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

The spring weather we had for the last two weeks gave us an opportunity to get a lot done around the farm, especially knowing that storms were coming. To be honest, farming in the winter during a drought is a bit of a grind. But a forecast of rain in the future gives us a deadline, a finish line, a goalpost.

We normally plant our first tomatoes around the 7th of March. But the warm sunny weather this winter kicked them into overdrive. We started planting on Monday and finished yesterday at sunset. We also got some potatoes and a handful of other things planted.

The warm weather also resuscitated a few crops that we had mostly written off after the freeze -- the small heads of Escarole in your boxes being one. There may be a few more surprises out there to be found, but not for much longer.

I feel like it's important to remind everyone once again about the freeze back in December. March and early April are always months of scarcity on our farm as our overwintered crops fade away. This year we are lacking two of our late winter mainstays -- Broccoli and Cauliflower -- that were completely destroyed by the cold.

Meanwhile, we are spending money like drunken sailors on crops that won't show up in your boxes for at least two months. We weeded and cleaned up our strawberry and onion fields last week, for example -- a task that took 25 people three full work days. We finished pruning the peach and apricot orchards and began pruning our table grapes.

During this time of year we rely on our subscribers to keep our cash flow coming in to help pay for all this work, even in a normal year. This is not a normal year. While we make it very easy for anyone to put their subscription on hold for a few weeks or a month, I would ask everyone this year not to this spring.

We will keep your boxes full during this period. For the next month you will see lots of asparagus, cabbage, and beets. But sometime in the not-to-distant future we'll start harvesting strawberries, peas and eventually cherries. And this could be our earliest tomato year ever. But we need your help to get there.

Thanks for subscribing,

Pablito

This week's Boxes

Asparagus has always been a harbinger of spring, and we knew the warm weather would get it growing -- harvest season started on Saturday and you get your first bunch of spears today.

"Grass" is a mainstay of our spring CSA boxes, as it is for most CSA farms across the country, and we are sure happy to see it arrive early this year. The season here will last until we get our first real hot weather, so you can look forward to at least six weeks of spears. Medium and Large boxes will get two bunches some weeks -- possibly as soon as next week.

As I mentioned above, we harvested small but beautiful heads of Escarole from a field we had written off for dead a month ago. escarole is a chicory, not a lettuce, but these ones have almost no bitter flavor at all. You can eat the leaves raw like lettuce or saute them very briefly.

Oroblanco is our second-ripening variety of grapefruit, and like the Melogolds is a cross between Pomelo and yellow grapefruit. It tends to be juicier and perhaps a little more acidic but still with a nice balance of sweetness. We are thrilled that most of the grapefruit in our orchards appears to have escaped damage from the freeze.

The Butternut Squash in your boxes is the last of our fall crop. We have carefully sorted and checked it, but if you find internal breakdown please compost it and ask us for a credit. Also, if you don't use it in a few days, you should probably store it in the fridge as warm temperatures and humidity this time of year are not favorable for it.

Recipe: Asparagus-Escarole Pasta

Here the escarole is raw but gets wilted by the other ingredients.

Snap the bottoms off 1 bunch of asparagus. Cut the spears into bite-sized pieces, slicing any that are fatter than a "Sharpie" marker in half lengthwise. Toss with 2 T. olive oil, salt and pepper. Roast in the oven at 400 degrees on a baking sheet or in a large cast iron skillet.

When the asparagus begins to brown, add 3 T. chopped green garlic to the pan. Roast another five minutes.

Separate the leaves of 1 head of Escarole. Soak them in a basin of water and then rinse the bases of the leaves if they are dirty. Drain and spin dry. Chop or tear the larger leaves roughly. Place in a large bowl. It will seem like a lot of greens, but they will wilt down at the end.

Boil water for pasta and cook 2 C. large chunky pasta like rigatoni or penne.

When the asparagus is done, you have two options: 1) Pour the juice of one lemon over it while the pan is still very hot, and stir to deglaze. Or 2), pour 1 C. of chopped canned tomatoes and their juice over the pan and stir to combine.

Toss the hot asparagus, pasta, and escarole together in the bowl. Season with salt to taste and sprinkle with grated parmesan cheese.