Meet this week’s Mac veggies:
(This lack of photos thing is becoming ridiculous.)
- Tomatoes — Big juicy tomatoes! August tomatoes! Summer tomatoes! Amazing tomatoes!
- Basil — A share with the first big tomatoes wouldn’t be complete without basil. Our favorite snack this time of year: good fresh bread smeared with butter or goat cheese, topped with slices of tomatoes (with salt and pepper) and sprigs of basil. Can’t beat that.
- Lettuce OR cabbage — Salad or cole slaw time! Dishes that don’t heat up the kitchen!
- Beans — Your choice between green and flat yellow “romano” beans.
- Broccoli — Summer broccoli is here! This time of year we enjoy adding roasted or raw broccoli to cold grain or pasta salads.
- Cucumbers — We took cucumber with us to the beach this weekend and thoroughly enjoyed their cool watery sweetness as we sat in the sun!
- Zucchini — Wouldn’t be August without them!
- Carrots — We’ve been enjoying using carrots to dip into hummus — makes a great simple hot weather snack or part of a picnic meal!
- Torpedo onions — These are definitely one of our absolute favorite onions. We used to describe them at market like this: “They taste like a large, sweet shallot.” Yummmmmm. This is a fresh onion, so store sealed in the fridge until use. Delicious sliced onto a sandwich (perhaps the open-faced tomato and basil sandwich described above!).
This year we are farming a triangular two and half-acre field on my parents’ property next-door to ours. This is not part of our long-term expansion plan, but since our new land isn’t available or ready for our use, we’re just temporarily farming this piece, which is very low ground and similar in many ways to our new land, which also has many low places. It also shares the same soil type, a very sandy, fertile and well-drained Newberg Silt Loam.
Since this land does flood every winter (low ground!), we chose to plant primarily summer annuals there this year. All of these crops will be done producing by the time fall sets in, so we hope we will be able to harvest and sow a cover crop before the river rises in the winter. It seemed like an easy way to plan our farm this year, and it’s turned out better than we expected.
The summer annuals seem to love that little low field, tucked back against so many trees along the creek. Even when the mild season seemed to be slowing down growth in our main, higher field, most of the crops in that triangular field were steadily growing along.
And, now that it’s truly warm(ish) out this August, it is by far our most visibly abundant area on the farm. Part of that is because this is truly the season for summer annuals — they are all at their peak of productivity as they put on fruit or begin to mature their crop.
We love walking through the paths down there, in the field we’ve nicknamed “The Field of the Americas” since almost all of the crops there are native to the American continents (corn, beans, squash, peppers).
Some of the winter squash plants are almost as tall as Casey and have spread 10+ feet in every direction. The pole beans long ago reached the top of the 8-foot bamboo poles and are hanging off, reaching for the sky. The first of our many corn plantings in that field is almost nine-feet tall, towering over all of us, and an incredibly dark, rich shade of healthy green.
That first planting of corn is a dry corn, intended to cure and save for use in winter, in this case for flour. Casey planted various kinds of dry corn this year (popcorn, flour corn, polenta corn) as a trial to see what kinds we might want to grow on a much larger scale as we move into grain production in future years. He also planted sweet corn too, of course, which I’m sure we will all enjoy, but our current passion is for those diverse varieties of dry corn.
Corn, or more properly maize, is one of the most amazing native crops of the Americas. It is by far the largest and most productive grain on the planet (topping its nearest competitor wheat by several times). Casey and I were both excited to recently learn much more about the mythical and historical origins of maize in the great book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Maize has an exceedingly long and vibrant history of sustaining complex cultures and peoples for long periods of time.
In 1491, we read about the city-based cultures, many of which rose and fell quicker than the smaller scale decentralized cultures — but urban or rural alike, most of the American cultures pre-Columbus relied heavily on diverse varieties of maize (the Amazon, in contrast, relied on tree crops and the staple root manioc).
In Mesoamerica (the region now known as Mexico), farmers have been growing maize in the same plots for centuries by employing a bio-intensive and bio-diverse planting scheme known as a milpa — these fields are small (typically just an acre or a little more) and they feature inter-planted maize (many types) with beans, peppers and squashes. Upon learning about milpa plots, we couldn’t help but think of our own Field of the Americas as a sort of unskilled version, with its rows of beans interspersed with peppers, next to squash and maize … of course, we have no idea if our methods are nearly as sustainable since this is our first and last year growing there.
Either way, we are always inspired to learn more about forms of agriculture that have sustained peoples for long periods of time (another fascinating study on another continent is the book Farmers of Forty Centuries which describes pre-industrial agriculture in China). We have so much to learn from these ancient methods, even as we move forward.
Some people make the mistake of assuming that organic growers just farm the way things were done prior to the introduction of chemical agriculture in the mid-20th century. This isn’t entirely true — agriculture and land management have taken many forms throughout history and the world, and not all forms have been sustainable. And, by ‘sustainable’ I mean in the most literal sense: able to be sustained for generations.
It is only in recent years that I’ve come to understand that pre-industrial agriculture in the United States of America was just as in flux then as it is today. Many of our “farming” ancestors were new to the job and fumbled along, in some cases for generations. This is especially true for European immigrants, many of whom were much too poor to have owned land in their native countries.
Even if new immigrants and settlers did have farming experience, the soil and climate in various regions presented fresh challenges. In some cases, regions were initially settled that were completely unsuited to any of the crops known about at the time. Also, the majority of American farmers of yore were subsistence farmers, growing enough food to support their families and extra for trading or selling. It is only in the last one hundred years that farming in the U.S. really became a “profession” or “job” the way we think of it today. (For fascinating fictional accounts of 19th century farming in America, check out these books: O Pioneers, Giants in the Earth, Farmer Boy, and The First Four Years.)
And, American farming practices certainly didn’t settle into a more or less homogeneous continued tradition until industrialization and the introduction of chemical inputs (except for niche communities, such as the Amish, who have established their own successful and evolving farming practices in America somewhat independently of mainstream ag).
In contrast to 19th century European settlers, actually, were Japanese immigrants in the early 20th century who often arrived with highly skilled farming practices and quickly established profitable market farms all along the West Coast (this is another one of those historical facts few people know, since most of the farms were stolen during WWII and Japanese interment).
Anyhow, yes, many of the practices we have adopted or are striving for are adopted from some form of prior agricultural practice. Use of green or animal manures, crop rotations, seed saving — these all have long histories in many different agricultural traditions.
But, I definitely don’t think that organic farmers today are just walking back in time, because today we have amazing access to information about so many traditions and forms of agriculture around the world. We are able to synthesize and analyze experiences of others and then make informed choices about how we want to take our farm into the future. It’s a whole new ballgame for us 21st century growers.
Of course, at times, this wealth of information can feel overwhelming (especially when one adds the large number of seed catalogs, equipment choices, marketing outlets, etc.), but overall we feel empowered by our ability to take sneak peeks into the successful (i.e. sustainable) or not successful practices of the past.
And, ultimately, many practices do overlap in theory, if not in exact implementation. The ideas of biodiversity, feeding the soil, thinking about the long-term health of the land … these ideas pop up in different forms in many historical and modern contexts.
So, our Field of the Americas might not technically be a milpa — but knowing about this ancient farming practice certainly inspires how we see our field today. We are so excited about the idea that these specific American crops have a long history of truly sustaining people, especially in their dry storable forms. As year-round CSA farmers, we would love to have more diversity of crops to offer in the “off” season, including dry beans and corn which have so many diverse flavors and tasty, nutritious cooking options!
Seeing our little field through the eyes of an ancient (or contemporary) Mesoamerican farmer also reminds us of our responsibility for this land we have the honor to farm. Casey and I are both acutely aware that at some point our ancestors were interlopers here. Reading 1491 and learning once again about the tremendous losses of peoples on the continent brought us both a profound sense of sadness — for the people, their lives, their knowledge, their cultures … We can’t erase the past, but we can take responsibility today and hopefully grow food in a way that respects the land and radiates care for all creatures, past and present.
Enjoy this week’s vegetables … many of them picked from the Field of the Americas!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
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CSA potluck on August 27!
Our annual summer CSA potluck is coming up on Saturday, August 27! (Reminder: this is a week later than the date that went out with prior information.)
Join us at 6ish for a potluck dinner. Bring a dish to share (salad, side dish, main dish, dessert). If you can, please bring your own plate and cutlery (we have extras, but we don’t want to run out if lots of folks come!). We’ll share a meal, conversation, and then Farmer Casey will give a walking tour of the farm during “golden hour” (when everything glows!).
This is always a fun, intimate event, and it’s a great way to meet new people who have shared interests (good food, sustainable living, etc.)
Directions: Take HWY-18 to Dayton exit. Head South straight through town, and stay on Wallace Rd/HWY-221 for about six miles. Turn LEFT onto Grand Island Rd. Go over the bridge, and then turn RIGHT onto SE Upper Island Rd. Our driveway is immediately on your LEFT. Park anywhere safe and join us for the potluck under our enormous walnut tree (behind the two-story cedar house in back).
