Terra Firma Farm
Community Supported Agriculture
Newsletter
 May 31, 1999                                                                                                          5-31-99
Homepage
What’s Growing This Week:
Salad mix
New Potatoes
Fava beans
cherries
Summer squash
Strawberries
 
***Bulk Fruit available

***If you are interested in hosting a drop site in the Hugo/ Inner Sunset area, please call Valerie

 
 Pablito....    
HOW MUCH FOOD AM I GETTING?, PART II
Picking up where I left over last week (I hope everyone read last week’s newsletter)… We are concerned that Terra Firma subscribers may have developed into two or even three separate subgroups with increasingly more apparent needs and desires.  While it has never been easy making up our weekly list for the CSA box, it seems to be getting harder all the time.  As we add new, fun crops while continuing to grow the old staples, we often have to choose what to leave out of the boxes.  This week, for example, we have both cherries and strawberries, two high value items.  We also have new summer squash, and nice salad mix.  All these items must be harvested or they will go bad.  But, we have also decided to start digging a few new potatoes for those of you who have been missing them.   With all this stuff plus one last week of fava beans, there’s no room in the box for onions, garlic, or carrots.  While these are clearly “boring” items that many subscribers might get too much of, they are also “staples” for other subscribers.

 Some of you cook most nights.  Others cook just a few.  Some have large families, others small families.  Fully one-third of our subscribers choose the “every-other week” option, while we strongly suspect that many others finish their boxes after just a few meals.We would like to better serve both of these groups.  So, despite our strong resistance to the idea, we are now beginning to accept the fact that we need to offer more than one size/ type of CSA box.

 Our chief concern about different box options is organizational.  One of the primary reasons that farms start CSAs is for simplicity — growing, packing, and selling your produce is made much more predictable.  Having two or three different sized boxes creates many potential areas for errors, from mistakes made on a list to packing errors to customers taking the wrong sized boxes from the drop-off and the ensuing .  We make enough mistakes already, and we’re not 100% confident about our ability to handle this type of new challenge.  However, we get better at CSA farming every day (we think), and we just might be at the point where we can do it.
 First, though, we need to find out if our hunch is accurate.  To do so, we’ll be sending out questionnaires to all of you, exploring the issue and going into more detail about what your current eating habits are.  Based on this information, we may introduce one or two new box options — a lower cost box for folks who don’t cook as often, and a higher cost one for people who cook all the time.

Depending on your answers, we may end up keeping the current box size and price, or junk if everyone chooses one of the other two.  We have three main goals for this survey:
1) To feed everyone better, and thus keep more of you subscribing;
2)  To “sell” as much of what we produce as possible to our subscribers;
3)  To eliminate the “every-other week” option, which doesn’t fit into our planting, harvesting, or any other type of farm cycle.
 The last time we conducted a survey of subscribers, it was a huge success.  The responses we got helped us shape the CSA as you know it today, and they still aid us every week in making decisions.  However, we are now sure that many of you are eating differently than you were back then, and we want to make sure you are still getting the most out of the box.
 Look for the survey in your mailbox in the next month or so.  We would appreciate any time you could take to fill it out and get it back to us.  Then we’ll process all the responses — which may take a while, given that it’s summer and things are getting crazy here at the farm.  We’ll let you know what we found out as soon as possible, and see if it’s time to make some changes.
  Thanks,

  Pablito
 
 
Bulk Fruit 
We will have a limited amount of bulk cherries, and apricots available for delivery with your CSA boxes: 
Cherries — $25 for 10 lbs. 
 Available June 1st – 15th: 
Apricots — $15 for 20 lb. boxes. 
 Available beginning June 15th 
Please e-mail your request to Valerie at goldenbell@aol.com.  Don’t send any money until she confirms your order and pick-up date.  Thanks. 
 
 
Potatoes 101 
Did you know there are two types of potatoes?  There are freshly dug “new” potatoes, with soft skins and tender, moist flesh.  And there are storage potatoes, harvested in the fall and stored for the winter months — usually the starchy, mealy Russets.  While we do grow potatoes for storage, we don’t grow Storage varieties.  We grow Yukon Gold, Yellow Finn, and Red Norland potatoes, all of which are excellent as new potatoes.  Today, we robbed the cradle to get you a dose of new Yukon Golds.   
This year may be an even later year for potatoes than last year.  We planted no potatoes in February, and thus harvested none in May — as we “normally” would.  All the potatoes were planted in March and April, and were extremely slow in emerging due to the cold temperatures.  As a result, they are just starting to form tubers.  To get 350 pounds of potatoes we needed for today’s boxes, we had to pick three full beds.  In contrast, our normal yield is around 500 lbs. For each bed.  In fact, we plant more than 50 lbs. Of potato seed for each bed.  So, it may be a few more weeks before you see potatoes in your boxes again. 
 
Coming Soon 
I ate a Sungold cherry tomato today (one), but Early Girls seem at least three weeks away.  Corn, after a slow start, is finally taking off.  July 4th?  However, flowers and fruit are evident on the green bean plants, and we may have some in two weeks.  Basil has recovered from cold & wind, and could size up quick with some warm weather.  Onions and garlic are on a one-week hiatus while we harvest them for drying… and the new carrots will be ready next week.  The first bunch will be a freebie to make up for the less-than-stellar carrots we put in your boxes the last time.  Apricots next week!
 

“It seems like you need at least ten pounds of fava beans to do anything.  That‘s like the minimum for me” — 
Anonymous Customer, 
San Rafael Farmer’s Market
 
 
Recipes 

Strawberry-Cherry Crisp
Remove the tops of 1 basket of strawberries and slice into a pie pan.  De-pit and halve 1 C. of cherries and add to the strawberries.  Mix the fruit with 1 T. sugar and 1 T. flour.  Make a topping with 1 C. flour, 1 C. brown sugar, and 1 stick of butter (1/4 lb.), plus a dash of salt.  Blend the topping ingredients until crumbly, not pasty.  Cover the fruit with the topping and bake at 375 degrees until the fruit bubbles and the topping is browned and crisp.

Spring Vegetable Minestrone
Saute 1 onion and 4 cloves of garlic in a pot in 4 T. olive oil with 1/2 tsp. Each dried thyme, oregano, and basil.  When the onions are soft, add 1 C. chopped canned tomatoes and saute another 3 minutes.  Add 8 C. vegetable or chicken broth and bring to boil.  Meanwhile, peel 2 lbs. Fava beans and parboil, then remove the skins.  Add to the broth, along with 1 lb. New potatoes, thinly sliced in half-rounds.  Cook for 10 minutes, then cut 4 summer squash into thin rounds and add to the soup along with 1/4 lb. Orzo, wagonwheel, or other small pasta.  When the pasta is cooked, remove from heat.  Season to taste with salt and pepper, and serve with Parmesan.
 
Produce 101: preparation & storage                        
NEW POTATOES:  Treat new potatoes as fresh produce — store in the fridge in a plastic bag, away from light.  Because the skins are still soft, the potatoes will be scuffed by our handling them.  Use them within five days to ensure good results.  Look for specific “new” potato recipes, or substitute for regular potatoes in any recipe except Baked Potatoes and French Fries.  New potatoes aren’t starchy enough for these types of uses. 

FAVA BEANS:  To prepare, remove the beans from the husks.  Parboil the beans for 3-4 minutes, until the skins begin to crack.  Drain and rinse, then pop the beans out of their skins.  At this point, you can eat them as they are, or cook them further — sauteed with garlic, made into creamy soup, or other uses of fresh beans.
Terra Firma Basics  
San Francisco Prices
Every Week: Every Other Week:
$70 Monthly $37 monthly
$200 Quarterly $106 quarterly
$780 Yearly $412 Yearly
$16 weekly vacation adjustment
Subscriptions automatically renew

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

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

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