Salt 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...
read moreLate Spring Musings
This spring I tilled up a garden plot in our backyard for my four-year old daughter. The edge of our farm fields are literally mere feet away and millions of plants are endlessly calling out for tending, and yet planting a garden seemed the thing to do. We are both just loving being gardeners! It’s so relaxing and entertaining. Watching the progress of our little plot, popping in whatever plants we want in all kinds of non-liner patterns, having a place where Delphine can do things her way all make the garden a huge win. Delphine made a path...
read moreA Well-Timed Strawberry Moon
Summer is here and the farm is going OFF! We are now stocking strawberries, frisee, and romaine, green leaf, and red butter lettuces in the Farmstand as well as at the Saturday and Sunday farmers markets. The best thing to happen this year, in my opinion, is that the strawberries became ripe in time for the Strawberry Moon this past Saturday, and not late like last year. Thank goodness we weren’t stuck in the rainy cold gloom for an extra-long time this year! A lot of us at the farm have established our home gardens with plant starts, and...
read morePlants and People Growing on the Farm
That strange march of time has caught me on the back foot once again, and on Tuesday I found myself celebrating my 27th birthday. Put like that, it sounds like I was dreading it, but it’s quite the opposite – I feel more myself at this age than I have at any other. Maybe it’s from being told I have an old soul one too many times, or perhaps that everyone says I look just like my mother, but whatever it is, I like this feeling. A sort of settling into myself, an ease I think I’m only just finding the edges of. I’ve spent so much time looking...
read moreExisting and Thriving with Plants
Hi, my name is Natalie and I love plants.No really, I love them. Sometimes I think I came here just to witness them work their magic. Being a farmer to me is not just growing food. It’s watching the plants transform, learning about their cycles, and being completely left in awe by them — I swear watching a bee pollinate a strawberry flower the other day felt like a full-blown miracle.Do you ever just think about photosynthesis? Or soil microbes? Or seeds? Or the mycelial network by which plants communicate? Or how plants find ways to defend...
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