News from Terra Firma Farm

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

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

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

News From Terra Firma Farm

Community Supported Agriculture

Greetings!

Everyone knows the old cliche about life's only certainties: Death and Taxes. For farmers, however, there's a third. But unlike the other two, this is a certainty that is in your face every day, reminding you who is boss, taunting you with its inevitability.

It's not an "it". It's a "them". Weeds.

There's a tendency to think of weeds as part of nature. But if you speak to a real ecologist or environmental scientist, you will find they are probably just as worried about weeds as any farmer. That's because nature does not make weeds -- humans do. To a scientist, a weed is not just a plant growing in a place where you don't want it growing. It is a plant that has evolved in response to human activity, outcompeting other plants in the process. An article in Tuesday's New York Times explains very nicely how plant species evolve into being weeds, becoming adapted to difficult environments through natural selection.

Usually the worst weeds in a given place are not even native to the area. Invasive weed species are brought from elsewhere, almost always by human activity. Without natural control -- animals and bugs that eat them, diseases that kill them -- they spread quickly and overwhelm both native plants and agricultural crops. Yellow Starthistle is a perfect example, a super drought tolerant Australian plant that has taken over millions of acres of land in California formerly dominated by native. grasses.

Weeds are the most costly pest in both conventional and organic agriculture, both in terms of the crop losses they cause and the amount of money spent on controlling them. But organic farmers spend more, and lose more crops -- to weeds than conventional ones. That's because at this time there simply are no effective organic herbicides.

Instead, organic farmers rely on old fashioned methods of weed control. We use tractors with special machinery to weed between the crop rows, and hoeing or hand weeding to weed between the plants. We rotate crops grown during different seasons so as not to allow the same weeds to grow in the field each year. We grow vigorous cover crops that shade out and smother weeds.

Over time, however, the wiliest weeds figure out a way. At Terra Firma, our most important form of weed control is irrigating our fields a week or two before planting to sprout the seeds, and then lightly cultivating the soil to kill them before planting. While this kills an enormous amount of weed seeds every time we do it, it has given preference to plants whose seeds take longer to sprout. Some of the worst weeds on our farm are those that germinate underneath the canopy of a fully grown crop and go to seed just before we harvest the field.

This is just one of the reasons why weeds haunt me awake and asleep. When I walk the fields here, they taunt me, laughing at my efforts to get rid of them. In my dreams I see them taking over our fields.

And so I will end this newsletter with another weed-related twist on a common cliche. You might say I'm paranoid about weeds. But I know better. They are out to get me. They really are.

Thanks,

Pablito

In Your Boxes

At this point, the vast of majority of our summer crops are planted and growing, and we are in the thick of harvest. Tomatoes, peppers, squash, cucumbers, corn, melons and peaches will make up the majority of your boxes through the middle of August.

Later this week we will begin harvesting our first Seedless Grapes, and you will see them in your boxes starting next week. We have also begun harvesting a few Asian Pears and anticipate sending some along before the end of the month. Finally, we are waiting for our main season crop of Figs to finish sizing up and begin ripening -- most likely during or soon after the next heatwave, which is forecast to begin on Friday.

Recipe: Tomato, Feta and Chickpea Sauce with Poached Eggs (Shakshuka)

This is a popular Israeli dish; you can omit the eggs (and the baking) and serve the sauce over pasta or rice. Or add chunks of zucchini and make it a stew.

Preheat the oven to 425.

Dice 1 onion, 1 sweet pepper, and mince 4 cloves of garlic and 2 jalapenos. Saute in 3 T. olive oil in a large ovenproof skillet until the onion and peppers are soft.

Add 1 t. ground cumin, 2 t. ground paprika, and one 12 ounce can of drained, rinsed Chickpeas (garbanzos). Cook until the onion is nicely coated with spices.

Dice tomatoes to make 4 C. Add the tomatoes and their juices to the pan, bring to a boil, and then simmer for 15 minutes or until it begins to thicken. Season with salt and pepper.

Sprinkle 1 C. coarsely crumbled feta cheese evenly over the sauce. Make 3 or 4 indentations in the sauce and then crack an egg into each one. Transfer to the oven and bake until the eggs are set, 5-8 minutes depending on how runny you want the yoke.