- Broccoli
- Red Cabbage
- Cucumbers
- Dill
- Head Lettuce
- Purplette Onions
- Strawberries
- Zucchini
Bulk Basil Available by Special Order!
Pesto Lovers! The Basil is abundant and you are invited to place a special order for delivery to your CSA pickup site! To Order:
Email your name, phone number, CSA site and desired quantity to: betsharrison@gmail.com
Available in 1 pound bags, no limit. $22/lb
Yum!
Carrots and Climate Change
It pains me to announce that starting this week VF carrots will be on pause for the next month. Normally those sweet, crunchy delights are a weekly staple in our CSA, from mid-June until the bitter end in December. But this spring we lost four consecutive carrot seedings to heavy rains and voracious slugs throughout April, May and early June. It was a major blow, since carrots are one of our most important and iconic crops on the farm. We've rationed our only bed for CSA and farmstand this past month and disappointed our wholesale customers mightily. But as of this week, we officially harvested the last of that planting and our next beds probably won't be ready until late August.
Fortunately our carrot beds have been germinating spectacularly since mid-June as conditions have become more hospitable to those tiny, slow-growing seeds (less mud, fewer slugs), but it takes about 60-80 days to get a carrot from seed to harvest. Hence, for the next few weeks carrots will be notably absent in your tote (nothing like having to buy a bag of old supermarket carrots to boost your appreciation of the fresh-dug, homegrown ones!).
In all the years I've been growing food, I've never experienced a carrot crop failure like this one. The weather this past spring was unlike anything I've farmed through over the past 20 years and posed some extreme challenges for us and for farmers around the state. When all was said and done, we had a lot to be grateful for on Floras Creek compared to many farmers in the Willamette Valley. We were able to find little windows of opportunity to get plants and seeds into the ground, but conditions were far from perfect. Meanwhile, a good friend of mine who runs a CSA near Salem was unable to plant ANYTHING until June, putting her 2 months behind and forcing her to cancel a few weeks of her CSA in June. As the weather gets more extreme - scary dry last year starting in April, crazy wet this year starting in April - she's wondering if it's time to throw in the towel and be done with the stressful rollercoaster. Farming has never been easy, but climate change is making it all the more tenuous and unpredictable.
Our carrots are the climate change casualty du jour at Valley Flora. It's disappointing at the kitchen table level, but indicative of something much, much more serious and heartbreaking at the global level. Is it possible that those carrots - or the absence of them - might be one of many sparks to help us tip towards solving our climate crisis?
