| What's Growing This Week: | |
Tomatoes (All)
Sweet Peppers (All)
Potatoes (All)
Grapes (All)
Onions(All)
Peaches (All)
Melon (All)
Zucchini (S)
Basil (S,L)
Carrots (M,L)
Sweet Corn (M,L)
Watermelon (L)
Cucumbers (L)
Green Beans (L)
Items may be substituted without notice.
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Contact Us:
| terrafirmafarm.com
csa@terrafirmafarm.com
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| CSA Rates 2012 | 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
Still 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.
Do you love the Shishito frying peppers that we've been putting in your boxes and can't get enough? Now you can buy them in on the Web Store, 5 lbs. for $25. |
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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!
Every year on or around Labor Day, we plant the strawberry patch that will provide the berries for your boxes next spring -- and the berries for you to pick on Farm Day. We took advantage of a nice cool day on Saturday to put the plants in the ground.
Like most berries, strawberries growing in the wild are perennials -- plants that grow in the same place year after year. And for centuries, farmers and gardeners who grew strawberries treated them this way. They were planted and grown for a year and a half before bearing any fruit, then harvested for two or three years. At any given time, a berry grower might have had two strawberry fields on their farm at the same time -- one that was producing and another that hadn't started yet. Strawberries make this fairly easy for farmers by producing "daughter plants" on runners that need to be removed in order to improve fruit production. In the old days, growers would simply cut the daughters off and then plant them in a new field.
In the 1970s, farmers and university researchers -- especially in California -- began to explore a more efficient way to produce strawberries by growing plants for a year in tightly packed "nursery" fields. The plants are dug by machine, then sorted, packed into boxes and sold. Strawberry growers buy and plant new batch of plants each year and then start harvesting fruit a few months later. To put it in perspective, a few hundred acres of "nursery" fields now provide enough plants for tens of thousands of acres of producing berry fields. The farmers growing berries can utilize more of their land to produce fruit. And the nursery growers can focus on producing the best quality plants. This is how modern specialized agriculture works, by finding inefficiencies and eliminating them.
The specialization in the strawberry industry is not just about who grows plants and who grows fruit. It's also about which varieties produce well in which areas. There are only a handful of varieties that grow well in the climate of the Central Valley with its cold winter, short spring and hot summer. So when the entire nursery crop of Camarosa berries was killed by a freeze in 2009 -- the plants that would have produced berries for us in 2011 -- it hit our farm hard as well. We planted other varieties to try to replace the missing plants, but none of them produced well and some simply died. The crop of berries produced from those plants -- a year and half after the freeze -- was our worst ever.
There were no problems getting berry plants last fall, and this spring's berry crop was one of our best ever. So imagine our dismay when we received our strawberry plants last week and opened up the boxes to find the roots covered in mold and rotting. A call to the nursery confirmed it: for some unknown reason, the Camarosa plants this year were rotting in storage. After carefully hand sorting through 50,000 plants, we ended up with roughly half the amount we had ordered. There are no "extra" Camarosa plants to be had at this time, anywhere.
After learning our lesson in 2011, we won't be substituting any other varieties for the missing Camarosas. We will simply have a smaller strawberry field than we planned. There will probably still be plenty of berries for your boxes, but the season may be shorter and less abundant. Keep your fingers crossed!
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Farm Day Date: Corrected
We've gone ahead and set the day for our annual Open Farm Day: Saturday, October 20. And because it often rains on the day we pick, we are also claiming the following Saturday as the Rain Date.
In the coming weeks we'll flesh out the details of the event, including how to get tickets.
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In your boxes
Most people's first reaction when they see the large black grapes called Autumn Royals is "they have seeds, right?". In fact these big, sweet and meaty grapes are almost entirely seedless. We are also harvesting their smaller red cousins, Scarlet Royals. You may get either of these delicious grapes in your boxes this week.
Sweet Corn in your boxes is the last of our 2012 crop. As is almost always the case with our late season corn, these ears will have tip damage from caterpillars (which may still be present) but the rest of the ear should be intact and tasty. Cut the tips off before cooking and you should still have 75% or more usable corn.
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Recipe: Salmorejo Sauce
This is a version of the classic raw Spanish tomato and bread sauce. It is delicious on top of roasted potatoes, grilled vegetables or grilled fish. If you have any basil handy, add 1 C. of leaves to the recipe and make Pest-almorejo.
Heat a cast iron skillet until very hot. Roast 1 sweet pepper until charred on all sides and soft. (You can also do this on the grill or in the oven). When it has cooled, remove the stem and seeds.
Roughly chop 1 lb. of tomatoes. Place in a bowl and salt them, then toss.
Crumble fresh bread to make 1 1/2 C. Alternatively, you can use stale or old bread, soaking it in water until soft instead.
Mince 1 clove of garlic.
Place the roasted pepper, tomatoes and their juice, the garlic, and 1 t. red wine vinegar in a food processor. Puree briefly, then add the bread.
While the food processor is blending, drizzle in 1/4 C. olive oil so that the sauce thickens.
Taste and add more salt if necessary. Refrigerate until used.
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