(CSA Newsletter: Summer Week 10)
Meet this week’s vegetables:
We have much to share with you this week! To accommodate it all we must abandon any pretense of transitions & give it to you in ‘bits & pieces’ …
Halfway point!
We know that students and teachers returned to school today, signaling the end of summer, but don’t despair! The fresh vegetable season continues long beyond the school year’s start. In fact, this week is officially just halfway through the Oakhill Organics CSA year! After this week, we have eight more weeks in the summer CSA season (ending on October 30) & then another seven weeks in the fall CSA season (running from Nov. 6 through Dec. 18). Plus, we still have six weeks of Farmers’ Market remaining this year: the final market day is on October 11. So, even though it may feel like summer ends today, we think the season still has treats up its sleeves for all of us: a few more sunny warm weekends at least & plenty of delicious vegetables.
Fall & winter pick-up at Red Fox Bakery!
And though it is still weeks away, we have found a good home for our less sunny CSA months. For the 2006 fall & 2007 winter seasons, we will hold the CSA meeting site at Red Fox Bakery on Evans Street downtown, less than four blocks from our current site at First Baptist. We just finalized most of the details with owners Jason and Laurie Furch, & we all agree that their bakery will provide a most cozy and convenient location for veggie pick-up during the wet months.
We love having the pick-up outside in the summer, but those of you in last year’s CSA I’m sure remember some dark & muddy moments. While they were fun for one season, we’d rather avoid those inconveniences this year & keep things pleasant. We’ll include more details & reminders as the fall season approaches, but for now just make a mental note that we’ll be changing locations. The day & time will remain Tuesdays from 3:30 to 6:30 pm.
A big thanks to Jason & Laurie for sharing their space. And to First Baptist for a perfect summer location. And also thanks to everyone who offered their garage, carport, etc. It was wonderful to have so many choices. In the end, we decided that a commercial space is probably easiest in terms of having adequate parking, etc.
Onions! & More!
The last week was one of the craziest we’ve had around here in awhile … As you know, we’ve been planning & preparing for fall/winter all summer, and this last week we began harvesting one of our three big storage plantings: our onions.
Once we began pulling them to dry, we both agreed: we may have over-planted. After three days of work, we have a lot of beautiful onions drying under our walnut tree. Our preliminary estimates were around 5,000 – 6,000 pounds. Yikes! So many onions.
The good news is that they look great, especially our red storage onions, some of which weigh up to a pound each. The hardest part of that harvest is over — now we just need to let them dry; trim, sort & grade them; and move into storage for the winter.
… and our next big harvesting tasks over the next two months: potatoes, followed by winter squash! Fortunately these three crops (which combined take up an acre of our 4.5 acre garden), mature at different rates over the end of the summer, so we aren’t stuck attending to all of them at once. That would not be possible right now.
Tired? Yes!
And speaking of three days of onion harvesting, we had a few people express concern last week that we look ‘tired.’ Yes, we certainly were tired last week. We tried to fit a lot into one week: the onion harvest; more fall planting; and our usual routine of CSA, market, restaurant harvests. We’ve been tired generally this last month … August is a tiring month, as we try to finish up summer work, prepare for fall, and still balance everything in between.
But we want you all to know that we’re ok. Really. Unfortunately, you all mostly see us at the ends of long harvest days: at the CSA pick-up or at market. I think that by the time we get to the pick-up site or market and set-up, we both experience a big rush of relief, followed by relaxation (which may accurately look like exhaustion, since the two are closely related). We still both have plenty of energy & excitement for the farm. We’re in no danger of giving up or burning out anytime soon.
Plus, I’m not sure what other life path would be less stressful for us. We look at what other folks are doing at our age and see just as much exhaustion. Friends of ours are just beginning their medical residencies (so exhausting), are teaching (so exhausting), have young children (so exhausting), or are trying to establish their careers in a world of lay-offs (so exhausting).
I think that being in your 20s and 30s is a time when you work yourself silly trying to get life off the ground, regardless of what you do. (A friend of ours calls it ‘breaking gravity,’ in reference to the massive burst of energy the space shuttle requires to get beyond the earth’s atmosphere into space where it can then more or less coast.)
So, while we do appreciate people’s concern (and are glad that folks want the farm to continue!), we are fine. And, we’ve already decided to not expand our CSA or market presence next year, in the hopes that we can have at least one year where we more or less know what to expect. That would be nice.
And, finally, very good island news!
We realized that in our own farm news & our panic over the recent quarry rumor, we have completely neglected sharing a great bit of island news. This summer, Laura Masterson, a CSA farmer from the Portland area (47th Ave Farm), purchased the 38-acre parcel of beautiful farmland just kitty-corner from us at the intersection. We are super excited that she and her farm will be moving down here (potentially a several year-long process). Not many young farmers get to have peers just a ‘block’ away, let alone two other farms run by young folks — Viridian Farms, a big Portland market presence, is already farming just across the street from Laura’s land.
Economists and farmers alike agree on one firm belief: the best preservation of farmland is for farmers to succeed. Three direct-market, CSA vegetable farms, run by young farmers, all thriving on one country intersection stands as a beacon of hope for us — for the future of Grand Island, Yamhill County, Oregon & beyond.
May that image of real hope warm you as well this week. And, as always, enjoy the vegetables!
Your farmers,
Katie & Casey Kulla
Oakhill Organics
