Sweet Juicy Navel Oranges

What’s Growing This Week: Carrots Walnuts Green garlic Potatoes Broccoli Navel Oranges Radicchio (M, L) Dino Kale (M, L) Cauliflower (M, L) Leeks (L) Chard (L) Blood Oranges (L)

FRUIT FOREST

Orchards and forests are both environments dominated by trees, but they don’t really have much else in common.

In a natural forest, competition is the rule and there is no referee.  Trees fight with other plants for survival, and then fight with each other for light, water, and nutrients.  The goal — if a tree can be said to have a goal — is simply to grow and thrive.  The bigger and healthier the tree, the more seeds (i.e. — fruit or nuts) it can produce, and the better its chances of reproduction.  If this leads to one large tree shading out and eventually killing ten others, so be it.  In other cases, it may lead to large populations of trees in areas with deep soil or close to creeks and rivers while other areas have fewer trees.

In an orchard, on the other hand, the goal is anthropocentric — to produce food, or in the case of timber “orchards”, wood.  Like any other farmer, an orchardist wants predictability and order.  So for thousands of years, humans have worked to select and “improve” tree varieties that grow well and produce a crop of fruit or nuts every year.  The trees are planted at a uniform spacing from each other in order to give each all the light, water and nutrients it needs to grow to the full size it can achieve.  And while a farmer might have several different “fruit forests”, each one is likely to be made up of a single variety of fruit or nut — or at the very least, of a single type.  Cherries, oranges, and walnuts, for example, are all different sized trees with different needs and different harvest seasons.  From a farmer’s perspective, it makes sense to separate them.

All this to say that an orchard is not a natural setting.  “Duh!” may be an appropriate response.  However, there’s an important question involved for anyone who hopes to farm an orchard as ecologically as possible:  Where is the happiest medium between the managed environment required to make farming trees economically viable, and the natural habitat the trees evolved in?

Humans have proved that trees can thrive in unlikely places, like those that grow to full size with their roots buried almost completely under concrete.  But they can also be killed by impacts we can’t even see, such as acid rain and air pollution.   Most of the large fruit and nut orchards in California bear little resemblance to any forest.  There is the precise uniformity and lack of diversity — hundreds or even thousands of acres of a single tree variety.  But the floors of the orchards are also profoundly unnatural.  A healthy forest hosts vegetation on the ground under the trees — grasses, weeds, brush and smaller trees.  Most orchards in California are “clean”, with all vegetation under the trees killed by a combination of tillage and herbicides.  This intensive management also eliminates the organic matter that would normally cover a forest floor — whole leaves and dead plants covering the soil and keeping it moist and protected.  Any leaves or dead weeds left on the surface of an orchard’s soil are chopped up by tillage and decompose quickly.

In a natural ecology, trees don’t need fertilizer.   A forest floor creates an ideal environment for soil fungi that develop a symbiotic relationship with the tree roots.  The fungi  break down plant matter, take up nutrients, and fight off disease.  In an intensively farmed orchard, the soil is changed dramatically, and the fungi are not able to survive.  In their place, the farmer must intervene.  Artificial fertilizers are used to keep the trees healthy, and even to alter the pH of the soil.  Toxic chemicals are used to control bacterial diseases that cannot survive in a natural forest soil.

Conventional farmers have many reasons for the anti-ecological practices they use in orchards.  Water conservation and mechanical harvest are the reasons most often used to justify weed control.  I have also been told by a UC scientist that allowing vegetation to grow below our pistachio trees will exacerbate diseases.  But it often comes down to the desire for control.   I believe that farming systems can also be modified to accommodate ecology instead of the other way around.

Personally, I see weeds as a threat to a fruit or nut tree only when it is very young.  On the other hand, we are growing an orchard and not a forest, so we must manage it to produce the best fruit or nuts.  To me this means allowing the grass and weeds to grow in the rainy season, when the trees are dormant.   Once the winter weeds set seed and begin to die, we mow it to create a mulch over the soil for the dry season.  Then, by using new technologies, we irrigate only the area around the trees, which conserves water and helps keep weeds from growing during the time of year when they would compete with our fruit or nut crop.  Someday, I hope to find the happy medium.

IN YOUR BOXES

Most of our “bunched” greens — kale, chard, collards, and mustard — are planted in the late summer and harvested all winter from one or two fields.  We pick the leaves off the plants one by one, taking only the biggest leaves and letting the other ones continue to grow.  At some point in late winter, the plants stop making new leaves and begin to grow much taller, finally producing flowers.  At this point, we mow them and plant something else, but if we didn’t, they would eventually produce seeds.

The Dino Kale is usually the first of the greens to go through this transformation, being especially sensitive to warm weather such as we had last week.  This year is no different, and the plants are already elongating and beginning to make flower buds.  And so, as we often do this time of year, we are harvesting entire plants instead of individual leaves.  Instead of a dozen or so large leaves bunched together, this week you will get two or three plants with lots of smaller leaves on them — sort of like a Brussels sprout stem.  Simply pull off all the leaves and use as you would otherwise use kale.  The stem is tough and woody and should be discarded.

Navel oranges are at their sweet prime right now and for the next month or so, and we have increased the amount in all of your boxes.  Like most of the citrus we grow, navels make wonderful fresh-squeezed juice — if you happen to find them piling up.  However, unlike other types of oranges and grapefruit, their isn’t enough acid in navel oranges to keep the sugars from fermenting for very long — even in the fridge.  So you’ll need to drink it within 12 hours or so or freeze it into cubes for later use.

We don’t often put Radicchio in the boxes except as part of our salad mix, but the current crop is so mild and beautiful (and our salad mix isn’t growing much), that we decided to go for it this week.  Try one of the salad recipes to the right and you may become a fan, but just remember that Radicchio is usually much more bitter.

Thanks,

Please make sure to include your account name, the one on the sign off sheet ? on the box, in every correspondance to Valerie

Recipes............................

Radicchio Salad Two Ways — The secret to salads made with bitter greens is to use strong flavors that contrast rather than highlight their intensity:  salty, sweet, and tangy.
Tear apart 1 or 2 heads of radicchio, rinse the leaves well, then spin them dry and chop them roughly into bite-sized pieces. 
Version 1:  Make a dressing with 3 T. olive oil, 2 T. sherry or white wine vinegar, and salt and pepper to taste.
Crumble 2 oz. of Roquefort or other strong blue cheese.  Toast 1/4 C. walnuts in a pan, and then chop them.
Slice 1 crisp apple or winter pear, adding any juice that results to the dressing.
Toss the ingredients with the radicchio and allow to sit for 5 minutes, then toss again and serve.
Version 2:  Make a dressing with 3 T. finely minced green garlic, 1 1/2 T. Dijon mustard, 1 1/2 T. lemon juice, 1 T. red wine vinegar, and 3 T. olive oil.  Season with salt and pepper.
Brush one or two slices of fresh crusty bread with olive oil, then grill or toast until well browned.  Chop into bite-sized pieces. 
Grate or thinly slice 2 carrots.
Toss all the ingredients with the radicchio and serve.  Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese if desired. 

CSA membership fees ~payment due day is first of month.~~ Quarterly discounts are given for any 3 month period only if paid in advance.
They are given as an extra credit when the payment is applied, you won't see your monthly rate change.
 

For mid-month changes,  Up/downgrades are $5 per week per increment.  Small to large is $10.

Vacations ? Billing Inquiries
We need seven days notice before a vacation hold or other change of service.
Contact Valerie through voicemail at (530) 756-2800, or e-mail Goldenbell@aol.com.  Include your account name in full (what's on the sign off sheet).

Account Balance Inquiries The account sheet is hiding under the sign off sheet each week with your account balance on it.  Mid month I've been e-mailing statments, so if you're not getting it send me an e-mail requesting to be added to the list. To be able to read the statements you need to be logged in as an administrator on a PC, and virus programs may corrupt the file. Some Mac operating systems do allow the file to be viewed.  We can't resend them, and it wouldn't work any better the second time anyway.

MAILING ADDRESS:
Terra Firma Farms, Inc
P.O. Box 836
Winters, CA 95694
(530) 756-2800
www.terrafirmafarm.com
Goldenbell@aol.com

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