Seed growing update

(CSA Newsletter: Week 41)

Meet this week’s vegetables:

• Sweet peppers — So far, we’ve only heard excitement about the continued sweet pepper abundance. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, you can very easily freeze your peppers for later. Core and remove the seeds, then chop and put straight into a freezer bag. Obviously frozen fresh peppers won’t retain the same crispness after thawing, but they are delicious to add to pasta dishes, soups, and casseroles all winter long.
• Broccoli — More of our new favorite fall broccoli variety. We love how the tight ‘bead’ on the heads keeps these from getting damaged in the wet weather. We think they taste great too!
• Chard OR Fennel bulbs — Your choice between ‘Rhubarb’ (i.e. red) chard or a fennel bulb.
• Carrots
• Sweet potatoes — ‘Tis the season for sweet potatoes! (I love how many fall foods have ‘sweet’ in the name — what a delicious time of year!)
• “Sweet meat” winter squash — This is a variety of winter squash that we grew this year on a vegetable seed contract. Rather than cut open the squash and waste the meat, we’re taking out the seed and giving you half of a squash to eat this week! We tried some last night with dinner and found that it is a very mild, wet smooth fleshed squash. I think it would be delicious in soups or in baking recipes (squash bread, pumpkin pie, etc.). If you don’t use it right away, cover the cut edge with plastic wrap and put in the fridge to store for up to a week. An easy way to cook: put cut side down on a baking sheet and bake at 350° until the flesh is soft all the way through. At that point, let cool and scoop/cut out the flesh to add to soup or use in baking.
• Leeks

This week we’re giving out a winter squash that we grew as a seed crop this year. As we’ve mentioned before, growing vegetable seed is a relatively new venture for us here at Oakhill Organics. It’s something that fits in well with our vegetable production, since they are the same crops — we just treat them differently (and obviously leave the seed crops in the fields longer so that the plants can complete their full life cycle and produce mature seeds).

This is the first fall we’ve had actual seed growing contracts to fill. Last year, we just messed around on our own and then managed to sell some of the seeds to local catalogs. This year we’re a little more serious and focused about it, and we’ve been pleased to see that (so far) adding some seed contracts to our farm’s work is not overly burdensome. The work fits nicely into the rest of our season — as I said, most of the work is the same: we sow, plant, water, weed. The big difference comes in the harvest season, when we pull the seed crops and let them further mature or cure in a warm dry space. Then, once the rain begins, we begin the work of ‘cleaning’ the seed.

Your squash this week is part of that process — to clean squash seed, we start by removing the seed from the squash. Rather than the waste the good flesh, we’re giving it to you! We’d love your feedback on its eating quality, since this is the first time we’ve grown this special ‘Sweet Meat’ squash. Then Casey and Jeff will carefully remove the seeds from the pulp and dry them.

Just as with different fresh eating vegetables, each seed crop has a slightly different seed cleaning process. Winter squash is a ‘wet’ seed crop, meaning that the seed is in a wet cavity, as are the peppers and tomatoes we grew for seed this year.

In contrast, the pole bean seed we grew on contract is a ‘dry’ seed crop, meaning that the final stage of the seed is in a very dry state — dry bean inside dried down shell. Casey already threshed and winnowed the bean seed outside while it was still dry out. We’ve discovered that these ancient arts are still easy to do by hand (winnowing with a little house fan or the exhaust on a shop vac).

Next, he and Jeff do a final clean, by sorting the beans on a table (pulling out bad beans) and doing a few final screenings and winnow rounds until the beans are quite clean and ready to ship to the seed company.

We’ve enjoyed the different work. It’s on such a different time scale than our usual harvests. With the fresh eating vegetables, we harvest and sell it usually immediately (with the exception of some storage crops). But the seed crops are grown, harvested, cleaned, and sold over a longer period of time, and the work feels more leisurely and less urgent (so far).

In fact, we just received a check for celery root seed we sold this year. This check was two years in the making: we sowed the celery root in 2008, grew it in the field in 2008, overwintered it (through the big snowpocalypse), transplanted the roots in early 2009, grew out the seed in 2009, pulled the crop in late summer 2009, cured the seed in fall of 2009, threshed and winnowed in late 2009, waited for the seed to come out of dormancy (for germination tests), and then finally shipped the seed in summer 2010.

Since seed growing still feels very experimental to us, we haven’t yet incorporated our ‘seed money’ into our budgets, so every check we receive is unallocated funds! The check we received for the celery root seed is a big one — big enough that it allows us to order a second greenhouse to construct this fall!

We’re not sure where we’ll go with the seed growing in the future. So much still depends on whether we’ll be able to buy the adjacent 31 acres. It’s funny to feel so patient about something that will determine so much of our future. We really do hope we can purchase this land, but at the same time we feel at peace with waiting for the current owners to make a decision. Some things are definitely worth waiting for.

Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

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Quarry hearing update

The gravel quarry hearing went long and didn’t finish … Most of our great expert witnesses were able to testify before the hearing concluded at 9:30 pm, but only a couple of us Grand Island farmers and residents have testified yet. So, the hearing continues 10 am on Thursday, December 2 at the Yamhill County Courthouse.

The good news about a second session is that opposition testimony will be the first order of business, so if you wanted to testify but couldn’t wait all day, here’s another opportunity!

It was great to see so many friendly and supportive faces at the first hearing. I hope that some of you can come again to keep reminding the commissioners that Yamhill County cares about protecting farmland!