(CSA Newsletter: Main Season Week 11)
Meet this week’s vegetables:
What a wonderful week we had here at the farm. After our well fiasco the week before, we were determined to take life’s obstacles in stride and keep enjoying the farm despite the continued uncertainties. And, enjoy we did. A few highlights from the week:
The weather, which was gorgeous — alternating between sunny and warm (but not hot!) and overcast and rainy. We received ‘measurable’ rainfall for the first time in 53 days (by our count here at the farm). The rain was more beautiful than overly useful, but I’m sure the wetness on the ground was appreciated by every growing thing on the farm, including us.
We made more progress towards a new well. The second driller came out again to ‘locate’ the new drilling location, just a few yards south of the old well. Of course, the actual drilling frightens us (so much uncertainty!), but we’re moving in a good direction anyway.
Some new and old friends came out the farm on Friday for a lovely potluck dinner followed by a walk through the fields during the ‘golden hour’ (when the sun peeks out below the clouds before setting and fills the world with rich glowing light). Just enough cherry tomatoes were ripe for us to taste on our way past the tomato houses. Delicious!
We participated in a very special dinner on Saturday night at Jacob Hart Vineyard outside of Newberg. The dinner was put on by Plate & Pitchfork, a project that aims to connect urban eaters to agriculture and create an awesome, memorable dining experience at the same time. The dinners are actually in the fields of farms around the Portland area, in this case between the rows of the vineyard. We were invited to provide produce and then speak about our farm (and then eat tasty food!) this weekend, and it was an honor and blast to participate. While we have the unique opportunity to experience dining in fields all the time, rarely do we do so with so many people — and we’re usually hosting too — so this was a beautiful, relaxing experience. We met fun new people, ate delicious food featuring some delicious pork, drank good wine, and watched the stars come out.
And, a final highlight for our week was the farm itself. August has arrived, which always marks yet another ‘turning point’ in the season. We’re reaching the end of our sowing and planting routines, and spending more and more fieldwork time maintaining plants in the field. We still have some fall garden stuff to get in over the next month, but for the most part, we’re just keeping things going: weeding, irrigating, harvesting.
Even though the season started out exceptionally slow, the fields are looking good. Every season is unique, of course; the ‘average’ season exists solely in statistics, even though we reference it all the time. (I’m not even sure we’d recognize average if we saw it!) Given that, we actually feel pretty good about what we’re seeing. Yes, the tomatoes are much later than last year, which were later than 2006 (which was of course the hottest summer on record) — but the plants are healthy and loaded with coloring fruit.
A few of our plantings look better than ever before too, which is exciting to us. The winter squash paths are a little weedy, but the plants are enormous and setting beautiful, healthy-looking fruit. This was our first year direct-seeding winter squash, and it looks like it was a good choice (last year the plants themselves were never very vigorous or full and consequently much of the fruit was scalded by the sun). Our beans are also looking drop-dead gorgeous. We have the healthiest beds of green, shelling, and soy beans we’ve ever seen. The edamame are chugging along, bright green and lush.
The first of the fall and winter cole crops are also doing well. We planted them out two and half weeks ago, and they’re already tripled in size. We didn’t end up row covering them this year, so we’ve had the ability to already cultivate them once. As usual, we’re staying on top of the fall plantings better than our summer ones (as is appropriate given how long they’ll be in the fields).
This week we’re looking forward to warmer weather (opportunities for river swimming!), a visit from some Katie’s extended family, and hopefully the start of our new well. Even though we still have two months of hard work left in the season, August is definitely the beginning of the ‘downhill slide’ to the finish.
And, before it’s all over, we promise you will have eaten your fill of sweet juicy summer fruits. Today’s green beans and tomatoes are just the beginning. Hoorah for August! Enjoy your summer vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
P.S. Your own opportunity to walk and dine in the fields is approaching: we’re having another CSA farm potluck Saturday, August 23, beginning at five-ish. More details will follow in future newsletters. Hope to see you here!
On planning a menu:
Sometimes others say things so perfectly that it is only necessary to quote them … Excerpted for your reading pleasure from Marcella’s Italian Kitchen, here are Marcella Hazan’s wise words:
“In simpler times, planning a menu did not require hard thought. Each season had its products, and cooks had a modest stock of reassuringly familiar recipes that could be arranged to suit most circumstances: a casual dinner for friends or a fancy one for important guests; a celebration; the everyday family meal, when it was still the custom to produce one.
“Today, in the market, it appears to be spring and summer all year long. Moreover; there is such an abundance of recipes available to Americans, most of them derived from other heritages, that picking one’s way among them is like sorting out the many and tangled strands of a thick skein. The trick is to find the principal thread, the one that, as it unwinds, shakes free all the others.
“When I am deciding on a menu, no matter if it is for the family, for guests, or for one of my demonstrations, I start thinking not of a specific dish, but of what ingredients may be timely. Nearly always, the first ones I look at are the vegetables. I know that now one can find almost all grown things almost all the time, but until one has seen them, no one can tell which are the freshest, ripest, youngest. No preparation, however skillful and elaborate, can compensate for indifferent produce, nor can the most brilliantly conceived menu divert attention from its shortcomings.
“Vegetables are the main line to which the several courses of an Italian meal connect. The choice of vegetable will determine with which pasta, risotto, or soup you will begin, which in turn affects the decision on the second course, the side dish, and, eventually, the salad. The process unrolls just as naturally from the other end, by the choosing the second course that is flattered best by the accompanying vegetable, then settling on a first course that will lead gracefully to the second.
“… Of course, we all like to plan ahead as much as possible, drawing on experience to work out tentative choices. But once we are in the market [or CSA pick-up!], we must be willing to revise or abandon those choices. A menu ought never to be jammed into an arbitrarily established scheme. One takes one’s cues from what the ingredients themselves suggest, as though one were listening to a story unfold. A sensitively assembled Italian menu has no set pieces; it may be meticulously wrought, but conveys no sense of fabrication; it speaks not of the cleverness of the cook but of the character of its components; it is derived each time from a true, sweetly seasonal moment of which it is the faithful depiction.”
