week!

Zoë

• Rainbow Chard
• Celery
• Carrots
• Leeks
• Head Lettuce
• Sunshine Kabocha Squash OR North Georgia Candy Roaster Squash: This week we're sending Sunshine Kabocha to our Coos Bay and Bandon members; Farm and Port Orford members will get North Georgia Candy Roaster. We had limited yields in both varieties this season and there wasn't enough of either variety to feed everyone. That said, both are great eating with smooth skins that make kitchen prep easier. Sunshine has sweet, orange flesh with flavor tilted towards the tropical. The North Georgia Candy Roaster is an unusual heirloom with fantastic flavor, but most people find more to comment on in the curious looks department. If a giant pink banana and a mutant sweet potato got together, North Georgia Candy Roaster would be their lovechild. Size-wise, we're talking large baby (rest assured we made our best effort to sort out the 15lb+ specimens so as not to scare anyone off from the CSA for good). Both types of squash can be roasted, stuffed, churned into soup or whipped into pie filling. You can also bake or steam them, scrape out the meat and freeze it for later if you're feeling some trepidation about eating 10 lbs of squash in one sitting. Also, both varieties improve in storage, so feel free to add them to your seasonal squash decor until the spirit seizes you to preheat the oven.

On Rotation:

• Cauliflower

BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY THIS WEEK...

Only 6 more days until Election Day, which means if you haven't already voted, do it today! It's too late to be dropping them in the mail, so your best bet is to drop your ballot off at one of the secure ballot dropsite locations in your county.

If you live in Curry County, 24-hour drive-up ballot dropsites are located at:

• Curry County Courthouse
  E Moore Street
  Parking lot
  Gold Beach, OR 97444
• Brookings City Hall
  898 Elk Drive
  Brookings, OR 97415
• Port Orford City Hall
  555 W 20th Street
  Port Orford, OR 97465

If you live in Coos County, ballot dropsites are located in Bandon, Coos Bay, North Bend, Lakeside, Myrtle Point, Coquille, and Powers. Details for each site are listed here: http://www.co.coos.or.us/Portals/0/County%20Clerk/Elections/Elections%20...

If you've already voted and want to check on the status of your ballot, you can do so here: https://sos.oregon.gov/voting/Pages/myvote.aspx?lang=en

It's a quick, easy way to ensure that your ballot has been received.

If you don't have a way to get your ballot to a dropsite before next Tuesday, email us and we'll help make it happen!

In the meantime, thanks for voting with your food dollars and your fork to support VF and the kind of farming that's local, family-scale, solar-and-horse-powered, organic, and full of love. 

Remember to breathe this week.

xoxo

• Carrots
• Lettuce
• Sweet Pepper
• Tomato
• Delicata Squash - the darling of the winter squash world, and for good reason. Delicatas are superbly good eating - sweet. creamy flesh with a thin, manageable, edible skin. If you are intimidated by winter squash in general, Delicata is a great gateway squash because of its flavor and ease of prep. All you need to do is cut them in half lengthwise, scoop out the seeds, lay them cut side down on a cookie sheet with a thin layer of water to create some steam, and bake for a half hour (or until soft). Then pull those delectable squash out of the oven, fill the cavities with butter and arm yourself with a spoon so you can dig in. You can also peel them, cut them into smiles and roast with olive oil and salt until lightly browned. They're like winter squash french fries. OR, you can stuff a Delicata with whatever suits your fancy and bake them as stuffed squash boats. Keep in mind that winter squash store on the counter (no need to refrigerate) for weeks to months depending on the variety, which means there's no pressure to use them right away. When it comes to Delicata, though, I find it hard to hold back.
• Yellow Potatoes
• Kale
• Radishes or Turnips - new varieties this week!
• Red Onions
• Liberty Apples

On Rotation:

• Broccoli
• Romanesco

LAST WEEK OF ABBY'S GREENS SALAD SHARES!

This is the twentieth and final week of Salad Shares for the season. The salad season is 8 weeks shorter than the Harvest Basket season because outdoor greens production becomes more and more iffy as we head into the shorter, stormier days of fall. A huge thanks and tip of the hat to Abby for her tireless dedication to putting out a beautiful product week afte week, year after year, decade after decade. Even though Salad Shares are ending, you will still be able to find Abby's Greens for awhile longer at the Port Orford Community Co-Op, the Langlois Market, Mother's Natural Grocery and Coos Head Food Co-op.

Enjoy this week's very autumnal collection of produce: pommes and pommes de terre together in one tote :)