| What's Growing This Week: | |
Tomatoes
Watermelon
Green Beans
Yellow Onions
Carrots
Sweet Corn
Summer Squash
Peaches (S,L)
Plums (M)
Basil (M,L)
Melon (M,L)
Cucumber (L)
Items may be substituted without notice.
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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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Bulk Items
Now available, 10 lb. boxes of ripe tomatoes ready for saucing, jarring or canning. $15 each delivered to your drop site. You can buy boxes one at a time, or subscribe and a get a box every week. Go to your account page to sign up.
We also have a limited amount of peaches available. These are not first quality, but may be slightly bruised -- perfect for cooking or canning. $15 for ten pounds when available. |
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Pledge of Authenticity
Terra Firma is a real farm. We grow 99% of the produce that goes into our boxes on our 220 acres of certified organic land in Winters. If we do buy produce from other farms, it's almost always from a neighboring farm and we give them full credit in the box list.
The owners of Terra Firma are involved in every aspect of making your boxes a reality: walking the fields, planting the crops, selecting and checking what goes in the boxes and finally delivering them to you. We eat the crops from our fields every day, just like you do. Thanks for supporting our efforts and enjoying the food we grow.
Paul, Pablito, & Hector
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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!
Heirloom tomatoes may be a tomato-lover's dream, but they are very close to being a farmer's nightmare. We have spent almost twenty years growing them, and yet each year is like spinning a giant roulette wheel. Certain varieties perform well, while others fail almost completely to produce. The next year, the varieties might flip flop on their performance. While we generally understand the correlation with certain weather patterns -- some varieties like cooler weather, others like it hot -- there is absolutely nothing we have figured out to do about it.
 | This heirloom plant has just two tomatoes on it.
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If we were only growing tomatoes for our CSA boxes, we would almost certainly not grow heirloooms -- or at least, not many of them. Instead, we would grow Early Girls and a few other hybrid varieties that are reliable and heavy producers while still offering delicious flavor. To put it in perspective: there are times when a single bed of Early Girls produces more tomatoes than five times that many beds of heirlooms. They produce well under difficult weather conditions, and they produce even better when the weather is good.
 | | At least 8 Early Girls in this picture...can you find them all? |
Heirloom tomatoes are one of the only crops we primarily grow for customers other than our CSA subscribers. Most large tomato growers refuse to grow them, so there is a niche market for smaller farms like ours. This has kept their price significantly higher than most other tomatoes -- and for good reason.
There are plenty of reasons other than unpredictability why heirloom tomatoes cost more. They are extremely delicate, requiring special boxes and additional packaging to prevent bruising. Even in a good crop year, they produce far less "#1 quality" fruit than regular tomatoes. Many are odd shaped, and the thin skins are more susceptible to insect damage as well as cracking when nights get cool and there is heavy dew.
This is where TFF's CSA comes in. We do not "charge" our customers a higher price for any heirlooms that end up in your boxes. Right now we are valuing your tomatoes at $2.50 per pound; organic heirlooms are selling in stores for twice that much. There are two reasons we do this. First, any heirlooms that go into your boxes are not the perfectly shaped, unblemished ones demanded by retailers. Second, we don't differentiate between tomato types at all when we are filling the bags (although we do try to put tomatoes of different ripenesses in). So we can't charge one price for regular red tomatoes and a higher price for heirlooms. Imagine the scene if we were to try to ensure that each customer got a specific mix of tomatoes -- our bag packers would have to walk down a row of boxes specifically laid out with the different varieties. Instead, they take tomatoes from three or four different boxes, all which may be heirlooms, or none.
Occasionally we have so many heirlooms of a single type that we are able make sure that every subscriber gets at least one. On this occasion I might highlight that variety in the newsletter. But the fact remains that if you discover one specific variety of heirloom tomato that we grow, the only way to be sure you get more of it will be to go to a store or farmers' market where heirlooms are sold and buy some.
What if every subscriber wrote in to let us know that they all preferred one variety -- let's say Marvel Stripe -- and you wanted us to grow enough so everyone got at least one every week and you were willing to pay more for them? We still would not be able to guarantee that we could do so. We could plant an acre of Marvel Stripes and there would still be years when we would get almost zero tomatoes from that field.
And that is why we also grow Early Girls, and why heirloom tomatoes are more expensive -- and always will be. I apologize if last week's newsletter made it seem like you were absolutely going to get heirloom tomatoes in your boxes and if you were disappointed that you did not. Because when we play Tomato Roulette, you are playing along with us. Thanks, Pablito
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In Your Boxes
Cucumbers have had a rough year this year, with insect and wind damage really slowing them down. We just have enough this week to put one or two in the Large boxes, but we will soon have plenty for everyone. The cukes in today's boxes are the Painted Serpent variety, long and twisty with a thin skin and few seeds. They should be kept in a plastic bag in the fridge.
Coming Attractions: After two years in a row of losing much of our Table Grapes to the weather -- heat in 2010 and cold in 2011 -- we are approaching the start of harvest this year with plenty of fruit on the vines. The earliest varieties are coloring up right now, and we should begin harvest within two weeks. |
Grilling Sweet Corn: A Tutorial
Any time you are firing up a grill, you should be cooking sweet corn on it. Sure, it takes up alot of space. But you can do it while the coals are still to hot to cook anything else. And the result is sublime: perfectly steamed ears with just a hint of smokiness. If you don't eat it all that night, the leftover corn can be cut off the cobs (to save space in the fridge) and used in other dishes where it's sweet and smoky flavor will do wonders.
There are just a few tricks to success, but they are critical:
1) Do not shuck the corn! Grilling corn without the husk will render it dry, chewy, and cook all the sugar out of it. Snapping the inedible stem off the end will save grill space -- it may take a layer or two of outer leaves with it.
2) Remove the silk by yanking it out. Otherwise it will catch on fire and act like a fuse, causing your corn to burn. You should also remove any leaf tips that might hang down into the fire.
3) Soak the ears in water. Ideally you should drop them in a bucket or bowl and leave them for 10 minutes or so, but in a pinch spraying them with a garden hose will do the trick. This is crucial to keeping the husk from catching on fire.
4) Cook over very hot coals. It takes a lot of heat to steam the corn inside the husks, so if you wait until the coals have cooled, you can end up with raw corn inside nicely-browned husks.
5) Turn each ear four times. You want the outer leaves of the husk to be brown or black on all sides. Otherwise you may end up with ears that are cooked on one side and raw on the other.
6) When done, leave the corn in the husk until just before you serve it. It will stay warm that way. If you have lots more grilling to do, you can move the ears to the edges to keep them warm longer.
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