The Weekly Bushel, Week 24, 2009

The Weekly Bushel #24

 

10/26/2009

A year in (brief) review

Compared to the last two seasons out here, 2009 will rank as the most favorable growing season yet. The spring was dry and unbelievably windy, allowing us to get into the fields earlier than I ever had. The dry conditions continued, keeping some pests at bay while invigorating others. Summer was a bust weather wise, but peppers and eggplant did pretty well. Melons, especially watermelons, may have done too well. I've never had so much summer squash to distribute either. The squash bugs and cucumber beetles that usually leave us with no cucumbers, melons, or summer squash, and assuredly no winter squash, only really got to the winter squash and some melons, thanks to the coolness of summer. And while the loss of tomatoes hurt feelings and pocketbooks alike, the broccoli of midsummer was exceptional.

Some things we grew in ways that no weather could have helped. The radishes, just about all of them, were either of poor seed quality, poor replacement of surefire varieties unfortunately out of stock, or just not watered enough. The sweet corn truly was embarrassing, but the cauliflower and leeks were pleasantly surprising. The peas were planted somewhat experimentally, with poor results, but better than 2008, when no peas made it to shares at all. And the blight even eventually wiped out the hoophouse tomatoes.

So, all told, weather and crop wise, I'd rate 2009 as the best season yet. For those home gardeners amongst you that found this year to be particularly bad, remember that we dealt with 25" of rain in 10 days last year, and 18" of rain in 7 days the year before, which either drowned our tomatoes, or shredded 6000 heads of lettuce, and just about everything else green in the fields, in 2008. I'll take a cool, long season over a violently unpredictable one anyday.

End of the line

And then it was over. Week 24 is here, the last week of CSA shares for 2009. We will press forward with some extended shares in the coming weeks for those of you whom have signed up for them. For the rest, this one last share will have to spread itself out. Though we do have produce still in the fields, the shortened day lengths don't allow for much growth on anything much beyond this time of year. So, eat this week's produce slowly, chew more frequently than usual, and hunker down. Winter won't be all that long now.

 

A thank you to my great CSA members

The biggest lesson I've learned this year, well at least the biggest one I'm willing to share with you over email, comes with a thank you attached. To get there, please read through the following paragraphs without deep analysis. My line of thought is good, but my proofs are no doubt unscholastic.

Imagine Walmart in its infancy, just one little store in Arkansas, selling a few items for high prices. Their employees, let's assume, know their customer's first middle and last names, their personal histories, who's married to whom, whose kid fumbled in the football game last week, etc. Now, consider Walmart today, a monolith, selling gangs of stuff, for next to nothing. The difference? The most obvious one at least: scale. What effect does scale have on quality of life difference for the workers? Regardless of how you measure this, suffice it to say that the small town employee of the first walmart, if working at store #6893 in St. Louis, would have a much harder time knowing his customers at all. To not have that connection, the store could not matter as much to this worker, could begin to feel like its only purpose is to sell stuff, not to care for customers. This may be a relief for some, as nosiness is one quality us Americans really don't seem to value. But for the community at large, for the broader group, these relationships are positive for all kinds of reasons. I'm guessing if you forgot your credit card at a small town store you were a regular at, like the first walmart, they'd be much more likely to allow you to come back and pay next time, and get the meds home to the kids first. I see this happen alot at businesses, and grew up with it as the norm. Now, try that at #6893.

Walmart in its current form isn't set up with service of existing customers as the prime directive. The second biggest change between Arkansas and St. Louis above is the motivation of $. Scale up, sell more for less, making more money, opening more stores, scaling up more, making more $, ad nauseum. In this model, customer service is important to minimize losses, not to build community at large.

I got into farming to try to build community, both generally and locally around food, but so often in my history of growing food, I've felt like more of a peddler than a pioneer. I bring up a expected trends in Walmart's growth as a convenient example of the fact that agriculture plays by these rules too.

Most farmer's sell commodities: large amounts of a few items. Selling commodities, like shampoo at Walmart #4591, works better for all involved if you have so much to sell, that you can sell it real cheap. If you apply this model to agriculture, the bigger you are, the better your chances to either make lots of money, or minimize lots of losses due to largess. Either way though, in this model, you're a jocky, riding a horse whose health you can guess at, but can't really take stock of.

Today, if you are wholesaling milk, for example, international pricing pressures, regulation, quotas from buyers, production booms across the globe, and so many other things can create vast hardships, regardless of how good your milk is. This is true across commodity agriculture. The farmer who plays commodities markets must guess what wheat prices will look like next year, before buying thousands of pounds of wheat seed. Anything can affect the price of wheat in a global and fully interconnected marketplace. On top of that, you need to grow that wheat in an ever changing climate context. Some years will be good. Some will be bad. None will be as you expect, until you give up on expecting anything. And at the end of that life, you've either been a really good gambler, making the right moves(not that all the credit is yours at all) at the right times, or you're scraping bye, trying your best to interpret your crystal ball. Regardless, you will have spent vast amounts of your life guessing right, and guessing wrong, with all of your work. How maddening!

The temptation in vegetable production is to get big enough that you can sell pallets, if not truckloads of singular items at all times. That's what most CSA or smaller scale vegetable producers seem to do. That makes cashflow smooth, allows you to scale up your equipment set, which will allow for more production, more employees with more to do, who get more trained and productive, which allows for more growth, again and again.........

The realities on the ground are this way, until one day, each farmer wakes up to the realization that a larger farm is not necessarily a more financially viable farm, and a financially viable farm is not necessarily a wealthy one. Wealth, after all, has money as only one component in a matrix of many: self satisfaction, quality of work, amount learning per quarter, diversity of place, health of participants, these are the standards by which the value of something are most reasonably assessed. This is as true of businesses as it is of communities.

Which brings me to my thank you. There are many different ways to describe why signing up for a share in a CSA program are positive for both growers and eaters. For the eaters, there's a possibility of saving money. Sometimes that bears out, and in some seasons it probably does not. There's the opportunity (or burden) of eating and preparing foods that you would not buy and try on your own. This too can be a plus or minus, depending on you and what you value. There's the farmer/eater connection, the propensity for CSA's to use organic methods if not to be certified, thus healing the earth, and providing safe, healthy food, full of vitality. For the grower, we get to grow things we wouldn't grow for commodity markets or even for restaurants. That is costly often, but also fun and enjoyable, and exciting even when things don't turn out but insights are gained. There enters a rhythm to our days and weeks that allows for an infinitude of work to be scheduled a bit more manageably. All of these are great features of the CSA model.

The very best feature though is that CSA's alow the producer to cast aside the economic boom and bust cycles of the traditional farmer lifestyle, and get a secured locked price for what we produce. Sure, the weather will still trick us into false hopes here and there, but no longer must we marry our optimism to economic cycles that are oustide our control. CSA's are by definition diverse farms, flourishing with lifeforms that other farms would have done away with long ago, removing the good with the bad. We can weather the weather better than a wheat farm or a corn/soy farm, because what is bad for some is good for others, all of which become part of our product, but aren't alone sufficient. Once May rolls around, I as a farmer don't need to worry about events in India affecting my ability to make an honest living doing what I love. All I have to worry about is tending the crops in the ground. The only guessing I need to do is on the weather.

With the money guessing removed from day to day concern, I can enjoy the farm. That enjoyment brings more of the totality of my self, my sanity and restedness, my focus, and my passions to my work, if not everyday, than far more often than I could conceive of in a commodiy context. CSA farming shares some of the guesswork of any other farming endeavor, but it doesn't add in more than is required. Once you sign up with me, that's a guarantee that you will get my best effort of a full season of crops, and I will get a set price for my products, and my workings.

So thank you for allowing me to learn this lifestyle with a bit more sanity than those before me, whose agricultural lives were spent with more fear, false hopes, and far less control over the tasks at hand. Your contribution to this season has directly impacted the quality of every share you've received, the sweeping diversity of crops, the depth of my attempts at clueing you in on the life and times of a young food grower wrestling with the transformative personal process of becoming a farmer, the improvement of our soils, and a vision for the future, both mine and yours as growers and eaters, based very strongly on collaboration. The reinvigoration of local communities will only happen through good local food or necessity, from a quarter we will likely not expect. In either instance, we all gotta eat.

A winter worth remembering to all of you,

Tim Huth
LotFotL Community Farm

 

 

The Food!

For this last week of normally scheduled CSA shares, we're bringing spinach back. It is growing pretty swiftly in the fields and promises to be very complex and sweet tasting. Unfortunately, we will not have brussel sprouts for shares ;( I'm personally very disappointed by this, as they are some of my favorites. Just haven't formed well enough to be worth cooking yet.

This Week's Share

* parsley
* spinach
* beets
* onions
* fingerling potatoes
* leeks
* assorted radishes-black spanish and bleeding heart
* other possibilities include: cilantro, celeriac, turnips, broccoli, kohlrabi, arugula, and baby carrots. We'll include 4 of these with your shares

Fixins

Beet and Leek Salad with Peanut Dressing

http://find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=1031652

The beets, leeks, and dressing can all be prepared and stored separately in the refrigerator up to two days in advance; just let them all come close to room temperature before serving. The dressing gets thicker as it stands, so add more water to thin it if necessary. To avoid staining your hands when rubbing the skins off the beets, wear gloves or rub the beets under running water.
Yield
6 servings

Ingredients

2 medium beets (about 3/4 pound)
Cooking spray
4 cups thinly sliced leek (about 1 pound)
1/2 teaspoon olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt, divided
1/4 cup water
1 tablespoon fresh lime juice
1 tablespoon creamy peanut butter
1 1/2 teaspoons minced peeled fresh ginger
2 cups alfalfa sprouts

Preparation

Preheat oven to 425°.
Leave root and 1 inch of stem on beets; scrub with a brush. Place beets on a small baking sheet coated with cooking spray. Bake at 425° for 1 hour or until tender when pierced with a fork. Cool. Trim off beet roots and stem; rub off skins. Cut each beet in half lengthwise; slice each beet half crosswise into 1/4-inch-thick slices.
Combine leek, oil, and 1/4 teaspoon salt on a baking sheet coated with cooking spray; toss well to coat. Bake at 425° for 15 minutes or until tender and just beginning to brown; stir after 8 minutes.
Combine water, lime juice, peanut butter, ginger, and 1/4 teaspoon salt, stirring well with a whisk until smooth.
Arrange 1/3 cup sprouts on each of 6 salad plates; divide the beets and leek evenly among servings. Drizzle about 2 teaspoons dressing over each serving.

fingerling potato & leek soup

http://foodisluv.blogspot.com/2009/04/potato-leek-soup.html

serves 4 (generously) - 6
2 large leeks
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon fleur de sel(sea satl)
1/4 teaspoon freshly cracked pepper
6 cloves garlic, minced
1 lb. fingerling potatoes, peeled and diced
1 cup white wine
4 cups low sodium chicken broth
1/2 cup cream

*reserve some of the leeks to use as garnish. see instructions below.

you only want to use the white and pale green parts of the leeks. cut off any dark green part and discard. leeks have a lot of layers which hold a lot of dirt so it's really important to clean your leeks well. to do so, split the leeks length wise and rinse under water. then dice them and put in a large bowl with water. rinse and strain. repeat a couple times until leeks are clean and free of all dirt.

in a large pot or dutch oven, heat the olive oil and butter. when the butter melts and starts to foam, add the leeks, salt and pepper. cook until tender but not brown, about 8-10 mins.

add the garlic and diced potatoes and mix in well with the leeks. add the wine, bring to a boil and simmer for approx 3 mins. the wine will mostly absorb into the vegetables. add the chicken stock, bring to a boil and then lower the heat and simmer for 30 mins or until the potatoes become extremely soft. add the cream and simmer for a couple more minutes.

blend 4 ladle fulls of the soup in a blender and return back to the pot. i wanted a chunky soup so i only blended 4 ladle fulls. if you want a smooth, pureed soup, you can of course blend all of it.

for garnish, julienne the leeks, approx. 2-3" in length. heat a small skillet with enough oil to coat the bottom. once the oil is hot, add the leeks and fry until lightly golden brown. make sure to keep an eye on them as they will brown quickly.

remove with a slotted spoon and drain on a paper towel.
serve the soup with freshly ground black pepper and the fried leeks!

Parsleyed New Potatoes

http://www.cdkitchen.com/recipes/recs/64/Parsleyed-New-Potatoes118965.shtml

1 pound Red Bliss or white-skinned creamer potatoes or fingerlings like Russian Banana or Ruby Crescent
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup cold water
1 tablespoon unsalted butter or soft margarine, at room temperature
1/4 cup finely chopped parsley
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste, if desired
4 lemon wedges (optional)
Turn this recipe into a puzzle! [click]

Directions:
Scrub potatoes and place in large saucepan. Add salt and cold water to cover. Cover pot tightly and set over high heat. When water boils, reduce heat to medium. Cook 20 to 30 minutes, or until tender when pierced with sharp knife.

Drain potatoes. Immediately return to hot pot. Add butter, shaking pot to coat potatoes as butter melts. Sprinkle in parsley and shake again. Season potatoes to taste with salt and pepper, if desired. Serve immediately, accompanied by lemon wedges, if desired.
This recipe from CDKitchen for Parsleyed New Potatoes serves/makes 4

Thanks for reading, and happy eating!
Sincerely,

tim huth
LotFotL Community Farm
Save
$25
When you sign up for you 2010 CSA share before January 1st, 2010. Offer restricted to 2009 CSA members only.
Offer Expires: January 1, 2010