In the CSA Share this Week:
- Sweet Corn
- Celery
- Persian Cukes
- Tomatoes
- Italian Parsley
- Carrots
- Walla Walla Sweets
- Zucchini
- Head lettuce
On Rotation:
- Strawberries (we might get rained out for our Friday pick)
- Gold Zucchini
- Eggplant
Once-in-a-Lifetime Celery!
Those of you who have been CSA members for a few years are used to me quasi-apologizing about Valley Flora celery - about how it packs a flavor punch but is distinctly not like the fat, juicy, blanched stuff you get at the grocery store. Well lo and behold, we had a celery miracle this season and for some inexplicable reason we managed to grow grocery store celery for the first time ever (and I mean that in the best way possible). Did we do something different? Nope. A new variety? Nope. Extra compost? Nope. The only thing that might explain it - and I've blamed many a bumper crop on this - is that it's growing in a field named "Molly" (each of our farm fields is named after various maternal grandmothers....Ida, Helen, Santos, Lorraine...and all of our crops rotate through the various fields over the years). Long ago when Molly was still just a sheep pasture, one of my original draft horses, Barney, died of colic. He was an enormous, big-boned Belgian and we buried him way out at the far west end of the property where there's a beautiful, sweeping view of the valley. A few years later we brought that half of the property into vegetable production and holy moly, the heads of broccoli that came out of Molly were bigger than basketballs. I half-jokingly gave all the credit to Barney, since that pile of bones buried deep down probably added up to a whole lot of phosophorous. But now, here we are almost 15 years later with bodacious heads of celery coming out of Molly and all I can think is that Barney's done it again. Thanks, old boy. XOX
A Wendell Berry Tribute
Wendell Berry died this week at the age of 92. If there is one person who has most influenced my path in life and my worldview, it is no doubt him. His books fill a disproportionate amount of space on my shelves, and one in particular I've reached for so many times it's become smudged and creased, dog-eared and post-it-noted all over. It's signed by the author himself, who I had the wonderful good fortune of meeting in my late twenties.
Wendell Berry was poet and author, farmer and activist, and he wrote extensively about the perils of industrial agriculture, the beauty of the natural world and human-scale local economies, the value of being rooted in place, the essential importance of "culture" in "agriculture," and so much more. He was prolific, which makes this writing farmer think that Wendell was doing a bit less farming and a lot more writing than I currently am :)....
If we flew a flag over Valley Flora, I would want it to be the blockprint engraving on the cover of the Mad Farmer Poems - the team of horses standing patiently while the "mad" farmer opines! rejoices! testifies! to the songbirds and the trees and the roadside weeds. Berry begins The Mad Farmer Poems, with this note: "The joke of the Mad Farmer Poems is that in a society gone insane with industrial greed and insecurity, a man exuberantly sane will appear to be 'mad'.....These poems...embody a vision of sanity breaking forth into a world driven crazy by dreams of wealth, power and ease - and so by fear."
Plenty of people think that farmers are out of their minds to do what we do. But I will sign my name to Berry's assertion that we are in fact "exuberantly sane," grounded by that which is simple, humble, essential, this:
Growing weather; enough rain;
the cow's udder tight with milk;
the peach tree bent with its yield;
honey golden in the white comb;
the pastures deep in clover and grass,
enough, and more than enough;
the ground, new worked, moist
and yielding underfoot, the feet
comfortable in it as roots;
the early garden: potatoes, onions,
peas, lettuce, spinach, cabbage, carrots,
radishes, marking their straight rows with green, before the trees are leafed;
raspberries ripe and heavy amid their foliage,
currants shining red in clusters amid their foliage,
strawberries red ripe with the white
flowers still on the vines - picked
with the dew on them, before breakfast;
grape clusters heavy under broad leaves,
powdery bloom on fruit black with sweetness
- an ancient delight, delighting....
-excerpted from the "Satisfaction of the Mad Farmer" with love and appreciation for the late Wendell Berry
