Thanksgiving week  Menu Ingredients

Ahhhhhh

What’s Growing This Week:    Carrots  Satsuma Mandarins Salad Mix French Fingerling Potatoes Baby Bok Choy Granny Smith  Apples—-# Garlic Fuyu Persimmons Purple Broccoli (M, L)  Spinach (M, L) Tokyo Turnips (M, L) Leeks (L)   All items are in all box sizes, unless marked

Pablito .... 

 THANKSGIVING NEXT WEEK:  DELIVERY SCHEDULE CHANGE
If that is a surprise to you, I know exactly how you feel.  Nonetheless, please note that we will be rearranging our delivery schedule as we always do so that all of our customers can get their boxes prior to the holiday.  Wednesday deliveries will remain unchanged.  However:
Thursday (SF) and Friday (Sacto/Davis) boxes will instead be delivered on Tuesday, November 20th.

Please make yourself a note to pick up the boxes on the correct day to avoid disappointment.  If you cannot pick up your box due to the schedule change, or plan on being out of town, please let Valerie know immediately upon reading this.  Because of the early delivery, we will be harvesting your produce two days earlier than normal.

MANDARIN PIONEER
I have written in the past about the debt that we at Terra Firma owe to the farmers who came before us in this area, especially the ones who planted trees that are still producing fruit and nuts to this day.  Some of them are unknown to us, others are known through stories and local legends.  Others are people we know, in person.  One of those is Terry Schroeder.  Terry is a local farmer — very local to us, since his home farm is just a mile east of our fields — who was almost single handedly responsible for introducing Satsuma Mandarin oranges to this area.  Not that they are a major crop in Yolo and Solano County.  The two counties together might have 100 acres of trees between them.  But they are a major crop for us at Terra Firma.

 Citrus orchards are a long-term investment.  Most varieties must grow for 4 years before they begin to make fruit, and closer to 7 years before the trees are really big enough to produce a decent amount.  (By contrast, table grapes produce a full crop the first year after planting, and peaches after just two years).  During this period, the trees are especially sensitive to damage from frost.  A hard freeze during any one of these years could potentially kill the trees entirely; a lighter freeze can kill an entire year’s worth of new growth, essentially pushing the whole enterprise back a year.  It’s like playing Russian Roulette with five bullets in the chamber instead of one.

 Satsuma mandarins grow even more slowly than many other citrus varieties.  On the plus side, the trees are more cold hardy than navel oranges, lemons, or grapefruit — it takes more cold to kill them.  And because the fruit ripens in November and December, there is much less risk that the crop will be destroyed by a hard freeze.  Historically, all of the killing frosts that have occurred in the Central Valley have happened after the winter solstice, usually between Dec. 21st and the end of January.  Normally, all the satsumas have ripened by then.  If a freeze is forecast, they can all be harvested; if the weather is favorable, they can be left on the tree through most of January.

 Terry Schroeder planted the first Satsumas in Winters back in the early 1980s.  The orchards he planted, one of which we are currently harvesting, have survived several freezes — although a number of trees within the orchard did not (they were replanted).  The trees don’t get particularly tall, especially compared to other citrus.  Instead, they tend to grow outwards in a spreading fashion.  The oldest trees we harvest are 20 feet in diameter.  In a good year, like this one, each tree may produce 500 lbs. of fruit, and the occasional tree twice that.  Unfortunately, the more fruit the tree sets, the smaller the size.  There currently isn’t much demand for golfball-sized citrus, so a sizeable percentage ends up being dropped on the ground.

 Another big advantage of Satsuma Mandarins is their ease of peeling.  Terry Schroeder recognized this important convenience over twenty years ago, but it took citrus growers another decade to see the logic.  Statewide, growers are now replacing much of their acreage of navel and Valencia oranges with so called “zipper skin” varieties like the Satsumas.  Varieties — like the trees we planted on our own land three years ago — have also been developed to extend the season into the spring and summer.

 We think the Mandarin oranges make our November and December CSA boxes particularly special and festive, and we hope you agree.

IN YOUR BOXES
We’ve just begun harvesting our summer-planted potatoes, and the French Fingerlings seem to have sized up before the Yellow Finns this year.  These red-skinned gourmet spuds are firm and waxy when cooked, so they are perfect for gratins and potato salads because they don’t fall apart when boiled.  (And thus don’t make good mashed potatoes)  But they are beautiful when roasted whole (small ones) or sliced in half lengthwise.  Like all TFF potatoes, they need to be stored in the refrigerator or they will deteriorate after a week or two.

Our vegetables really loved the warm weather that ended with Saturday’s storm, and grew beautifully the last few weeks.  However, insects love the same weather — aphids in particular.  Aphids are tiny green or grey insects that live in the nooks and crannies of some of the plants we grow, especially broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale and other members of the “brassica” family.  We have been working hard to control the aphids, spraying the plants with an evergreen and rosemary oil that desiccates them.  However, you may find a few aphids on the Baby Bok Choy in today’s boxes.  They are easy to remove with running water during normal preparation of the choy, which must be carefully washed anyway to remove the soil that tends to collect at the base of each stem.

 Those aren’t white beets or radishes in your boxes today, they are Tokyo Turnips.  The roots are mild tasting and can be eaten raw like a radish, or cooked- — they make a good substitute for water chestnuts in a stir fry or can be roasted with potatoes.  The greens are slightly spicy but tender and can be steamed or sautéed.

 If you are preparing a Turkey Day meal and want a sneak preview of next week’s CSA box, check the website.  As always, we may have to make last minute substitutions but it should be reasonably accurate.
 

Thanks,
    Pablito
 

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

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

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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