| What's Growing This Week | |
Strawberries
Cherries
Summer Squash
Salad Mix
Navel Oranges
Arugula (M,L)
Sugar Snap Peas (M,L)
Apples (M,L)
Garlic (M,L)
Cilantro (L)
English Peas (L)
Spinach (L)
Potatoes (L)
Items are subject to substitution without notice.
# Asparagus comes from Jim and Deborah Durst in Esparto. It is CCOF certified organic. |
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Green Beans Next Week!
Our early plantings of Green Beans have been patiently sitting, waiting for just a little warm weather to size up their tiny beans. We're finally getting that weather now, with more to come next week. As the beans come on in force, our Pea fields will fade out and their season will be over.
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Berry Care 101
-- TFF strawberries are highly perishable. If you want them to keep for more than a day, store them in a sealed, airtight plastic container in the fridge.
-- Don't wash them until just before you eat them.
-- Recycle the green baskets. We can't reuse them here (for food safety reasons) so there's no reason to send them back to us.
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Get More Berries!
Did the basket of strawberries in your box disappear before your spouse/partner/roommate got it home? You can get a half flat (6 baskets) of TFF berries delivered with your box, for just $12. Log on to your account and go to the Web Store, then select strawberries. Deliveries will start the first of May.
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Contact Us:
| terrafirmafarm.com
csa@terrafirmafarm.com
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| CSA Rates 2011 | Boxes are charged on Monday for the week's deliveries at:
$14 Small
$24 Medium
$32 Large
For a payment of $300, get a 3% bonus. Your account balance will be $309.
For a payment of$850, get a 5% bonus. Your account will be posted as $892.00
For a payment of $1,400, get a 7% bonus. Your payment will be posted as $1,498.
Vacations are charged weekly when notice is given as a fee, no charges occur during the vacation week.
$4 Small
$8 Medium
$11 Large
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Payments, Billing, and Changes
| Schedule vacations, change box sizes, make payments or sign up for autopay by logging in to your subscriber account at terrafirmafarm.com
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News From Terra Firma Farm
Community Supported Agriculture
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Greetings!
Most people are aware that California grows the majority of the fruits and vegetables eaten in the United States. And almost everyone "knows" that "California is a desert", and crops here are grown primarily using irrigation rather than relying on rainfall. What most people don't fully understand is why our state, despite its "lack of water", is one of the best places in the world to grow fresh produce.
In a word, it's all about the climate. California is not a desert, although we have several deserts in the state (and some food is grown in them). Most of the state has a Mediterrean climate, meaning that it has wet, mild winters and long dry summers. No other state in the U.S. has this exact combination. Other western states have dry summers, but longer, colder winters. And many southern states have long growing seasons, but they are damp and rainy.
The topography of California allows us to collect rain and snowfall in the Coast range and Sierra, and then easily and cheaply deliver water to farmland (and cities) in the valleys below during the summer. The flat valley bottomland is ideal for irrigated agriculture.
Many of the most common fruits and vegetables that Americans eat come from regions with climates similar to California: Mexico, Peru, Mediterrean Europe, the Middle East, and India. In all of these places, crops have been grown using irrigation for thousands of years. To make a long story short, we eat a lot of vegetables and fruit that simply don't like to get wet.
Of course all plants need water, just like humans do. Humans drink by swallowing water, not by taking a shower. Plants drink primarily by pulling water in through their roots. In fact, plants like tomatoes and melons, as well as most trees, have the ability to suck water from a very large area of the soil. Like humans, these plants don't like being wet all the time, nor do they like the soil to be flooded or constantly soaked. Constant moisture creates perfect conditions for fungal and bacteria diseases on leaves and fruit as well as roots. Areas with high rainfall, constant humidity, and swampy land are terrible places to grow the most common vegetables and (non tropical) fruit.
Synthetic fungicides have made it possible to control many humidity related plant diseases, although constant rainfall makes them impractical to use. The simplest, most economical, and most ecologically sustainable way for humans to grow these crops successfully is to plant them in places like California using irrigation. And this is how humans have been doing it for thousands of years.
Here at Terra Firma, we would love to be irrigating right now, delivering the abundant water that nature provided us this winter directly to our crops through drip and furrow irrigation. Instead, the entire farm is soaked from the wettest yet late season storm: not just the thirsty crop roots, but also their fungus-sensitive leaves and fruit. Acres of soil surface that our irrigation methods normally leave dry in the summer are wet, which will sprout the seeds of millions of weeds that we will have to control somehow.
The crops that we grow that tolerate and even thrive in the mild, rainy winters of California are mostly finished for the season. Most of the crops that remain would prefer it if their leaves, flowers, and fruit never saw another drop of rain. And so would we.
Thanks,
Pablito |
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In your boxes
Cherries are certainly one crop that prefers not to get wet, especially during harvest. After several near misses with the weather, we finally lost a significant part of our Cherry crop to rain over the weekend. While there is still plenty of firm ripe fruit out there to harvest, there are also plenty of ruined fruit, burst open when they absorbed almost an inch of rain over two days. This may reduce the amount of cherries you get next week, or shorten the length of the season -- which we had expected to last another three weeks. Enjoy them while they last!
We also lost quite a few ripe strawberries to rain over the weekend, but the timing of the storm won't affect subscribers much: by the time we started harvesting berries for your boxes on Tuesday morning, the field had dried out and more fruit had ripened. In addition, the rain seems to have encouraged the plants to send out a new round of flowers, which means our strawberry season should continue for at least another two to three weeks. As usual, though, an extreme heatwave could end the season earlier.
It's been quite a while since we've had enough Arugula to put it in your boxes: most of what did have got mixed into the Salad Mix. And in general, the lettuce and spinach have enjoyed the cool, wet weather more than the Arugula. We are reaching the end of our spring salad greens season; you may see Spinach (baby or bunched) in your boxes for another week or two, but this will probably be the last week for the rest.
Garlic in your boxes today is "fresh". It's not "green garlic" because we've cut the leaves off. The heads are full size and the cloves fully formed, but the outer skin and layers between the cloves are still not fully dried. It takes a little more work to get the cloves peeled, but once you do, you will find them incredibly juicy and fresh. You can store fresh garlic at room temperature, where it will gradually continue drying if you don't eat it all first.
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Size up for Spring
It's easy to get more of the good stuff we're harvesting right now, just go to your account and size up. You change downsize again at any time.
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Recipe -- Warm Spring Pasta Salad
This salad is perfectly tasty eaten cold as well, but several of the vegetables are cooked.
Boil salted water for pasta and cook 12 oz. of penne pasta until just tender. Drain and rinse.
Trim 1 lb. summer squash and slice into pieces roughly the same size as the pasta.
Thinly slice onion to make 1 C. Mince 3 cloves of garlic.
Trim 2 C. snap peas and cut in half (leave smaller ones whole).
Rinse 1/2 lb. of arugula and dry.
Saute the onion in 2 T. olive oil until tender and beginning to brown. Raise the heat to high and add the squash. Fry for 3 minutes, then add the garlic.
When the garlic begins to brown, add the peas and cook 2-3 minutes. Stir the pasta into the pan and turn off the heat, then toss. Empty into a large bowl.
In a cup or jar, make the vinagrette: 3 T. stoneground mustard, 3 T. lemon juice, 2 T. olive oil, 1 t. capers, and salt and pepper to taste.
Toss the pasta and arugula together with the dressing. Season to taste with more salt and pepper.
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