Thank you to everyone who became members of the R-evolution Gardens CSA this year. We signed on 20 families to our 3 season (spring, summer, fall) 21 week CSA that stretched from the beginning of June through October 24th. Our CSA farm members received a bag of vegetables every Saturday morning delivered to their door. Some folks signed on for one or two seasons, most were on board for the whole harvest. We tried to put as many different items in the weekly bag as there were members. 15 items in a spring bag for our 15 families included; ; head lettuce, radishes, carrots, green onions, beets, swiss chard, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, turnips, spinach, peas, parsley, wakame dried seaweed, strawberries. All grown by hand, using organic methods and love for the land. The seaweed we wild crafted from the ocean nearby on a low spring tide and dried in the sun.
Summer CSA bags included heat loving foods like tomatoes, basil, peppers, mini eggplants, beans, summer squash, walla walla onions, blueberries.. and much more.
Fall CSA featured the cool season veggies like butternut squash, pumpkins, potatoes, mustard greens, and even pears we harvested from an organic orchard in Hood River.
It was quite a challenge to plan for growing such a diversity of veggies on our 1/2 acre of garden space in one season. I had to do quick rotations, and intensive planting, inter-cropping plants with each other (basil under tomatoes, carrots under lettuce) and it was a nonstop whirlwind of seeding, transplanting, harvesting, processing, and selling for the last 6 months. I am actually still planting garlic and shallots. I am harvesting the last of the tomatoes now, transplanting kales and other hardy brassicas into the hoop house and cover cropping and mulching bare beds. I have seeded some of the indoor beds with lettuce mix and arugula for overwintering salads. And we have winter squash, pumpkins, potatoes, carrots, beets, in storage – and lots of greens and late maturing brassicas (cauliflower, broccoli, brussel sprouts, cabbages, collard greens) that will produce in the winter garden even during the dark cold months.
All I can say is, “Whew! I can’t believe its over already!” When you are growing food for a living you gage time by what you are harvesting and planting. From the first peas shooting up the trellis, the first tiny spinach leaves you thin and harvest for that February fresh salad to the first strawberry eaten in the garden- to the first ripe tomato and then the first pumpkin to turning orange. Your harvest is your diet and it also shifts with the season- focusing on what is most ripe and plentiful at the moment.
I recall two years ago struggling to make a Thanksgiving dish with ingredients grown within 100 miles of my apartment in Manzanita. Back then I was mostly eating from the health food store and in November they didn’t have much produce from Oregon. Now it is the rare day when I don’t most of my meals from my own garden= 0 miles.
Not only that but I know the complete history of what I am eating from seed to stomach and I appreciate food in a way I have never done before in my life. Feeding others through my market booths and my CSA is like sharing food with an extended family. As more people join the local food circle the family grows. We sat 50 of our CSA members, volunteers and farmer friends down for a 10 course local food feast in September as a thank you to all who helped us get through our first season. It was my Thanksgiving. More real to me than pilgrims and turkeys because this meal reflected so much about what I was truly thankful for.
First of all I am thankful for the food. Amazing, abundant, and life sustaining. Food coming forth from the earth is incredible and it’s hard to appreciate it enough as far as I’m concerned. There is no religion that I have experienced that covers how holy a honey bee is when it is dancing in a squash blossom sticky with golden pollen. Or when a nightly rainstorm brings forth hundreds of sprouting lettuces unfurling in the morning light. The king bolete mushroom magically appearing along the trail amongst misty shore pines after the first fall rain, the bowed branches of laden pear trees in a sunny hillside orchard, the giant volunteer potato unearthed from the compost pile. What gifts! What magic! Food does not come from a store! It comes from this living planet, the incredibly complex, mysterious, generous, powerful force of life begetting more life.
How is it that we as humans have been conditioned that food is something we buy from a box or a can with a list on it describing how many calories and fat grams it has per serving? How is it that women in particular see food as an enemy to be fought with or surrendered to? It is something I have done my whole life up until this year. This year however, I finally got back in touch with something that is nourishing for my body and soul. The art and magic of how we feed ourselves and others. For this I am truly thankful.
Secondly, I am thankful for the people. You can’t grow food alone. Well, you could but it would be so much harder and it isn’t the way it’s meant to be done. Agriculture was a key part of human social development, the cornerstone of civilization and all attendant arts and technologies. When humans discovered how to work the land they discovered how to work together for so many things. As we become more isolated by modern living, growing food is a wonderful way to bring us back together. Much of farm work is repetitive and lends itself to talking to pass the time. Conversations ranging from music to politics, to sex and gender , to travel and philosophy, and of course to food- happen with gleeful abandon over weeding the carrot beds or cutting sweet peas for market. The people you garden with become your friends in ways that people you party with do not. Garden friends can know your more about your thoughts and dreams over one 25 ft row of broccoli transplants than folks you see at the bar will know about you for years. It is good healthy work, set in the morning sun with bird song and rooster crows for a soundtrack. You breathe fresh air, your hands dig in living soil, your attention focused for hours on the real moment and engaged with life and death matters of who grows and who is pulled. And it is necessary work- so your farm volunteers and your intern, and those folks who show up and roll up their sleeves when you are staring at a task that no one person should even contemplate taking on alone- become deeply bound to you through sheer gratitude. I also feel this way for folks who come to farmers markets in the pouring rain and buy carrots, for farmers who arrive with tractors to help pull the damn chicken coop to a new location, and for CSA members who write checks months before they will ever see a scrap of lettuce because they have faith in your vision for the year. I am thankful for the people.
Third and lastly, I am thankful for the place. This community on the North Coast of Oregon has become my home. I am not from here and in many ways am not of here. I struggle with the feeling of being in such a small place for my ever expanding ideas and with feeling isolated from the grander more important goings on in the wide world. I struggle with being single and secluded on a small farm in the middle of “nowhere” and turning 35 this year. I struggle with feeling broke and owing on a mortgage with a small farmer’s income. And yet I never can think of where else I would go that could be better than here. What holds me is the good heart of the place. Water moves through this land all around me and into the Pacific ocean which is powerful enough to smash illusions of “smallness” into bits on any given day. Fog drenched forests give way open green pastures and sandy beaches with plenty of room for the eye and heart to roam wild. Here I have joined a local Grange that was the original one room school house 100 years ago for this place and is still being run by some of the folks that went to school there. Here I wake up to the east sun coloring the majestic top of Onion Peak, part of the coastal mountain range that frame the backdrop of my life. Here night time is dark and quiet and holds no terror for the late night star gazing walking woman wandering alone down the empty country highway near her farm listening to coyotes yipping and the owls calling as they hunt the fields and woods. Here is support and love from friends that I live with who are struggling with me to sustain a vision; live off the grid, eat from the land and overall heal our relationship to this planet. Here are other folks who choose to live here because they love it, and they want community and change too. Here we laugh our asses off sitting around after dinner, we swim naked in the river across the street and dry off on the warm rocks in the sun, we build large fires and bake cob oven pizzas, trade vegetables for massages, watch ants instead of television and ride bikes to sauna with our old school hippie neighbors down the road. I am thankful for this place.
Thanks everyone for a great season of food, folks and farming!
Peace,
Ginger
