The Willamette River was already creeping up on our broccoli seed crop Friday afternoon, hours before the official crest on Saturday morning.
Meet this week’s vegetables:
- Purple top turnips — We pulled these beautiful turnips out of the ground in anticipation of the flood’s arrival. They were ready to harvest and we were worried we’d lose them! Fortunately, the waters never reached these beds, but in the meantime we still have lovely turnips to eat. We enjoy these turnips peeled raw and then chopped small and made into a slaw with cabbage or carrots (also chopped small). Sometimes we also add apples! A simple cream dressing is all it takes to transform a humble root vegetable into a delightful crunchy winter salad!
- Brussels sprouts — The mild winter has been wonderfully kind to our Brussels sprouts. In most years, they don’t make it through the turning of the year, but right now we have a small field full of these delicious round treats! Remove from the stalk by twisting (or carefully cutting with a paring knife). We recommend trimming before cooking. Typically, we simply slice them in half and sauté in butter until tender. It’s easy and delicious.
- Komatsuna mustard greens — These greens are among the most radiant vegetables in our winter garden. Their color reminds us of verdant spring, even as the rest of the world remains subdued. They are mild and tender enough to chop as a green salad, but you can also gently sauté these and eat them as a cooked green.
- Carrots — The carrots have fared well in storage and are still sweet and moist! Enjoy!
- “Red thumb” fingerling potatoes — A smaller style potato, fingerlings’ size makes them well suited to roasting. Scrub the skin clean, slice in half or quarters and roast at 425° until tender inside and crispy outside!
- Delicata winter squash — We discovered this winter that our toddler son Rusty enjoys eating delicata as “finger food,” so we’ve started making delicata “rings” more regularly: wash your squash and then chop width-wise to make rings of even width. Once they are chopped, you can easily scoop out the seeds. Arrange in a single layer on an oiled baking sheet and roast until tender and crispy (turn once). If you want to be sure they will be sweet, you can brush them with honey or maple syrup before cooking.
- Leeks — Another hardy winter vegetable! In the winter, we like to use leeks in place of onions to mix up the flavors in our dishes.
This week marks the start of our 2012 CSA season, our seventh season offering this program in Yamhill County! Over our break, I occasionally pondered how I should mark this occasion in the first newsletter and came up with many heart-warming reflections … which now will have to be set aside until future weeks, because we have some “breaking news” to address first!
This last week we experienced our first real flood here on Grand Island. In fact, even as I write this newsletter on Monday morning, the water is still receding very slowly, and I can see a large river of water all along our home property.
The fact that floods happen on Grand Island is not a surprise to us. When we bought our home farm back in 2006, we spent several months investigating every aspect of it and learned all that we could about the flood history and what that would mean for our future farm. Eventually, we decided that this was the right place for us to farm, and we accepted the inevitability of future floods as part of that decision.
In fact, the fact that our land floods is directly related to its desirability for our farm — flood plain land is often some of the most fertile and best drained land in an area, and this is true here on Grand Island. While it doesn’t flood here every year, every year we receive the direct benefits of prior floods in the form of rich, arable soil that drains well in all seasons (making winter gardening especially successful).
On some level, farming here (especially in the winter) feels a bit like a gamble, but the odds are very good — we “win” big most years, but we still live with a slight sense of being constantly on the edge of something big and unknown.
Of course, “knowing” this in our heads was different than actually experiencing a flood. Up until this last week, we had experienced regular high water events that got the corners of our field wet (including once in June — that was a real surprise!), but no actual floods.
This particular flood crept up on us too. This winter has been very mild with many long dry spells. In contrast, we’ve experienced other seasons with record rainfall and no flood to follow. The hydrology of floods is obviously very complicated, but needless to say, a flood was not on our mental horizon this winter.
Then two Sundays ago, it snowed in the northwest, followed by a fair amount of rainfall. At the beginning of that week, the Willamette River was at a very low winter level of 8 ft. But mid-week, we saw on the online NOAA prediction website that it was going to come up fast. Each day, the predicted crest was higher, so that by Thursday we realized we were in for our first true flood.
We started scrambling that day: Casey took down the control panel of our well on the land next-door, which we feared was in the path of the rising waters. We moved implements to high ground, and Casey started harvesting crops that we worried would be lost.
I sent out a plea on Facebook for help, and Friday morning a hardy bunch of folks came out to help us urgently finish digging our potatoes and harvest as much from our winter garden as possible. In actuality, many crops can survive gently moving floodwaters, but not roots or crops that are ready to harvest — we wanted to be sure we could start the CSA season as planned! With the help of these volunteers, we managed to bring in 600lbs potatoes, 400lbs turnips, 100 lbs chicories, 400lbs brussels sprouts, 500 cabbages, 300lbs leeks, and 200lbs of celery root — quite a feat and good for Casey and my spirits on so many levels that day. The river was already in our fields that day, but it hadn’t crested yet and we went to bed knowing we’d wake up to a changed landscape.
Saturday morning we woke up to the crest (29.36 ft in Salem, making it the 14th highest flood in recorded history for the Willamette). The road onto the island was cut off by water, and the river in our field was up past the top sideboard on our greenhouses. Two fingers of water crossed the field and were in our winter vegetable garden (fortunately spots we’d harvested already!), leaving the vast majority of our winter crops high and dry! Oh, how we rejoiced upon seeing that!
We spent the weekend doing what most islanders were doing: wandering around and looking at the water where we could. Many roads on the island were cut off by high water, so we couldn’t walk as far as usual. For Casey and me, it was fascinating to see such a changed landscape and to learn where high ground lies. Whole fields were part of the river in some places, while others were still dry (very few though). Unfortunately, as part of this exploration, we learned that essentially all of our new 85 acres next-door was low and underwater. This was a sad piece of news and has us rethinking how we approach our plans over there for buildings, infrastructure and animals.
But, there were many things about this flood that left us entirely grateful. For one, we are grateful for the timing — that it arrived before the CSA season begun, allowing us to react without interrupting normal vegetable deliveries. Also, we are grateful that the flood occurred before we developed any of the new land — how wonderful to have this important knowledge now as we move forward with plans!
We are also of course grateful that our winter vegetables were spared and that we already had so much harvested and safely secured in cold storage. And, of course we are so grateful for the help of our friends and CSA members in bringing even more in to storage at the last minute.
We were extremely grateful for the high ground we do have on the home farm, especially for our house and existing infrastructure. Even as high as the floodwaters came up, they were still visibly quite far from our home, which was a huge relief (not everyone fared so well in Oregon during these floods, and our heart goes out to anyone who had damage on their home!).
We were also surprisingly thankful for the opportunities provided by the flood — namely the many occasions to interact with our neighbors, which is a less common occurrence out here in the country where we are usually all busy with our own farms and lives. Everyone was out exploring this weekend, and so we ran into each other on the road and had many good check-ins with folks. It seems that adversity is good for community — those moments when we actually need each other form bonds in ways that potlucks just can’t (although potlucks are good too!).
Rusty was grateful to have a river in his backyard, which offered countless opportunities for rock and stick throwing. Given that the water has yet to come down, this fun continues!
So, now that we are more or less through the flood, we are feeling pretty good about how it unfolded.
But, I think that Casey and I are both still recovering somewhat from the simple shock of having the Willamette River raging through our farm. Looking out our windows and seeing such a massive body of water is intimidating. I also think that we have a new appreciation of what it means to live and farm in a flood plain. It’s going to be hard to go back to feeling quite as casual about the possibility of floods, but I need to keep perspective that this scale of flood is still a relatively unusual event. They don’t happen every winter, and even then they just occupy a week or two of time. Of course, when they do happen, they are quite dramatic!
Our thoughts for the future are focused on how we continue to farm in the best possible way while also establishing contingency plans for floods. For example, animals continue to pose a challenge, since we will have to consider their safety and health in a flood too. But even though they would be challenging, we think these are challenges worth figuring out. Because in all those other majority of moments on our farm, animals would be well suited to this place and to our farm.
In the meantime, we’re keeping our fingers crossed that this recent crest was the big water of the winter. The river is going down much slower than it came up. The NOAA prediction is for the water to hang out just below 24 feet (in the “action stage”) for the foreseeable future (see the NOAA website here). This won’t hurt our farm, but it does leave the river primed for another big water event, which makes us nervous. In 1996, there was an early January flood of 29 feet, followed two months later by the big 1996 flood of 35.09 feet in February. The likelihood of that same scenario happening again seems low (especially given that the 1995-96 water year also had over 80 inches of rainfall — something we are not experiencing this winter!). (Update: as of Tuesday, the river is predicted to go back up to just shy of 25 ft this weekend!)
Anyhow, for now it seems that we’re set to start the CSA just as we’d planned. We are so excited to have new people with us this year, and we are also so excited to have our Newberg pick-up join us for the whole season. This is also the first year we’re implementing our new system of choosing your own number of items to take home, and we’re looking forward to see it in action. Please share any feedback you have as we go!
We hope you all are staying dry as this winter continues. Enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
