• 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.

• 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.

• 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!

• 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! 

• Broccoli
• Carrots
• Cucumbers
• Fennel
• Basil
• Head Lettuce
• Sugar Snap Peas
• Purplette Onions
• Strawberries - Our strawberries are going through a period of Type III Bronzing right now, causing them to look more dull and seedy, as opposed to bright and shiny. Type III Bronzing is a physiological disorder similar to sunscald that commonly occurs in strawberry fields from late spring to mid-summer when UV radiation is at its peak around the summer solstice. When there's intense light, high temps and low humidity the developing fruit can be affected, particularly on the heels of a cold winter (ahem, that would be this past year) due to reduced plant canopy development (without as much leafy shade cover, the green fruit is more exposed to the negative affects of intense light and heat). Fortunately the fruit is still tasty - sometimes even sweeter than usual - but the berries don't have the same bling, cosmetically speaking. It usually take a few weeks to get through a Type III Bronzing episode, at which point the berries get back to being pretty lil' red shiny morsels again. It's always painful for us strawberry pickers when this happens, since we end up tossing a lot more of the harvest in the compost and the berries aren't up to our usual standards of beauty. But like most things, this too shall pass. There's a lovely flush of new flowers and green fruit on the vine right now, so hopefully we're in for an abundance of nice berries in the coming weeks. 
• Zucchini

Laminated CSA Checksheets Coming Soon!

We'll be sending laminated CSA checksheets to all our pickup locations in the coming week, now that the dust has mostly settled on our CSA membership for the season. Thanks for putting up with the paper copies for a few extra weeks this season (there have been an unusual number of changes, additions, and switerchoos within our membership this first 6 weeks). Please mark yourself off with the dry erase pen each week from here on out! Thanks!

No Newlsetter Next Week - Zoë is Headed for the Mountains!

Assuming no big wildfires flare up in the next few days, Zoë will be heading for the hills on horseback for her annual wilderness pack trip next week. That means no newsletter next Wednesday. If you need something next week, emailing us is your best bet (the crew will be checking the email daily while I'm away and getting back to folks as best they can). Calling or texting will most likely get you radio silence until I return. :)

Valley Flora is Stocking Local Foodbanks and Community Fridges this Season, Thanks to an Oregon Foodbank Grant!

The farm received an "Oregon Producers Feeding Oregon Communities" grant this winter, which is allowing us to provide $15,000 worth of produce to local foodbank partners this season! For over 15 years, we've donated produce to various foodbanks in Coos and Curry County, but this grant is enabling us to take it to the next level. Since early June we've been doing a weekly harvest and delivery of fresh veggies to our partners: the Common Good Foodbank in Port Orford; Coast Community Health Clinic in Port Orford (they have a new community fridge that they're distributing produce from); the Coos Bay Public Library community fridge; and to the biweekly Bandon Public Library "Farm to Families" events organized by the Beet Food System (see flyers below, and spread the word to folks in need!).

The grant funding is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program (LFPA) — and is administered through a partnership among Oregon Food Bank, Oregon Department of Human Services and Oregon Department of Agriculture. All told throughout the state, the program is providing $2 million to support anti-hunger efforts, with a focus on communities that are experiencing rising food insecurity and have faced disproportionate hunger and poverty for generations. Coos and Curry County both have food insecurity rates upwards of 20%, which ranks us among the most food-insecure counties in the state.

Access to fresh produce can be particularly grim on the southern Oregon coast - particularly at food pantries, where most things are shelf-stable and highly processed. At the moment, Valley Flora is the only source of fresh produce for the Common Good, Coast Community Health Clinic, and the Farm to Families program, so it's been deeply rewarding to bring them cases and cases of head lettuce, cucumbers, broccoli, zucchini, and anything else we have coming out of the fields each week. It also means that nothing is going to waste on the farm, and that we as farmers can get paid for our efforts. It's been a win-win-win, so much so that our team of partners is trying to brainstorm ways to find permanent funding for these programs, once the initial grant money is gone. Please reach out if you're interested in helping grow the long-term sustainability of this effort!

Farm to Families Calendar .pdf

• Sugar Snap Peas
• Green Cone Cabbage
• Bunch Carrots
• Cucumbers
• Fennel
• Arugula
• Head Lettuce
• Zucchini

On Rotation:

• Broccolini

Last Thursday, hot on the heels of the solstice, we crossed the threshold from spring food into summer food. It was a distinct shift: suddenly the sugar snap peas were fat on the vine, the cabbages had heft, the beets were flashing broad shoulders above the soil line, and the zucchini were fat and abundant. It makes for a fun change in the Harvest Basket this week, away from leafy greens and turnips, and towards the sweet crunch of summer. I often breathe a slight sigh of relief at this point in the season, knowing that most of you probably know what to do with peas, carrots, and cucumbers - things that even your pickiest five year old most likely enjoys raw, simple and unadorned. 

For some of you, this week's kitchen challenge will be fennel. I always have to remind myself that not everyone is as excited by fennel as I am, either because they've never had it, or they detest black licorice. To the first point, fennel is not a commonly eaten vegetable in the U.S. Go to Italy and you'll find big, fat fennel bulbs on prominent display in every grocery store, and at bargain basement prices. It's a culinary staple there. But here if it's stocked at all it gets relegated to a little corner of the produce aisle and is often bruised, tired and expensive. I don't blame you for not buying it every week alongside your broccoli and romaine.

As a CSA member you'll see it four or five times this season from now until November (it's really at its prime in the fall when the bulbs get huge and juicy under the influence of shortening, cooler autumn days). Summertime fennel is often smaller in size but bigger in flavor, which brings us to the second point: black licorice. Some people complain that fennel tastes like it, but I disagree. Black licorice bludgeons you with its overpowering black licorice-ness (I'm not a fan), whereas fennel is more subtle and delicate (I'm a zealot). They are two very different flavors in my book. The word for fennel in Spanish is "anís." Anise, flavor cousin to black licorice, manifested gently in an earthy, juicy, crunchy, beautiful bulb named fennel. 

So how do you eat it? First off, you can eat the whole thing, bulb and leafy fronds. The leaves are often used as an herb garnish - chopped up like dill. The bulb is the meat of the matter and it can be eaten raw or cooked. I love it thin-sliced into salad or as the base for slaw, but I also love to saute it down with onions until it's caramelized and then eat it atop pasta or a grain. Cooking diminishes the anise flavor of fennel, so if you are on the fence about striking up a love affair with this particular vegetable, you should cook it first to ease your way into the relationship.

• Here's a smorgasbord of recipes from Bon Apetit that all center around fennel: 68 Fennel Recipes for Shaving, Roasting, Pickling and More.
• What's missing among the 68 recipes from Bon Apetit is this one: Roasted Fennel with Parmigiano (a delicious, easy way to make your fennel crispy, salty, and cheesy)
• This food blog claims that all 25 of these fennel recipes can be made in under 30 minutes (they always lie!): 25 Best Fennel Recipes from Insanely Good
• And if 94 fennel recipes aren't enough to get you going, here are another 23 from Serious Eats: 23 Fresh Fennel Recipes That Everyone Will Love (fennel pizza is excellent).

Nothing brings me greater joy than having a skeptical CSA member report back that they have learned to love fennel, so please write in the event that your heart (and your tastebuds) are moved!

Strawberry U-Pick Opens Today!

At last! The berries are ready enough for us to open the gate for u-pick. We'll kick off the season today, Wednesday, June 28th and should now be open every Wednesday and Saturday starting at 11:30 am. The berries are still limited and strawberry fever is running hot, so we expect the patch will get picked out pretty quickly these first few weeks. The u-pick will be open only as long as there is ripe fruit to pick each day; once it's picked out we will close (our apologies that we cannot guarantee an exact range of open hours for u-pick). Our "official" hours are 11:30 am to 2:30 pm, or until the patch gets picked out - whichever comes first. Sometimes we are only open for a quick hour at the start of the season when strawberry fever is at its peak (we often refer to it as a "strawberry derby" in June and July). 

We provide buckets to pick into, but PLEASE BRING YOUR OWN CONTAINERS TO CARRY YOUR BERRIES HOME IN (bowls, cardboard flats, buckets, etc).

U-Pick is $3.50/pound and like everything on the farm our berries are grown according to the National Organic Standards (and then some!). Our bareroot crowns (variety is Seascape) are sourced from the only organic strawberry nursery in the nation and from the moment they are planted at Valley Flora in early November they are tended using organic practices and inputs. We never use sprays or chemicals anywhere on the farm, ever.

Remember, our strawberries yield all summer and well into September, so there is ample opportunity to get your fill this season. If you don't like a crowd, or are traveling a long way with eager kids whose hearts will be broken if we're picked out, or are hoping to pick heaps of berries to fill your freezer for winter, you might wait until August when there's more elbow room and lots of super-sweet berries! Also a reminder that Valley Flora grows 101 other things besides strawberries. We know it's hard not to love the sugar, but there are additional reasons to visit the farm, all waiting for you pre-picked at the farmstand: Sugar snap peas, which actually have "sugar" in their name! Bunch carrots, which might be sweeter than the strawberries right now! Abby's Greens, find them in the new Farm Fridge at the farmstand! Head lettuce, larger than your overweight cat! And much more!

• Spring Onions
• Broccolini
• Baby bulk arugula
• Kohlrabi
• Head Lettuce
• Violet Queen Turnips

On Rotation:

• Zucchini
• Cilantro
• Chard
• Kale

51% Art: The Valley Flora Maxim

Farms can be messy places. Most of the time when you pull into a farmyard there's evidence of the inherit chaos and everyday hustle that defines a working operation: piles of this, piles of that, old junked equipment, some of it an eyesore. But when people visit Valley Flora, often the first thing they say aloud is, "it's so tidy, so beautiful!" It's true, the farm is pretty tidy most of the time. We are constantly striving to create smart systems and good organization so that the place will shine. We blame that impulse partly on our genetics (a heavy streak of German ancestry runs through my mom's side, and her grandmother had an iron rule that I suppose is still vibrating in all of us at some cellular level: "A place for everything and everything in its place!").

But there's another streak of influence from the more bohemiam side of the family milieu, which is expressed simply in one of my own mother's maxims: "Everything we do has to be at least 51% art." That's where the beauty part comes in on the farm, whether it's the layout of the fields or the arrangement of kale leaves in a bunch or the interplay of colors and shapes in Abby's salad mix. We want everything to pass, and hopefully exceed, the 51% art test, every day, whenever possible.

This week, I don't think the spring onions are passing the test. A quick backstory: these onions were seeded last August, planted last October, and grew through the entirety of our frigid, harsh winter. Miraculously, most of them decided to bulb up instead of bolt this past month. Bolting is disappointingly common in overwintered onions, especially when they're subjected to extreme temps. So common, in fact, that I vowed that if this bed of onions bolted it would be the last bed of overwintered onions we ever planted (this on the heels of five years of trialing different onions, trying to find the best type that will survive for 7-8 harsh months in the ground and then give us a nice, juicy onion come June). Well well well, two of our three varieties shined this year (good news for continued overwintering onion production!). The only problem is that after 2/3 of a year in the ground, having been pelted by 65 inches of rain and some snow and hail, the bed they're rooted in is as hard as concrete in places. That can cause the onions to break while we're pulling them out of the ground, and alas, it means that some imperfect onions are going into totes this week. Perhaps if you eat them with your eyes closed you can find the 51% in the flavor or texture or aroma instead (not all art is visual, or perfect, I suppose...).

But there shall be redemption! On Monday evening, after we'd pulled the last of the onions from that bed, I planted it straight away into 220' of mixed sunflowers, right next door to the strawberry patch. Just for fun. Hopefully it means that come August the edge of the u-pick will be ablaze in yellows and reds and oranges and browns, like a sunny brush stroke across the field. For beauty's sake. For 51%+.

p.s. and for the pollinators and birds, too :)

In a Landscape Concert at Valley Flora, September 6th!

And while we're on the topic of art! Mark you calendar and buy yours tickets quick (sell-out warning!): We are so lucky to have Hunter Noack of In a Landscape coming to the farm on September 6th to transport us with a virtuoso piano concert performed on his 9-foot Steinway atop a flatbed trailer, parked in the middle of the field. Yup, classical music has never been so awesome. Pack a picnic, bring your lowback chair, and prepare to be moved, heart and soul.

A limited number of Good Neighbor (free) tickets will be available for those who would otherwise not be able to attend due to cost. Check out the Good Neighbor Tickets section when you go to purchase your tickets. 

• Baby arugula (bulk, in the larger of the two plastic bags)
• Head Lettuce - varieties rotate each week
• Yellow bunched spring onions
• Bunched Tatsoi (bunched, dark leaves with white stems)
• Radishes - pink or purple
• Spinach, bunched
• Sunflower Shoots (in the smaller plastic bag)
• Strawberries!!!
• A SunOrange Cherry Tomato Plant

On Rotation:

• Zucchini
• Artichokes

Hello 2023 CSA Members, and welcome! The Valley Flora van is on the road as we speak, delivering the first load of CSA totes to Coos Bay! Old Frank (that's the van) is also loaded down with a motherlode of head lettuce, radishes, turnips, and other VF produce for Coos Head Food Co-op, 7 Devils Brewing Co., the Langlois Market, and a handful of other stores and restaurants (insider tip: the first Abby's Greens salad was delivered to McKay's in Bandon today, in case you are not an Abby's Greens Salad Share member and are jonesing for some of those greens, stat!). All to say, the season has started with a bang. We are off and running.

The farm surprised us with a few things this week, in quantity enough to share with our beloved CSA members: namely, STRAWBERRIES! This has been perfect strawberry weather the past couple weeks and the plants are starting to yield some beautiful fruit. There isn't enough red out there to open the u-pick yet, but hopefully within a few weeks we'll be ready for the strawberry stampede. Also ramping up: our early zucchinis, which - like artichokes - are on rotation this week. That means that some pickup sites will get them this week, others will get them in the coming week or two. We are diligent about tracking who gets what every week so that we can keep it even-steven for all of our members throughout the season.

Overall, though, the name of the game right now is greens! Big salads, spinach in your smoothies, tatsoi in your stir-fry. We farmers tend to be terrible sympathizers when it comes to that common feeling of greens-overwhelm that some CSA members experience at the start of the season (that's because our household can easily put down a couple heads of lettuce and bunch of spinach/chard/kale/tatsoi every day, between morning smoothies, lunchtime leftovers, and dinner plates heaped high with salad). So my advice: eat like your farmer! The more greens the better! Also, remember that you have a superpower in the kitchen and it's called heat. If that bunch of tatsoi or spinach is staring you down in your fridge, toss it in a frying pan or the steamer and you'll diminish it to a teency but tasty little pile in a flash. Zap! Take that, tatsoi! (Definitely put on your superhero cape when you do that, and please send me the picture.)

Also going home with Harvest Basket members this week: a SunOrange cherry tomato plant. Be sure you take a plant from the yellow bin at your pickup site, one per Harvest Basket. 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 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, 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.

A reminder that all of the info about our CSA pick-up locations is on our website, in case you need a refresher about the when, where and how of it all: https://www.valleyflorafarm.com/content/valley-flora-pick-locations

FARMSTAND UPDATES

As of today our farmstand is operating on Summer hours: we're open every Wednesday from 11:30 to 2:30 for order pickup and drop-in shopping. We will be adding Saturdays to the schedule within a couple weeks, once the strawberry u-pick is ready to open. You have two options for sourcing produce at the farmstand: pre-order your produce on Local Line (our online store); or, drop in to shop. You'll find the greatest diversity, abundance, and guarantee if you pre-order on Local Line, but we try hard to always have some produce on display for folks who don't want deal with the internet :). (We understand, we're half-Luddite, too. See Exhibit A, below).

Enjoy your first week of VF produce, and thank you ALL for being part of the magic!

-Zoë

P.S. Coming in next week's newsletter: an introduction to our all-star crew, aka the fantastic humans who are growing and harvesting your produce this season! Stay tuned for more!