Casey enjoying perhaps the earliest plum we've ever harvested here on our farm! "Happy early birthday to me," he said with joy. (He turns 35 next Saturday!)
How is it July already? Tomorrow, anyway … We are knee deep in real summer now, although we appreciated the last little respite we received just after the solstice. A final touch of Oregon June before we head into the real dry season.
Alas, I had so many plans this week for newsletters — the farm has me thinking a lot these days about so many things related to growing food, nourishing community, understanding each other as people. But, today was “one of those days.” Our normal rhythm was interrupted by various things, including lots of fetching things — the kids and I picked up some laying hens this morning from a friend and then Casey spent the better part of the day picking up a mower/conditioner from our tractor guy in Canby. This is step #1 in our new adventure of making our own hay! As I’ve noted in previous newsletters, we’ve had others make hay on our ground before, but it’s time for us to take control of the process from start to finish.
So, even as I write this, Casey is out “making hay while the sun shines.” The kids are already in bed, but we have a few more hours of sun left here in Oregon, such as it is in summer. But I can tell that our farmer bedtime approaches, so rather than try to muster some beautiful prose, I’ll end with a few more photos from the week that can help share the story of our farm in this season:
Sigh ... a most beautiful potato planting under a crisp blue sky.
I've set for a goal this year to harvest and dry enough herbs from around the farm to last Casey and me through to next spring (when the nettles come up again!). I pick a few little items here and there as the kids and I meander. Today's harvest: red clover blossoms and St. John's Wort!
Rusty loves to check out the animal den beneath our large Linden tree by the creek! We found some cool jaw bones here once. And, we think an owl lives high up in the tree too, because we've found pellets and droppings in a pile nearby. These are big adventures for these little ones (and me too!).
Have a safe and happy 4th of July everyone! We’ll be on the farm (as usual) celebrating Casey’s birthday (as usual). We don’t really do loud noises — for now … we’ll see how long until our adventurous boy changes the tone of the 4th on our farm.
Enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
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Reminder: The third quarterly CSA payment is due this week! I sent out email statements a while back — check yours for exact details (if you didn’t get an email me, then it’s likely you don’t owe anything this time around). Please email me if you have any questions! Thanks!
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Meet this week’s vegetables:
- Summer squash & zucchini!!!! — I can’t believe how excited I am about this summer squash and zucchini! I hope you are too! I’ve written many times in this newsletter about Casey and my own “journey to being vegetable eaters.” I think it’s easy to assume that farmers like ourselves are lifelong vegetable eaters, which is only somewhat true for Casey and me. As with many people, we were fairly ambivalent about vegetables growing up and really grew into our love as adults. This love grew directly out of trying new vegetables over and over again. Vegetables which I once actively disliked (fresh tomatoes!), I now love! Others that I just didn’t have much enthusiasm for (fennel), I also now love. Summer squash and zucchini fall into this category. For years and years and years, Casey and I grew these crops and felt pretty “eh” about them ourselves. We’d eat a bit every year, but in the last few years we really got excited about them. Last year especially, our liking turned to downright ecstatic love as we discovered how much we love roasting summer squash. This year when we picked the very first earliest summer squash, this was what we did first: slice it into chunks and then roast it at 425° (with butter) until soft and crispy on one edge. We like to put plenty of salt on it. I’m going to start drooling right now, in fact. We also love using summer squash and zucchini as the base for all kinds of summer stews. I’ll start with onions/leeks frying in butter, add zucchini, then maybe some kale or carrots or whatever else we have around (tomatoes, of course, once they arrive). Plenty of salt and butter helps here too. But seriously delicious stuff! Also, I love that summer squash is a great item for the kids to help with in the kitchen. Last year I bought them both “safety” knives that can actually cut foods but not skin, and summer squash are a favorite for them. I pull up chairs on either side of me and cut long strips for them to cut on their own cutting boards with their own knives. Rusty has been known to chop all of our squash for a meal — a real help!
- Cherries
- Fava beans
- Lettuce
- Kale
- Carrots
- Summer leeks
