In the CSA Share this Week:
- Walla Sweet Onions - jumbo, juicy, sweet and mild!
- New Potatoes - in red, yellow, purple and blue!
- Carrots
- Zucchini
- Strawberries
- Parsley
- Greenleaf Lettuce
On Rotation:
- Cucumbers
- Broccoli
- Gold Zucchini
Produce Notes:
Everyone is gonna find a little nest of multi-colored new potatoes in their tote this week. They're called "new" because they're freshly dug while the plants are still green, before the tubers have fully sized up and before the skins have cured (unlike storage potatoes, which have finished their life cycle underground and have tougher, scuff-proof skin). This means they're extra tender and delicious, but also need to be stored in a plastic bag in the fridge to stay fresh. New potatoes are wonderful steamed then drizzled with olive oil or butter and fresh herbs (you have parsley in your share this week; if you find any leftover dill in your fridge from last week that would also be delish).
Walla Walla Sweets are also debuting this week: our biggest, most bodacious onion - sweet, mild, and your siren song to make onion rings! We always start giving these out when they're still fresh with green tops, but we plant enough to also let some dry down and cure for short-term storage. That means you'll see Walla Wallas a few times between now and October, while they're at their best.
Bulk Basil by Special Order!
The basil is still pumping, so if you haven't made your pesto for the season yet there's still time! Place your order online and Bets will reach out when your basil is in the queue for delivery to your pickup site!
A Love for Lettuce
We grow hundreds of different crops at Valley Flora, but when you drill down into the numbers a pretty significant percentage of our business comes down to lettuce. Abby's Greens were the very first commercial crop to come off the farm back in 1998 (and here we are, almost 30 years later). Head lettuce makes up almost a quarter of our wholesale sales to stores, co-ops and restaurants. One of the reasons for this: we really love eating salad. I mean, REALLY love it (people who are dining with us for the first time often get bug-eyed when they see the size of our nightly salad bowl, and I'll admit that there are plenty of times when the dinner menu is just salad and popcorn). But there's also another reason that lettuce plays such a dominant role in our world: this is the perfect climate to grow lettuce. A lot of farms in hotter locales have to give up on lettuce through the summer months, or rely only on heat and bolt-resistant varieties like summer crisps (that was the type of lettuce you received in your CSA share last week, a fantastic variety named "Magenta" that has some crunchy, juicy, iceberg characteristics). But on Floras Creek we can plant lettuce almost every week of the year (with a little help from our greenhouses in the winter) to keep the salad love flowing. The colors! The shapes! The flavors and textures! Yup, I'm a lettuce swooner.
So when Cyclosporiasis started making the headlines this month I knew it could go one of two ways for us: either demand for our lettuce would bump up because people would go looking for a local source, or the generalized fear of explosive diarrhea would scare people off lettuce altogether. As it turns out, both things happened, first the latter and then the former. We sell almost eleven cases of lettuce to Coos Head Food Co-op each week and in mid-July they reached out and let us know that their deli salad sales had slumped considerably. Lettuce - any lettuce - had become radioactive in the public eye. But within a week, after more details became known about the source of the Cyclospora outbreak and some messaging about how CHFC exclusively sources their lettuce from Valley Flora in the summer, sales rebounded. At the same time, demand for lettuce at our farmstand started going through the roof. Ironically, over the past two weeks we've been selling more butterhead, romaine and leaf lettuce than ever before in the humble history of the VF farmstand.
It's encouraging to see consumers understand that there's a difference between lettuce produced and processed in a globalized industrial food system versus lettuce sourced within a local, farm-direct food system. It's one of the many benefits of knowing where your food comes from, and who grew it. Thanks for being part of that food system, and for enabling our lettuce obsession. Lettuce swooners and lettuce enablers, we make a great team.
Fields of green (and red, and gold, and chartreuse, and forest green, and merlot, and did I mention the savoyed leaf structure of the romaine and the extra crunchy ribs of the little gem and the unbelievable sweetness of the butterheads, and and ....?)
The farm truck, Yoshi, loaded up with a Tuesday lettuce haul: 40+ cases of redleaf, greenleaf, romaine and butterhead destined for salad bowls between Port Orford and Coos Bay.
