Play with your food ~

What’s Growing This Week:· · Green Garlic · Carrots · Broccoli · Salad Mix · Potatoes · Cabbage · Tangelos · Navels · Escarole (M, L) · Cauliflower (M, L) · Leeks (L) · Spinach (L) · Kiwis (L)

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my philosophy of weed control and how different it is from the ideas that govern mainstream agriculture.  Cover cropping is another important component of organic agriculture that makes us different.  At any given time of year, most of our land is planted — if not with a vegetable crop then with a “cover” crop.  These crops — primarily grasses and legumes — protect the soil from erosion by wind and rain.  And depending on how they are managed, they also replace critical organic matter (carbon) or nutrients (nitrogen) lost in the course of farming.

Through most of the winter, most of the farmland in our area is “chemically fallow”.  This means that the soil is kept bare by the use of herbicides.  Our farm, on the other hand, is green.  Aside from our winter crops, we have dozens of acres planted to vetch, a legume related to lentils that grows well in the cold and wet.  And our orchards have a carpet of weeds and grasses.  In one orchard, we have even created a perennial cover crop of Burr Medic, a type of clover that grows naturally around here and can be encouraged by allowing it to go to seed each spring before mowing it.

So all is green and good here at Terra Firma, the little oasis of vegetation in the heart of a chemically fallow winter desert, right?  Well, ecology is never quite so straightforward.  Last week, a group of UC Farm Advisors and researchers came out to the farm to do some insect surveys.  It seems after years and years of organic farmers begging for studies that help us out with our insect problems, UC Extension is responding.

Since I can remember, I have had a Twilight Zone moment every time I read farm publications and UC studies about problem insects.  It was as if the farmers growing the same crops as us were growing them on a different planet, with completely different pests.  Conventional farmers seemed to have pests tailor made to their crops, where most of our problem bugs seem to eat or damage a broad range of the crops we grow. 

It turns that every farmer creates their own pests.  Conventional growers traditionally have done so by using pesticides that kill all types of insects indiscriminately.  The ones that evolve to resist these chemicals become extremely difficult to deal with because all their predators are eliminated.  We don’t often have this problem, as the pesticides we are allowed to use hardly work on the target pests, much less any other bugs. 

In our case, we are not just creating our own insect pests at Terra Firma, we are giving them lodging and three squares during the off season.  The UC folks who came out to our farm last week were looking for two specific bugs that cause problems for organic farmers.  Cucumber beetles destroy our cucumber, melon and squash plants, but also damage chard, spinach, lettuce, radicchio, green beans, and other leafy green plants.  Stink bugs are responsible for those bleached out spots you may occasionally see on our tomatoes — some years they damage as many as a third of the tomatoes in the field.  Both these bugs are controlled on conventional farms by insecticides targeting other pests — collateral damage, if you will.  On our organic farm, the only method of killing them that is effective is picking them up and squashing them.

There are no cucumbers or tomatoes currently planted at the farm the researchers visited.  But they still found plenty of cucumber beetles and stink bugs.  The former, which look like ladybugs with black dots on a light green background , were hanging out in our cover cropped fields.  The stink bugs, which are grey and orange with a pointy nose, were living on weeds. 

If we managed our farm the way conventional growers do — chemical fallow, no weeds or other plants allowed during the off season — there would be no winter habitat for these pests.  Instead, they will move from their current host plants to the cucumber and tomato fields in another few weeks.  So while there is nothing that we can spray on them to kill them, we can tweak our management practices in ways that will affect their lifecycle.  Simply by destroying their host crops at the right time, we can kill many of the pests before they have a chance to move into our vegetable fields.  In the case of the stinkbugs, just mowing the weeds before the first tomatoes get planted will do the trick.  For the cucumber beetles, the cover crop field will actually have to be plowed before the larvae laid by overwintering adults have time to develop wings.

Unfortunately, we can’t always base our farming decisions on a single criteria such as this.  There are always competing reasons to justify one action or another on our farm.  But in the case of stinkbugs and cucumber beetles, I feel better now having learned about their winter vacation habits.  More information is always better, right?

IN YOUR BOXES

Of all the citrus fruit we grow, Minneola Tangelos are the most frustrating — heartbreaking, even.  Most years in the fall, the trees are absolutely loaded with fruit.  Then the storms come.  When the right combination of wind and rain hits the trees, the fruit start dropping.  And keep dropping.  This year, by the time we began harvest last week, it was actually difficult to walk in the orchard due to the number of fruit on the ground, like walking on tennis balls.

The problem is that Tangelos like spring weather.  They are perfectly happy to turn bright orange in January, around the same time that Navel Oranges ripen.  But just because they color up doesn’t mean they get sweet; I picked a brightly colored fruit off the tree a month ago and was astonished how tart it still was.  But give them a couple of weeks of warm, sunny weather and they ripen right up.

Even at their best, Minneolas are rarely sugar-sweet like Navels.  They always have an undertone of tartness, which comes from their grapefruit ancestry.  They are also probably the juiciest oranges we grow, and will yield as much as three times as much liquid as a similar sized navel orange when squeezed.  If you find them a bit too tart, try juicing alongside Navel oranges and mixing them together.  If the nice weather holds and no more storms come through, you may get another two weeks of Tangelos in your boxes.

Over the next few weeks, you will be seeing each of our winter greens for the last time this spring in your boxes.  The Dino Kale is already gone.  This week we’ve sent along the last Escarole of the season — the heads are small, so you got two in each Medium and Large box.  Look for Red Kale next week and then Chard again before we wrap up the cooking green season.

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

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

Ides of March Frittata — This is somewhere between a frittata and a Spanish “torta”.  Can be eaten hot or cold.

Separate the leaves of 1 head of escarole and soak them in water.

Boil water and then drop 4 potatoes into it.  Cook until they are just barely tender — 5-7 minutes, then remove and drop into cold water to cool.  Slice them into very thin rounds or half rounds.

Clean and dice 1 large or 2 smaller leeks and 1 stem of green garlic.  Carefully rinse the leaves of the escarole.  Cut a caulilflower into individual florets.

Saute the leeks and garlic in 3 T. olive oil in a cast iron pan until they are soft.   Add the cauliflower and the escarole and cook until the escarole wilts.

In a bowl, whisk 7 eggs with 1/2 C. parmesan or gruyere cheese, salt, black pepper, and any fresh herbs you have available.  Stir into the vegetable mixture, then top with a layer or two of the potatoes.  Turn the heat all the way down and cook until the eggs have set.

Sprinkle the top of the frittata with more grated cheese, then place under the broiler to brown the top.  When it is browned, run a knife around the edges.  Invert a plate on top of the pan and carefully flip it over so that the frittata slides onto the plate.

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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