Pics & Puns from the Fields
What do you call a strawberry in math? A berry-able! These heirloom tomatoes are on a Hot Streak. Lord Cukeington (Emma) harvesting a gorgeous slicer! Lettuce know if you love lettuce puns. It’s corn o’clock! Let’s bake a beet-za for dinner. My friends hate my herb puns. Don’t know what their dill is. How did the vegetables ask to be paid more? Lettuce have a raisin celery. ~Eddy
read moreTomato Taste Test
After a lot of tending, planting, pruning, weeding, watering, waiting… We are officially in tomato harvest season! We’ve got the usual Big Beef slicing tomatoes, a classic, as well as our outdoor Sungolds (my personal favorite summer snack) starting to produce fruit. And, in all their colorful glory, we’ve got a wide variety of heirloom tomatoes this season. Walking through the greenhouse, you’ll see them hanging heavy on the vine, using all their cues to tell you when they’re ripe & ready. I noticed while harvesting the tomatoes...
read moreMoving Irrigation
We all know that water is an essential part of farming. But knowing about irrigation and seeing it in practice are two different things. As straightforward as it seems to move water from point A to points B, C, and D, irrigation has many moving pieces. Literally. It’s a dynamic world, finicky and imperfect. And a fun one. A silly one. A satisfying one. And beautiful, too. Our irrigation system uses wells (which, honestly, have always seemed a bit mystical to me). We pump the water, running it through the ground and through long...
read moreLoving Raspberries, from the Midwest to the Northwest
Up until two weeks ago I had described myself as a Midwesterner through and through. I’ve spent the majority of my life in Minnesota, and while I love my home state, I felt it was time for a change of pace after finishing my time at college. Luckily, I found an excellent opportunity with Red Dog Farm to work with the field crew, and so far it has truly been a blast. There’s been so much to learn and a crew of fun and hardworking people, and while I do think I am getting the hang of things, you never really stop learning. Naturally, I’ve...
read moreSalt Baked Beets
Hello everyone! As I write this newsletter, the wind has officially picked up for the first time this season, and sneaky gusts are making harvest suddenly a lot more dramatic. This is presenting a new experience for the crew members who are new to this area! Today I have a recipe that y’all can use several ingredients from this week’s CSA share to make, and which is a crew favorite.Salt Baked Beets: For baking/roasting beets in salt, you can actually reuse the salt, which is much more economical and less wasteful than using new kosher...
read moreConnections to Wilderness
As long as I can remember, I have been making my way to the Peninsula from Seattle. It has always been a more seasonal pilgrimage, the weather putting a bit of a damper on outdoor sleeping from October to May, so ferry rides and packed coolers became a much anticipated sign that summer had arrived. I am deeply lucky to have had such an emphasis on outdoor excursions from such a young age, and while I certainly have my parents to thank for that, there is someone else in my immediate family who always insisted upon it. At 97...
read moreWhy to Grow Tomatoes
A couple of years ago, I was trying to decide whether I wanted to remain in the nonprofit world or leave my office and grow food. It was early summer in Boston, and I lived with an eclectic and wonderful group of people in a hostel. One of my roommates would often come home with little gifts – one day, she brought me a tomato plant. I sat down and breathed in the thick, intoxicating smell coming from its leaves. And then (to everyone’s delight) I started to cry. Taking care of tomatoes is a singular experience at the farm. If...
read moreRediscovering the Goodness of Fresh Food
When I was a child, my parents owned a farm-to-table–style restaurant in Raleigh, North Carolina called Zely and Ritz. Through the restaurant and the partner farms I started to eat with the seasons and learned to love the intense and fresh flavors. As I grew older and started to live on my own, however, I grew away from buying fresh, local, and organic produce because of the price. Over the past few years, I have started to come back to the freshness though through my own gardens and working on farms. Since I started working on farms, I have...
read moreChange is Slow, Change is Fast
This week marks the first week of summer. I’ve been thinking a lot about what that means; how I waited all fall for the respite and slow of winter, how just as I settled in to the quiet of the cold…spring arrived, and how spring – a time of rapid change and immense growth – has suddenly transitioned to summer. I barely noticed it happening. Is this a hazard of the work of farming?Farming does seem to create a void in time. One task can feel long and short at the same time. Like how I notice what it feels like to hold each bunch of carrots,...
read moreFlowers, Salads, and Pesto
We have certainly been enjoying this week of cooler temperatures on the farm! It seems like a time to catch our breath before the slide into summer is official. The sky offers dramatic scene changes from puffy white clouds to blankets of grey, and the question of rain lingers in the back of our minds. In the greenhouse, we are in our final weeks of seeding kales and lettuce, and it’s a relief not to be checking on them constantly as they germinate to ensure they’re not drying out. Out in the fields, the plants also seem to enjoy a break from...
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