Revolution Gardens CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) Manzanita, Oregon

As the compost turns….

January 28th, 2010

Just back from Thailand! I am glad to be home on my little farm and already feel the pull of spring and work calling. Now that I played my fireside dreamy time away in the tropics, it feels like I skipped over winter and suddenly I find myself on the edge of a new season of growth. Buds are on the trees outside and it was downright warm in the hoop house this afternoon. Feb 2nd is the official midpoint between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox (also know as Imbolc, Candlemas, and Groundhog’s Day). Whatever you call it- in Oregon it means it is time to turn the compost pile, get those peas in the ground and start seeds for spring greens.

I was lucky enough to attend the 30th anniversary of the EcoFarm Conference in California this year and came home with lots of new ideas and information. I also spent time visiting farms in Thailand and soaking in the amazing agricultural systems you can build in the tropics. Imagine growing mango trees under storied with cacao plants and coffee bushes- now we’re talking good food!

I loved the way Thai farmers cooked with their produce and created every curry, soup and noodle from scratch. The Thai people are true localvores! You couldn’t walk a block without coming across someone cooking up a fresh caught fish on the grill (sold whole-blackened with spices- yum) or a coconut curry with fresh chiles, lemongrass, galangal root and basil. Gardens were everywhere- and 65% of Thais are still farmers for a living (compared to fewer than 2% of Americans). Food knowledge was extensive and the flavors were impressive as a result.

And the fruit, well.. let’s just say we in the US live with a very poor idea of what pineapples and bananas, papayas and passion fruits taste like. Fruit shipped green to ripen in transit is no comparison to eating these fruits ripened on the tree. I guess I just have to wait for our local strawberries in June to come close to the kind of flavor packed into those pineapple shakes I was sucking down everyday! Rum (made from local rice) only enhances the flavor I might add.

I feel truly blessed to have been able to escape some Oregon rain and soak in the sights, smells and sounds of Southeast Asia. The thing that kept coming back to me as I traveled was how beautiful this planet we call home is. The turquoise seas, million year old rain forests, mountain sides terraced with rice fields, fish covered coral beds, limestone caves and rushing rivers. The diversity of people I met reflected the landscape in which they made their homes.

Moken sea gypsies living fishing off the Surin islands, Karen hilltribe women weaving baskets from the bamboo forests around them, Cambodian villagers living in a floating village created by the seasonally flooded Mekong river, Thai farmers growing rice, garlic, herbs, ducks and fish in the same field worked by their grandfathers.

I have a hard time understanding why some feel superior to others based on where they are from. The earth is everyone’s home. All the life and food and experiences we have depend on the abundance of our land and seas. Diversity is the key to survival and so we must strive to honor and hold on to our connections to place. I live on the North Oregon Coast and grow food here- (what some call Salmon Nation). That means it’s my job to protect and love this place as best I can. I send so much gratitude to my fellow humans in Thailand and Cambodia who are likewise respecting and caring for their unique ecosystems.

As we grow food without pesticides, herbicides, gmo seeds or chemical fertlizers we are giving back to the earth from which we take so much. We clean the water, add health to the soil and diversity to the seeds and pollen of the planet. Working together and connecting the strands of community across the globe we can weave a web of peace and abundance for all. Let’s make it happen in 2010!!

and now some pics just for fun of my trip:- hooray!!

Autumn at the lake- we were not told of the alligators until after swimming

Sunset offerings of flowers, candles and incense on New Year's Eve. On the mountainside temple in Pai, what a gorgeous way to end the year.

Sign on Bangkok river taxi seat.

The eye of a lifeform much wiser than I.

Thais are amazing at farmers market displays!

They stack fish just as well as fruit!

Total addiction to these handmade rice crispy treats made from local rice hand pressed into molds, dried in the sun and then deep fried and drizzled with palm sugar. Soooo much better than our version.

Lost in translation at the local hot springs

Fig overcame her fear of water and my goddess what awesome water it was- 80 degrees with 35 feet of visibility!

I have found my new love- mopeds! Cruising in the mountains near the Burma border.

The Asparas of Angkor Wat- Cambodian divas!

Don't think all Thais are farmers! Punks at a show in Chiang Mai.

Who let this guy into the country??

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We made it! Our first year of CSA farming was a great success!

October 24th, 2009

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

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Some summer reflections……

September 6th, 2009

It’s really raining this morning after several teases over the last day or two. The land and our creek need the water so badly after our long summer drought. The rain also means that I can take a minute away from the fields to pause and reflect on the summer as it winds down. Labor Day weekend has finally arrived on the coast. I can almost feel the collective exhale from all the beleaguered tourist industry folks who now can breathe a little slower and have some time to enjoy the rest of the summer for themselves. I was a merchant in the bustling little town of Manzanita up until this year and what a strange feeling it has been to go through a summer without doing the daily retail routine. I can’t say that I miss the selling and schmoozing but I do miss having that nice pile of money squirreled away for winter!

The farming season around here is still going strong. I have been planting and transplanting continuously for fall and for my overwintering crops that will harvest early next year. Like so much of what I have done this year- it’s an experiment to see what I will get and what I won’t. Farming is incredibly challenging as a job. It makes you think harder than most occupations as the amount of variables that can happen with any given crop are almost endless. The idea that if you take a seed and plant it at a given time, with given amendments, soil and temperature conditions it will produce a healthy plant and be ready to harvest when you expect, is the barest sketch of what is actually going on in the field. When you are a business partner with Mother Nature you are in quite a complicated relationship- and she is definitely calling the shots! Organic farming is also a calling to go deeper and observe more closely the world around you. I have learned so much this season, sometimes I wish I could just fast forward 20 years and have the wisdom that I will gain from working this land implanted in my brain now! As it is, I will just have to struggle through and figure it out with the help and advice of those who have lived and farmed longer than I.

We are planning to throw a slow food dinner for our CSA members and our steadfast volunteers on September 19th. We have 10 courses planned all with food from the garden and with dairy and meats from our farmer pals down the road. True local food celebration. I need to have an event to mark the passage of this first year on the job and to thank all those people who helped make it happen. I have had to learn the difficult skill of accepting help this year (difficult for me at least!) When you look at an acre of crops in constant rotation with 2 markets and a CSA every week and a mortgage payment that needs to happen every month through the winter- you suddenly become open to anyone who is willing to pull a weed or wash a carrot! And my CSA members have been the steady underlying support that makes this whole thing possible. The CSA is the challenge and the foundation of my job. Challenging me to produce a diverse array of food for 15 families every week for 21 weeks and providing the financial foundation to get this farm started with soil and seeds and shovels etc. etc. First year CSA members really took a risk with me and I am so grateful. I also feel so proud and happy when they tell me how well they are eating and much they are enjoying the food. It is soul satisfying in a way that is hard to describe. Everything about the relationship between a farmer and her CSA so right. The community it builds, the good food it delivers, the mutual support and caring it provides on both ends- it is the way we need to be growing and eating into the future.

OK, need to get on with my day now- and do some yoga and eat breakfast for a change instead of rushing out to water plants! Thank you fall rain! My favorite month of September is here at last, now I can join the collective season end sigh, ahhhh…….

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R-evolution hearth and heart

August 9th, 2009

Jessi and Lisa dance the cob mix together

Over the first three weekends in August we are building a community hearth for our farm. We decided to use a natural building material called cob (old English for “lump”) which consists of a mixture of clay, sand and straw. Our idea is to make a bread oven with attached benches and a firepit with a rain covering overall.

The best way to check a foundation is to get up on it and see what shakes out!

I’ve had some experience using cob before to build with and have found it to be a cheap, easy and fun material that lasts amazingly well even in the Oregon rain. It is also completely nontoxic and can be made from local materials!

Dan sifting out rocks from our native clay

To make cob you mix the materials by hand or with your feet, and make big lumps which you stick together over a piled rock foundation. We bought our local rock and sand from Mohler Sand and Gravel some 8 miles or so from our land for a total of $40, the clay we dug up from the garden when we were terracing our south slope for beds.

Adding sand to the oven top to help hold the heat in under the oven floor made of firebrick.

Making sure our oven floor is level.

When we bought the land I noticed our incredibly dense clay and knew it would be terrible to garden in- but wonderful for building cob. Now I finally get the satisfaction of using the clay for something other than intense double digging.

Our happy cob mixers, Jessi, Lisa and Steven

Last Sunday we built the foundation of the cob oven which we will use to bake breads and pizzas and to warm the attached benches in winter. This Sunday (August 9th) we will build the foundations of the benches, make the top of the cob oven and hopefully cob the bench seats up a bit. Next Sunday (August 16th) we hope to finish the cob oven and decorate it, cob the backs of the benches and add artistic embellishments. We are aiming to fire the oven on August 17th for Jessi’s birthday and to bake her favorite food- muffins!

Checking the book "Building a Cob Oven" for details.

Test batches of cob to see what the right ratio of sand and clay is- ours was 2 parts sand to 1 clay

Anyone is invited to come and help work on the Revolution Cob oven project this or next weekend. Workshops are free of charge, drop in anytime from 10am-6pm! We make a farm lunch for hardworking cob mixers (dancers) and you are invited for our birthday firing as well. We will post photos of the hearth project as we go!

Lisa making sure the muffins will fit!

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