The Valley Flora Beetbox

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

Week 5 of Winter from Valley Flora!

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

On Rotation:

  • Cauliflower
  • Spring Raab
  • Purple Sprouting Broccoli

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newsletter: 

CSA Newsletter: Week 16 from Valley Flora!

Please note this is NOT our farmstand availability email. This is our weekly CSA newlsetter primarily intended for our subscribed Harvest Basket members who receive a weekly box of produce from the farm from June through December. You cannot order farmstand produce from this email or directly from our website. Rather, farmstand availability emails are sent out on Thursday and Monday mornings to folks who have signed up for Wednesday or Saturday pickup, respectively. To learn more or sign up for a farmstand pickup day, click here.

  • Napa Cabbage - the foundational ingredient in kimchi, but also wonderful shredded into light slaw or salad. At this time of year when we have sweet peppers and apples, I like to make a napa/apple/pepper/carrot slaw with a rice-vinegar vinaigrette.
  • Carrots
  • Sweet Corn
  • Lettuce
  • Yellow Onion
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Tomatoes
  • Beets - Red, Gold and Chioggia
  • Strawberries - we are stunned by the strawberries right now. Abundant, beautiful, better than ever! Normally there wouldn't be strawberries in the Harvest Basket at this point in the season, but they just keep giving! U-pick is going to be FANTASTIC today (Wednesday)!
  • Cucumbers

On Rotation:

  • Eggplant

I can't believe it, but yes, still strawberries! We are a bit baffled by this late season run in the berry patch - we haven't seen anything like this in years! If we get our much-hoped-for rain later this week it might start to slow them down, but right now they are phenomenal. Come upick today, starting at 11 am! And if you want a special order flat, let me know and we'll see if the weather cooperates: name, pickup location, number of flats and phone number.

Peppers Peaking: Now's the time to order up a few bags of red Italian roasters or assorted colored bells. Peppers are available in 5 pound bags for $22. To order, email Bets your name, pickup location, type and quantity of peppers you want, and a phone number. 

Help Support Farmworkers and Immigrants Impacted by the Devastating Wildfires: The wildfires have affected us all, but many of us are lucky enough to still have a home to go to. That's not the case for many immigrant Oregonians who tend to be most impacted by the smoke, have lost everything and don't have a safety net to fall into. In recognition of the devastating effects that wildfires have had on immigrant Oregonians, the Oregon Worker Relief Fund Coalition is pivoting to raise and distribute funds to impacted individuals and families. You can donate to their effort through CAUSA, Oregon's immigrant rights organization.

Strength and safekeeping to everyone in the terrifying path of fire right now, and to all those coping with hazardous air quality. We give thanks for clear air overhead today, temporary as it might be. Come on rain!

Newsletter: 

CSA Newsletter: Week 15 from Valley Flora

Please note this is NOT our farmstand availability email. This is our weekly CSA newlsetter primarily intended for our subscribed Harvest Basket members who receive a weekly box of produce from the farm from June through December. You cannot order farmstand produce from this email or directly from our website. Rather, farmstand availability emails are sent out on Thursday and Monday mornings to folks who have signed up for Wednesday or Saturday pickup, respectively. To learn more or sign up for a farmstand pickup day, click here.

  • Carrots
  • Eggplant
  • Head Lettuce
  • Red Onions
  • Hot Peppers - Jalapeño & Serranos (1 red serrano & 1 green serrano)
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Tomatoes
  • Strawberries

On Rotation:

  • Collard Greens
  • Lacinato Kale
  • Sweet Corn
  • Zucchin

Bulk Sweet Peppers Available by Special Order!

It's that happy time of year when the sweet peppers are coming out of the greenhouse by the bucketload! Now's the time to order up a few bags of red Italian roasters or assorted colored bells. Peppers are available in 5 pound bags for $22. To order, email Bets your name, pickup location, type and quantity of peppers you want, and a phone number. If you can manage to not eat them all raw, you can preserve peppers in a myriad of ways, listed here from easiest to most advanced:

  • Chop and freeze. No blanching necessary. Just cut 'em up and throw 'em in a freezer bag. Adds color and great flavor to soups, stir-fries and other dishes come winter.
  • Roast, peel and freeze. A great addition to soups, quiches, pasta, pizza, sandwiches and more all winter. Here's a quick tutorial on three different ways to roast peppers: https://toriavey.com/how-to/roasted-bell-peppers/
  • Roast, peel and pickle: https://www.freshpreserving.com/blog/pickled-roasted-peppers
    • I make pickled roasted peppers every year but use a brine recipe that doesn't call for much sugar or other spices: For 3.5 pounds of peppers (roated, peeled, cored and seeded), mix 1.75 cups white wine vinegar or distilled white vinegar, 1Tbs sugar, 2 Tbs pickling salt, 1 garlic clove chopped. Simmer all together for 10 minutes before pouring over packed peppers in sterilized canning jars. Leave 1/2" headspace, close jars with hot canning lids and rings, and process jars in boiling water bath for 10 minutes.

It feels awkward to be talking about fire-roasted peppers on this apocalyptic day, when I woke up to the heavy news of so many Oregon, Washington and California towns and forests burned to the ground. Never has fire threat - and climate change - felt so close to home. Temperatures reached over 100 degrees on the farm yesterday, and we were cloaked in low heavy smoke. There was a fire scare up Floras Creek yesterday morning, attended by a bunch of Coos Forest Patrol trucks zooming up the road first thing. Fortunately it was a false alarm. But numerous friends had to evacuate their homes, from the North Bank of the Coquille to the Santiam to Ashland. Our hearts are big and broken thinking about the devastation that is sweeping through our state, and for our neighbors north and south of our state borders.

Yesterday as we labored through harvest under the suffocating skies, I felt a level of disappointment in our species like never before. This is our only planet, our only home, our only chance to be human, and yet we can't quite seem to turn the ship. We watch while the "house" burns down. What does it take for something as big as climate change to finally hit home for enough people that we reach a critical mass to change behavior, shift policy and foment change, and to do it fast? When you live here on the southcoast where the temperatures are amicable, the cool, damp fog is just off-shore, the forests are green, it's easy to think climate change is something that's happening somewhere else. It's hard to imagine our corner of the world engulfed in flames. But yesterday I could imagine it, and east of Bandon some of it was. 

Food and agriculture are major drivers of climate change and I applaud all of you for making the choice to eat locally and to eat lots of veggies (that are grown mostly with solar power, thanks to the 12 kW PV system on the roof of our barn). Twenty years ago my concern about the environment and climate change was one of the motivating factors that led me into organic, regenerative farming: I wanted to do something that was positive for the planet and good for my community. It's great that something delicious can make a difference, but at this point it's going to take more than a local salad to double down on atmospheric carbon. Yes, pile your plates high with plants grown close to home and start your car as little as possible, but also elect leaders who take the climate crisis seriously. And most importantly, hold on to stubborn, purposeful optimism. Because we won't turn the ship unless we believe we can, and will.

Newsletter: 

CSA Newsletter: Week 14 from Valley Flora!

Please note this is NOT our farmstand availability email. This is our weekly CSA newlsetter primarily intended for our subscribed Harvest Basket members who receive a weekly box of produce from the farm from June through December. You cannot order farmstand produce from this email or directly from our website. Rather, farmstand availability emails are sent out on Thursday and Monday mornings to folks who have signed up for Wednesday or Saturday pickup, respectively. To learn more or sign up for a farmstand pickup day, click here.

  • Carrots
  • Cucumbers
  • Eggplant
  • Red Onion
  • Sweet Peppers - all the peppers in your share are sweet Italian types this week; no hot peppers....:)
  • Red Potatoes - the first dig of the season. I have a love-hate relationship with potatoes. I love growing them (it's something we do almost entirely with horses, from planting, to cultivating, to harvest, so therefore I wish we could grow 20 acres of potatoes!). But I hate all the sorting. When you grow potatoes, especially organically, there are a LOT of impefect ones - cracks, holes, scurf, funny knobs, insect damage, greening here and there. So many ugly little tubers that are pefectly fine on the inside but don't meet my produce beauty standards on the outside. I realize that I am perpetuating the supermodel myth of beauty, and that we all know it's what's on the inside that counts, but it's hard to liberate myself from my own vegetable pageant standards. It means we dump bin-fulls of the ugliest spuds, we donate a lot to the foodbank, and finally we try to skim the cream for you. That said, even some of the not-so-pretty ones get by us in the hustle of wash and pack. If that's the case with some of your potatoes this week, I am going to try to not apologize right now and instead encourage you to get out your veg peeler. If any of your spuds have a green spot, it's safe to cut or peel away that spot and still eat the potato. You wouldn't want to eat 5 lbs of greened potatoes in a sitting, but if you're cutting off a spot here and there you'll be fine (greening indicates the presence of solanine, a natural but toxic compound that develops in potatoes when exposed to the sun). You'll see potatoes in your share every few weeks now for the rest of the season. Which, by the way, is halfway over! This is week 14 of 28!
  • Strawberries
  • Zucchini
  • Tomatoes
  • Parsley

On Rotation:

  • Melon - We surprised our Bandon and Port Orford members last Saturday with a melon (and in fact, stumped one member who emailed me to say: "There's something in my share I don't recognize...it's round, dense, tan, and looks like a melon..."). Her hunch was right, this is "Sarah's Choice," a delicious cantaloupe-type melon that Abby grows for us. Supremely sweet and aromatic, we look forward to these all year!
  • Corn
  • Lettuce

Strawberries Still Peaking!

I can't believe I get to say this, but the strawberries are still pumping! What an amazing, quasi-miraculous late season we're having. Usually by now they're slowing down and We the Farmers are glad for it. But yesterday's harvest might just have been the best of the year. When the fruit is that beautiful and abundant it's hard to resent all the crawling on your knees ("oh please sir, can't I pick another row?). That being the case, I'm putting out the call (probably the last time) for special order flats. If you want some, give a holler via email with your name, pickup location, number of flats you want, and your phone number. Flats are $45 apiece delivered to your pickup site.

OR, come u-pick! The u-pick crowd has thinned out because no one thinks of September as strawberry season, but here at Valley Flora it's better than ever! Wednesdays and Saturdays from 11am to 2:30pm.

 

Pickling Cukes on the Horizon

Our late planting of pickling cukes has just begun to produce. I dont know what kind of yield to expect, but if you're interested in pickling, email me your name, pickup location, quantity (in 10# increments), and your phone number. If we have plenty we'll be offering 10 pound bulk bags for $30. They are a small, European-style gherkin, great for pickles or fresh eating.

Newsletter: 

CSA Newsletter: Week 13 from Valley Flora!

  • Rainbow Chard
  • Beets
  • Carrots
  • Cucumbers
  • Eggplant
  • Serrano & Jalapeño Peppers
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Strawberries
  • Zucchini
  • Tomatoes
  • Sweet Corn

On Rotation:

  • Green Beans
  • Head Lettuce

All of this bounty at our fingertips all day long, and then there's this....

The Dirty Secrets of Organic Farmers (a new segment in your weekly CSA newsletter!)

Last week, my mom was deep into her 12th hour of a 14 hour workday, buried in tomatoes, her brain on the fritz from not eating all day, and she dug this gourmet gem of a lunch out of the freezer (left by a houseguest at least a year prior, nicely freezer-burned around the edges...). I walked into the barn at 7 pm for the final stretch of packout and had to take the picture.

Whatever you might imagine about organic farmers sitting around a big lunch table leisurely eating beautiful family-style meals bursting with seasonal produce, yeah, you can pretty much scrub that from your mental imagery. It's leftovers from the night before when you're lucky enough to have cooked plenty of extra quinoa, or it's quick quesadillas and some salad, or in this case, when things get really dark, it's freezer-burned pre-fab pizza that not even the dogs will try to steal off the table. 

We have often mused about the irony that attends this time of year, when we're buried in beautiful produce but don't have any time to cook with it (much less eat it): wouldn't it be great if some chef or inspired cook wanted to take a sabbatical, come camp out at the farm for a summer and make the crew a meal once a day with whatever was ripe in the field? Or in the very least, if we could just get a taco truck to pull up to the barn around 2 pm each day.....Meals on Wheels for farmers!

Ah well, in the meantime, we'll get by with the sweet pepper eaten at a trot in the farmroad while hustling to get the cilantro harvested before the heat of the day presses in. That, and of course, quesadillas.

Split Screen - What our CSA members are doing with their produce:

Bravo!!!!!!

 

Newsletter: 

CSA Newsletter: Week 12 from Valley Flora!

  • Strawberries
  • Carrots
  • Walla Walla Sweet Onions
  • Red Cabbage
  • Sweet Corn!!!!! - Corn season kicks off this week! We have five successive plantings in the field, so expect to see sweet corn in your share pretty often for the next month+! I don't think you'll have too much trouble eating this much corn fresh in a week (or a day) - steamed, grilled, raw! - but if it's too much for you I suggest freezing it. You can either cut it off the cob and freeze it raw, or blanch it for a minute in boiling water and then cut if off and freeze it. I like to spread the cut corn out on cookie sheets and freeze it, then put it into freezer bags (so it's not a solid frozen block when you go to use it in the winter). 
  • Cucumbers
  • Zucchini
  • Tomatoes
  • Cilantro

On Rotation:

  • Eggplant
  • Green Beans
  • Lettuce - Not everyone will get a head of lettuce this week. As the days shorten dramatically in August, our lettuce slows down and we usually have to hit pause for a week or two in order for our successive plantings to catch up. Once it resumes we should have weekly lettuce for you again well into November.

 

Onion Harvest!

This week we completed the harvest of our 2020 onion crop, a process that involves pulling them out of the ground, loading them into the trailer, hauling them to the greenhouse, and finally laying them out on our propagation tables to dry and cure. It was a beautiful year for onions! They got a great start this spring thanks to weekly rainfall in May and early June and ideal growing temps. Every square inch of greenhouse space that isn't dedicated to seedlings and starts is covered in onions now. Once the onion tops are crispy-dry, we'll start cleaning them: snipping off the tops and roots, sorting them by size into bins, and stowing them in our dry storage room. It's the first crop that begins to fill our fall/winter treasure chest of storage crops: onions, winter squash, potatoes. Look for some new varieties of onions in your Havest Basket soon: Cipollinis, yellow onions and red onions coming your way!

Have a great week! Thanks for eating VF produce!

Newsletter: 

CSA Newsletter: Week 11 from Valley Flora!

In This Week's Harvest Basket:

  • Romano Green Beans - flat and wide and tender and deeeeeeelicious! Give them a light steam or sautee for maximal enjoyment (don't overcook!).
  • Kale
  • Carrots
  • Cucumbers
  • Lettuce
  • Walla Walla Sweet Onions
  • Strawberries
  • Zucchini
  • Tomatoes
  • Broccoli - monster heads!!!! And probably the last of the summer harvest, so enjoy. Until fall, Señor Broccoli! (Although this week's heads are so big you might still be gnawing away at yours come September...)

On Rotation:

  • Eggpant

Pickling Cucumber Update, Plus Beans, Plus Strawberries...

I've been getting lots of inquiries about pickling cukes this summer. We had a banner year in 2019, so it goes without saying that we would have a complete crop failure this summer. There are none to offer at the moment, HOWEVER, we replanted and with slightly better luck should have an abundance starting in September. I know that's probably later than many of you usually make pickles but if you're willing to wait we should have lots in about a month. That gives you plenty of time to round up your dill seed and pickling salt and crocks and canning jars. 

Green Beans are pumping and are available by special order in 10# bags at our wholesale price of $50. 'Tis the time for dilly beans, canned beans, frozen beans, or just eating a heap of beans. To order, email us your name, pickup location, the number of 10# bags you want and a phone number.

Strawberries are so lovely and abundant right now it's hard to stop picking on Tuesday and Friday! We're almost caught up with our special order list, so if you'd like to order some by the flat we can probably take care of you this month. Flats are $45 each. Email us your name, pickup location, the number of flats you'd like and a phone number.

A reminder to everyone to check labels carefully on special orders and on salad shares before you take them home. There have been some mix-ups in the past few weeks that could have been easily prevented by taking a few seconds to double check labels. Thanks for your help!

Enjoy the August abundance!

Newsletter: 

CSA Newsletter: Week 10 from Valley Flora!

Week 10!

  • Onions
  • Fennel - at last! Our first planting intended for the CSA baskets in June succumbed to some weird foliar disease, so the fennel has been a long time coming this season. I'm a huge fan of fennel - which I know not to be true of every human on the planet - but it's one of my top ten favorite veggies. It has a mild anise flavor, wonderful cooked down or sliced thinly and eaten raw. The fat, juicy bulb is the main part of the plant we eat, but you can also use the ferny tops as an herb. This week you have all the farm ingredients you need to make finocchioa wonderful summer dish built around fennel, tomatoes, onions and basil. It stands alone, or you can eat it atop pasta, fish, polenta and more. We have a pretty broad collection of fennel recipes on our website if you want to branch out further.
  • Beets
  • Lettuce
  • Strawberries
  • Carrots
  • Cucumbers
  • Zucchini
  • Tomatoes
  • Basil

On Rotation:

  • Broccoli/Broccolini
  • Eggplant - Just starting to yield in the field! 
  • Heirloom Tomatoes
  • Green Beans

Beautiful Flowers and Handsome Roosters!

Zinnias, dahlias, statice, strawflowers, sunflowers, black-eyed susans and more! The flowers are in full bloom on the farm and open for u-pick on Wednesdays and Saturdays starting at 11 am while the strawberry u-pick is open. If you come to u-pick, you might even get to enjoy the company of our oh-so-social resident farm rooster, Robinson (aka Ricky Bobby). He's really more like a dog than a chicken: he follows at your heels, comes when called and likes to share your lunch. He showed up out of the blue at the farm in June and has stuck around, making himself comfy in our equipment shed. I hate to admit just how fond I've become of a rooster, but really, what's not to love about a chicken that likes to ride in the car, socialize over lunch, and look handsome in the moments in between...

Newsletter: 

CSA Newsletter: Week 9 from Valley Flora!

Please note to all our customers who are receiving this newsletter: this is NOT the list of available farmstand produce for the week. This weekly BeetBox newsletter is primarily aimed at our CSA Harvest Basket members who receive a weekly pre-paid tote of produce for our 28-week CSA season. There has been some confusion among folks who are trying to order farmstand produce from this email. Our weekly farmstand availability emails get sent out separately to everyone who has signed up for a farmstand drive-thru pickup day on our website. All that info - in case you want to source farmstand produce - is here. Thank you!

In the Harvest Basket this Week:

  • Broccoli
  • Chard
  • Carrots - Your carrots will likely be coming loose by the pound from now on. At a certain point in the season bunching gets slow and difficult because the carrot tops get weak. We dig fresh poundage for you every week and leave the tops in the field to feed the soil microbiota.
  • Cucumbers
  • Italian Parsley
  • Head Lettuce
  • Red Long of Tropea Torpedo Onions - a specialty onion from Italy that doesn't cure or store well, but is wonderful fresh! If you had a handful more of them you could set them up as bowling pins....:)
  • Strawberries - they're back!
  • Zucchini
  • Tomatoes - It's on in the tomatoes! Bets, mi madre, is the tomato farmer (she also grows your zukes, cukes, parsley, basil and peppers) and she is now officially neck deep in her busiest, heaviest season. By the way, a sidenote about my mom: she is a badass! She's in the second half of her seventh decade of life and she's still farming full bore, lugging heavy buckets of stunner produce out of the field all week. Thanks, Ma, for adding some bling to the CSA share this week!

On Rotation:

  • Cauliflower
  • Heirloom Tomatoes

Strawberry Update: Best Week Yet!

It's shaping up to be our best week of strawberries so far this season, with lots more on the way in the coming weeks. We're seeing an incredible flush of flowers and new fruit, which bodes well for abundant u-pick in August. We opened up more beds on the u-pick side of the patch this week, and anticipate being able to give even more over to u-pick soon. I wholeheartedly recommend making time to fill your freezer in the next few weeks while the picking is at its peak! The patch opens at 11 am, Wednesdays and Saturdays. If you're coming a long distance with high hopes of bringing home a big haul of berries, aim to arrive when we open.

 

The horses have been throwing their weight around in the field every week, doing their part to keep our crops well-cultivated and weed-free. We worked Jack single this week to get into some tight crops that are just about to close in - Brussels sprouts pictured here, as well as asparagus, artichokes, leeks, kale, chard, and more. Jack is a Belgian/Morgan crossbred, and hands-down the best horse I've ever had. He works beautifully in harness and is also just as willing to saddle up and hit the trail. He's a handsome devil, all heart, with a sense of humor to boot.

 

Newsletter: 

Week 8 CSA Newsletter!

In the Harvest Basket this Week:

  • Carrots
  • Cucumbers
  • Dill
  • Lettuce
  • Red Onions
  • Zucchini
  • Cabbage
  • Broccoli or Broccolini

On Rotation:

  • Tomatoes
  • Cauliflower

Flower U-Pick Opens this Week!

The flowers are coming into full bloom on the farm: dahlias, sunflowers, zinnias, statice, strawflowers and more! The public is welcome to u-pick on Wednesdays and Saturdays during the same hours we're open for strawberry u-pick (11 am until 3 pm, or until the strawberry patch is picked out). We have clippers available, but encourage you to bring your own buckets to keep your flowers fresh on the trip home. Check in with Sarah at the strawberry u-pick for clippers and to get directions to the flower patch.

 

Newsletter: 

Week 7 CSA from Valley Flora!

In the Harvest Basket this Week:

  • Dazzling Blue Lacinato Kale
  • Carrots
  • Lettuce
  • Walla Walla Sweet Onions - big, juicy and sweet!
  • Zucchini
  • Kohlrabi - the last of it until late fall...
  • Cilantro
  • English Cucumbers

On Rotation:

  • Broccoli
  • Broccolini
  • Cauliflower - purple or neon green

Strawberries on Pause this Week

Qué lástima (what a pity), our strawberries are having a minor hiccup right now. We're in the midst of an episode of Type III bronzing in some of our Seascapes: some of the fruit is rough, leathery and seedy, which renders it unmarketable. Type III bronzing is thought to occur after fruit exposure to environmental stress in the form of high heat (over 85 degrees), extreme solar radiation, and low humidity. We're seeing it in our youngest plants primarily, where the leafy canopy is not fully developed yet. It happens every year to some extent, but is particularly bad this week. I'm guessing the culprit was the week of hot weather we had in mid-June. It takes strawberries 4 to 6 weeks to transform from blossom to fruit, so the fruit that was just forming in mid-June is maturing into ugly seedy berries right now. Bummer. It means no strawberries in the share this week, but fingers crossed for a return to beautiful harvests in the coming weeks.

There isn't a lot of research on bronzing, and actually some controversy over whether it is caused by environmental factors or a pest called thrips. I have a call and an email in to the UC organic strawberry expert in Santa Cruz in hopes of shedding some more light on the issue. We did make an interesting observation yesterday during harvest, which was that the June-bearers, which have a huge leafy, protective canopy, show no sign of bronzing, and our most mature Seascapes have very little bronzing. However, the side of the strawberry patch that was planted latest last fall has the worst of it. It suggests that the timing of planting in the fall could make all the difference. We typically start planting our new strawberry crowns in November and finish up by mid-December. If getting them in the ground in November can prevent bronzing episodes the following summer, it argues for dedicating more labor to planting strawberries as early as possible in November. 

The good news is that the strawberry u-pick, which includes our June-bearing varieties and our most mature Seascapes, is mostly unscathed. So if you're desperate for some berries this week, venture out and experience strawberry harvest first-hand. The beds are somewhat limited right now, so plan to get there at 11 am if you have your heart set on filling a bunch of buckets.

Here's a quote I have always appreciated, as someone who has crawled countless miles picking strawberries in this lifetime:

Strawberries are too delicate to be picked by machine. The perfectly ripe ones bruise at even too heavy a human touch. It hit her then that every strawberry she had ever eaten - every piece of fruit - had been picked by calloused human hands. Every piece of toast with jelly represented someone's knees, someone's aching back and hips, someone with a bandanna on her wrist to wipe away the sweat. Why had no one told her about this before.  -- Alison Luterman, What We Came For

 

 

 

Newsletter: 

Week 6 CSA from Valley Flora!

In the CSA Harvest Basket this Week!

  • Chard
  • Carrots
  • Lettuce
  • Purplette Onions
  • Strawberries
  • Zucchini
  • Hakurei Turnips

On Rotation:

  • Broccoli
  • Broccolini
  • Mini Cucumbers

Want More Food?!

If you're getting through your Harvest Basket each week and still wanting for more, remember there are a couple ways to source more produce directly from the farm:

  1. Strawberry U-Pick! Open every Wednesday and Saturday starting at 11 am at the farm. The berries are sweet and red now that our summer weather has arrived. Keep in mind we have some new u-pick systems in place this season due to COVID-19, so be sure to read up about the u-pick before you come.
  2. The Farmstand Drive-ThruDue to COVID, this spring we pivoted to a new pre-order, online farmstand system with drive-thru pick-up at our barn. We're using a customer-friendly online platform called Cropolis designed for small farms selling to local markets. There is no open-air, drop-in shopping this season. Instead you sign up for a farmstand drive-thru day - Wednesday and/or Saturday - on our website. Once you do that, you'll automatically start receiving our weekly farmstand availability emails and be able to place an order for drive-thru pickup. In addition to our produce, hot sauce and jam, you can also purchase Aguirre Farms local organic eggs, Farmstead Bread and Langlois Creamery sheep milk through our new system.

And, if it's too far for you to come to the farm, you can also find our produce at the Port Orford Community Co-op, the Langlois Market, Mother's Natural Grocery and Coos Head Food Co-op each week.

Thanks for eating locally!

Newsletter: 

Week 5 from Valley Flora!

In your Harvest Basket this week:

  • Carrots
  • Dill
  • Lettuce
  • Strawberries
  • Kohlrabi
  • Mini cukes
  • Beets - some members will get sweet red beets, others will get Chioggia beets (pink skin with a pink and white bulls-eye interior)

On Rotation:

  • Broccoli
  • Broccolini
  • Zucchini
  • Arugula
  • Mizuna - mizuna is a mild, light green, serrated Asian green - wonderful as a salad or alongside a slab of fish

A few quick notes about storing your produce and keeping it perky for as long as possible:

  1. Any leafy vegetable, like lettuce, herbs, bunch greens and baby greens, do best in the fridge in a sealed up plastic bag. They like it between 34 and 40 degrees with high humidity. Broccoli, broccolini and cauliflower are the same way. Best used in the first week.
  2. Root veggies like carrots and beets, and dense veggies like kohlrabi, store the longest if you take the tops off and store in a plastic bag in the fridge. They'll keep for months without tops, but won't taste as good 3 weeks from now as they do today. 
  3. Zucchini and cukes prefer life at around 50 degrees with some humidity, but who has their fridge set to 50?! Nobody, I hope! They'll go soft on the counter, so your best bet is to put them in the fridge in a plastic bag but use them within the week before they get slimy.
  4. Strawberries will last on your counter for a day or two, and will continue ripening as they sit there. However, you can get a lot more life out of them if you keep them in a tupperware in your fridge. Not that anyone is actually making it home with a full pint of strawberries....If you are, you probably don't have kids in the backseat :)

Farm Updates

  • NEW laminated checksheets are going out to all pickup locations this week! Please mark yourself off each week with the dry erase pen!
  • BULK BASIL by SPECIAL ORDER! Primo tops, no stem, $18/pound. Pesto-lovers rejoice! To order, email Bets your:
    • Name
    • Pickup location
    • How many pounds you want
    • Daytime phone number

Farming Improv

I have one regret about college and it's that I didn't take an improv class. At the time I had my schedule packed with other classes: fiction writing workshops, sustainable development in Latin America, ecological forest management, biology, econ, statistics...

The thing I've heard over and over from friends who did enroll in improv is that it was the most valuable class they took. My friend the labor organizer, my friend the OSU farm advisor, they swear that improv has served them in life more than any other course. Darn, I guess I really blew it in undergrad.

But good news, my Stanford alumni magazine came in the mail last month and had a whole spread about the "8 Life Lessons You Can Learn from Improv: How to apply just-go-with-it wisdom to your career, realtionships and well-being." The funny thing is, some of the guiding principles of improv have been guiding the management of the farm without me realizing they had anything to do with improv. Even better news: I didn't have to pay an arm and a leg for the college credits!

  1. Pay Attention: Yup, keen observation is by far the most important skill for keeping a highly diversified farm like ours humming, and for averting occasional disaster. Everyday I'm paying attention to every detail, with eyes, ears and nose cocked to all the sensory information the farm is throwing at us - why is that row of cauliflower an imperceptibly lighter shade of green - is there fertility stress? Why is the pump cycling so often - do we have a leak somewhere in the mainline? How big are the newly budding broccoli crowns and what's the weather forecast and should we pick them today or will they hold until Friday?
  2. Don't Go it Alone: It's all about working together - one giant spontaneous choreography each day to get all the work done between dawn and dusk on the farm. We're all leaning on each other to pull off a successful season, and the energy of every single person on our crew is essential.
  3. Trust that the Scene Will Evolve: Things are in constant flux on the farm, so extremely seasonal is our model of production. It helps to remember that one setback - like symphylans in the spring Brassicas - will give way to some other success, like beautiful June carrots. We are never stuck in one failure for too long, the failures teach us how to be better farmers, and in the end the diversity of the farm carries us through. 
  4. Stay Positive: It's easy to think it's the end of the world, but it never is. The glass-half-full mindset is the place where we proactively solve problems on the farm. The pressure tank exploded? OK, I guess that means it's time to replace it, build a better pumphouse, and plumb the system smarter than we did the first time.
  5. Accept the Offer: Saying "yes" to whatever is going on at the farm lubricates the wheels of creative innovation. COVID-19 means we can't run our farmstand? OK, Coronavirus, we'll turn it into a drive-thru!
  6. The Journey is the Thing: "what makes improvisers so good at creating something out of nothing isn't as much about what they do as it is about how they do it..." We farm because we love this place, we love working together as a family, we love to eat well, and we believe in organic, regenerative agriculture and it's ability to transform communities - from the living community in our gut microbiome all the way up to how humanity interacts with this planet. Yeah, it's about growing carrots, but it's also about a whole lot more.

My advice to you this week: say yes to beets! Accept the offer (even if you are sure you don't like beets), stay positive (they really might taste good!), don't go it alone (share them with friends), trust that the scene will evolve (i.e. you won't get beets next week!), and know that the journey is the thing (you tried them and confirmed for yourself that you really still do not like beets so you decided to carve them into stamps for your kids and you made really cool vegetable art).

A+!!!

 

 

Newsletter: 

Week 4 from Valley Flora!

Happy official summer! It arrived with a bang this week, with temps in the mid-eighties at the farm the past couple of days - dreamy weather for all the eggplant and squash and corn and beans and tomatoes and melons; a little less dreamy for all the sweaty farmers. Grateful to have legs that can march me down to the creek and throw me into the drink late-afternoon!

In your share this week:

  • Red Ursa Kale - at last! Our new plantings of kale and chard are hitting full stride now, which means we can finally leave the bitter taste of spring symphylans crop failure behind us. Red Ursa is an heirloom variety that I love for it's beautiful colors and tender leaves, and it's a great variety to use for kale chips. One of our farmstand customers is a kale chip fiend and she shared her recipe, below, with me. If you don't have a food dehydrator, you can also make kale chips in your oven on low heat: https://minimalistbaker.com/how-to-make-kale-chips/
  • Bunch Carrots
  • Mini Cucumbers - a little sampler of our favorite early mini-cuke. Not enough to make a dish, but enough to get you excited about cucumber season to come!
  • Abby's Spinach
  • Basil
  • Head Lettuce
  • Strawberries
  • Radishes
  • Hakurei Turnips
  • Fava Beans - the big, fat green pods in your tote are fresh favas. This is one of the not-so-common things we grow for you and the season is fleeting. You'll likely only see favas this week and maybe next week. They're a delightful fresh bean but they take a little effort to prepare, which is why I consider them a "weekend" food - one of those things that I'll cook when I have the luxury of a little more time. Ideally it's also one of those things you dig into with a bunch of friends - sit around and shell favas and talk story - but that might not be in the cards this COVID season. So....maybe shell favas while visiting friends on Zoom...? That's how I got 40 pounds of artichoke hearts preserved earlier this spring, in the Zoom company of college buddies around the country. If you're new to favas here's how to prepare them: https://www.epicurious.com/ingredients/how-to-prepare-fava-beans-gallery

On Rotation:

  • Broccoli
  • Broccolini
  • Snap Peas

 

Cory's Kale Chips

2 bunches kale

Dressing:

  • 3/4 cup tahini 
  • 5 tablespoons olive oil
  • 5 tablespoons lemon juice
  • 2 teaspoons nutritional yeast 
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt (or 3/4 if you're a salt fiend like me)

Remove all main stalks from the kale and cut leaves into large pieces. Wash and dry the pieces in a salad spinner so they're fully dry. Make sure they're fully dry.

Whisk all dressing ingredients together.

If you don't have a mixing bowl big enough for all the kale pieces, use a stock pot to toss them with the dressing until all the pieces are evenly coated. This process takes several minutes, using both hands.

Lay out the coated leaves on the food dehydrator trays and set to 135 degrees. For really crispy kale chips, eave them in for 18-24 hours, but best to check on them after 8 hours and play it by ear from there. 

 

The 2020 Valley Flora Crew!

It's high time you met the team that's growing, packing and delivering your food this season! Pictured left to right:

Sarah Snow and Allen Williams joined us this season after 7 years farming in Idaho and Hawaii. Sarah has the hardest job on the farm: keeping track of all four of our kids during the week, along with helping with harvest and running the U-Pick. Allen is a core part of of our harvest and field crew and is in charge of Saturday deliveries. He is also regularly called upon to reach for anything stored up in the stratosphere. We feel so lucky to have these two in our midst!

Bets, Cleo, Zoë, Abby, Jules, Pippin, Uma & Roberto in a not-so-social-distanced clump in the middle. Yes, that's Cleo stuffing her face with homemade strawberry-rhubarb pie. The kids got really into baking during "homeschool" this past spring, which is paying sweet dividends on Fridays now - they've been baking Friday treat for the whole crew. In this picture, taken last Friday, we were celebrating Roberto's birthday! Roberto has been part of Valley Flora since 2010, and what beautiful decade it's been! Roberto has thrown himself into the farm heart and soul and helped make Valley Flora what it is today. 

Jen Faraci on the far right, sporting the latest Valley Flora washline fashion (you wouldn't believe how that neon orange brings out the green in her eyes!). Jen joined us this spring and wears multiple essential hats at the farm: greenhouse manager, field and harvest crew, Wednesday deliveries. She says she's wanted to work for Valley Flora for years so she could get a free VF baseball hat. Mission accomplished. Might have to get some new merch made so we can bribe her to stay forever.

Not pictured is Donna Smith, who is running the farmstand drive-thru this season. Hats off to Donna for taking on a brand new, logistically complicated system and making it run smoothly - with a smile! A round of applause!

This little farm wouldn't chug along without this team working together. And speaking of teams, there are a two more members of the crew who pull a lot of weight around here:

Enjoy the food, have a great week!

Zoë

Newsletter: 

CSA Week 3 from Valley Flora!

In your share this week!

  • Strawberries
  • Kohlrabi - a green one and a purple one. If you're new to kohlrabi, it's the bulbous thing with the up-do of leaves. Cut the tops off and then peel the bulb with a sharp knife or good veggie peeler. It's juicy and crunchy inside, a little bit like jicama. I prefer it raw, but you can also add it to stir fries and other dishes. My five year old goes nuts for it cut up into veggie sticks. Douse it with chili and lime if you like it ala Mexicana!
  • Head lettuce
  • Bunch carrots
  • Sugar Snap Peas
  • Hakurei Turnips - the white roots that look like big radishes. These are a Japanese salad turnip, and pretty much the only turnip I grow because they're so dang good. Munch them like apples, or slice up on your salad. Buttery and tender. If you want an even more refined flavor, peel them.
  • Zucchini
  • Yellow onion

On Rotation:

  • Red mustards greens, bunched - lacey maroon leaves, eat raw or cooked - has a little kick!
  • Tatsoi, bunched - dark green spoon-shaped leaves, eat raw or cooked.
  • Braising mix, bagged - a mix of Abby's baby kale and mustard greens
  • Spinach, bagged - Abby's succulent baby spinach

The Color of Food

Tucked up Floras Creek it's easy to feel far removed from the headlines, from COVID hotspots and urban riots. It's easy to feel like race is not a pressing topic in our quiet, rural (mostly white) community. But this week I found myself really giving that more thought. I recently got my stimulus check in the mail and wanted to donate it to an organization doing good work on racial justice, ideally somewhere close to home. But what I realized is that there aren't any organizations that I know of to give that money to right here in Curry County. Is that because race is "not an issue," or rather is it because race has been such an issue - for so long - that we haven't even gotten to the point of addressing race constructively in our little corner of Oregon? 

I learned for the first time this year about Oregon's Exclusion Law of 1844: a law that banned Black people from living in Oregon. Another black exclusion law was enacted in 1849 that made it illegal for Blacks to to enter or reside in Oregon territory. It meant that when Oregon became a state in 1859 it was the ony state in the Union with a black exclusion law on the books, which was expanded to prohibit Black people from owning property and making contracts. These laws remained in place until 1926. Even though the same racist sentiment pervaded all of the U.S., Oregon was the only place bold enough to write it down. That wasn't part of my Oregon history class in high school.

My mom has an old letter written by a Civil War veteran who moved here in 1885, Samuel T. Malehorn. He settled on Floras Creek and started a fruit farm and nursery on the land where Valley Flora now sits. In 1896 he sent a letter to a friend and fellow war vet, encouraging him to move to the area:

"It is all timber, light and heavy, rolling land, well watered, productive, all of it adaptive to good fruit. I am 4 miles from the beach, which is about right, 15 miles north of Port Orford. There are still good choices for homesteaders near me...Deeded lands can be bought from $5 to $40 per acre now. 40 acres is enough for a family to live on. You can build your houses with one cedar tree by hand. Fish and game everywhere. There is no poisonous reptiles or insects, you can lay out under a tree anywhere safely. It is blessed and glorious country, the best in the U.S."

I've always loved that letter - such an affirmation of this place where we live and farm - but this week I realized another significance of that letter. Samuel Malehorn was a white man, inviting a fellow white comrade of the 29th Regiment to come to Oregon. He could live here - and so could his white friend - because they were white. They had access to cheap homesteads - and therefore land and the means of production - where Black people didn't. Oregon's historic racist exclusion laws set us on a course that put property ownership - and power - into the hands of white folks only. 

This history is no doubt part of the reason that your farmers here at Valley Flora are white, not black - why my family "owns" this land, not a Native American family or an African American family or a Chinese family or Latino family. We are standing on and supported by the very big, broad shoulders of institutionalized, systemic racism.

That's uncomfortable. And it's high time to be uncomfortable, since most of us probably don't have a clue what it's like to be really uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable, as in not able to breathe because a cop is kneeling on your neck because your skin is not white.

It's hard to know what to proactively do with this heavy realization, especially in June when most of my bandwidth is occupied with beating back the weeds, harvesting peas, and planting seeds left and right. But this morning I did something that felt really good. At the recommendation of a friend who has worked on racial justice issues for decades, I donated my $1200 stimulus check to the Movement for Black Lives Fund, a coalition that's made up of over 150 organizations that are working to coordinate actions, messages and campaigns for the Black Lives Matter Movement nationwide, and to funnel resources to frontline organizing efforts where they're needed most: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/movement-4-black-lives-1

Martin Luther Kind, Jr. said, "Everything we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see." It's time to see what's behind the shadow.

Newsletter: 

Week 3 of Winter from Valley Flora

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

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

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

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

London Bridge is Down

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

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

All hail the queen, she will be missed dearly.

 

Newsletter: 

Week 2 of Winter!

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

A Few of My Favorite Winter Meals...

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

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

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

Newsletter: 

Week 1 of Winter!

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

Back at It in the Field!

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

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

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

Newsletter: 

Week 28: Your Final Harvest from Valley Flora!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Holidays to all, savor the cozy time.

-Zoë

 

Newsletter: 

Week 27 of 28 from Valley Flora!

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

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

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

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

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

Winter CSA Sign-Ups are Open!!!

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

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

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

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

Newsletter: 

Happy Thanksgiving from Valley Flora!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newsletter: 

Week 25 of 28 from Valley Flora!

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

On Rotation:

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

Thanksgiving CSA Deliveries - PLEASE READ!

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

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

The takehome is twofold: 

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

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

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

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

The Week 26 Thanksgiving Share:

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

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

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

Get ready to feast!

Newsletter: 

Week 23 of 28 from Valley Flora!

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

On Rotation

  • Cauliflower
  • Romanesco
  • Tomatoes

November and Beyond on the Farm...

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

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

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

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

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

Newsletter: 

Week 22 from Valley Flora!

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

On Rotation:

  • Tomatoes
  • Cauliflower
  • Romanesco

New Veg!

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

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

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

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

 

Apples! Apples! Apples! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fall tastes so good!!!

Newsletter: 

Week 21 from Valley Flora!

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

On Rotation:

  • Broccoli
  • Cauliflower
  • Romanesco

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pickling will also beat them into submission.

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

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

 

Newsletter: 

Week 20 from Valley Flora!

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

On Rotation

  • Eggplant
  • Broccoli
  • Romanesco

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

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

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

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

 

Newsletter: 

Week 19 from Valley Flora!

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

On Rotation:

  • Eggplant
  • Broccoli
  • Romanesco 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newsletter: 

Week 18 from Valley Flora!

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

On Rotation

  • Head Lettuce
  • Broccoli

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

Last Week of Abby's Greens Salad Shares

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

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

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

Newsletter: 

Week 17 from Valley Flora!

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

On Rotation:

  • Eggplant
  • Cilantro

A Man and a River: Grieving them Both

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pray for rain. Lots of it.

Newsletter: 

Week 15 from Valley Flora!

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

On Rotation:

  • Cantaloupe Melon
  • Italian Parsley
  • Cilantro
  • Heirloom Tomatoes

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

In a Landscape at the Farm This Evening!

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

Newsletter: 

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - The Valley Flora Beetbox