Last Pickup

Yesterday we picked up our last share of the year from our CSA farm. It has been a great season
and we now have a lot of food stocked up for the coming months.

I could go on and on about how great it has been to buy food from a hard-working family as opposed to a large company, but you've probably heard it all before.

This season, we have learned a lot about vegetable farming and we are putting it to use in our borrowed garden space.


Our tomatillo plants are still producing like crazy and a few tomatoes are hanging in there. The tomatoes are not ripening like the used to, but I will still cook them down for sauce. The purple bush beans and arugula are still growing and I'm hoping to harvest them into the winter.

Our old-growth kale patch will definitely last until spring.


Last night I carved my CSA pumpkin to look like a painting in the Frontier Cafe in Albuquerque.

In the dark, it looks like a Space Invaders character!

Food Prep Season

With our garden and CSA farm both producing great yields, I have been busy preparing much the food for storage.


Apart from occasionally eating out, I hope we can survive solely on what we put up during our extended Oregon harvest.

We never know how much we will get of each item from week to week, so it can be a struggle to preserve the produce that arrives in abundance.


We have no shortage of basil, which I have been grinding with olive oil and freezing for future pasta dishes.


Now that tomatoes are growing and ripening faster than we can eat them all, I have also started cooking them down to tomato sauce.


Last night, I made a pot of beautiful orange-colored sauce that I froze for future pizzas.

We still have a fridge full of pole beans and summer squash. Way too much for us to eat now, so I am planning to blanch, puree, and freeze like crazy while watching college football tomorrow.

If you have not noticed, I am keeping tally of the records of my three teams throughout the season. In addition to Oklahoma, my graduate school, I follow the University of Oregon (Sarah's undergraduate school) and the University of Montana (my undergrad school). Since the three teams will not be playing each other this season, there should be no conflicts of interest.


I hope all three teams remain undefeated when the time comes to eat this winter squash.

Ag Weekend

This weekend, Sarah and I braved triple-digit temperatures to learn more about the places that produce our favorite foods and drink.


On Saturday, we attended a potluck picnic and tour at our CSA (community supported agriculture) farms. Steve and Mish, who are about our age, lease land for their program, Abundant Harvest, at two farms a few miles north of our apartment. Both farm properties are owned by great families who joined us for the picnic and tour. The picnic was held at the Dos Sequoias Farm, and the namesake trees provided lifesaving shade as we ate. The CSA families brought amazing dishes and we even shared a table with fellow biologists.


After eating, Steve led us on a tour of the Dos Sequoias property. We saw the rows and rows of tomato plants and other crops.


We took a look inside a mid-century barn that has a hypnotic pattern of beams and sheet-metal.

We walked past a greenhouse that must have been unbearably hot inside. Thanks to this structure, however, we received plenty of greens during the chilly weeks of late-spring.


We then caravaned up the hill to New Earth Farm.


This was a beautiful piece of land with a nice patch of forest and views of Mount Hood and Mount Jefferson to the east.

To maximize the number of crops grown in a relatively small space, Steve plants crops like broccoli and parsley right next to each other. It amazes me that they can supply sixty families and several restaurants with so much produce from two little plots of land.

We also checked out New Earth's industrial scale compost operation. As a compost enthusiast, I was quite impressed.

Steve supplements the compost with bags of coffee bean husks provided by a local roaster.

The last stop on the tour was a look at New Earth's worm composting bin. It is fifteen feet long and four feet deep. Thousands of red wiggler worms lurked just below the surface and tiny mites crawled over the debris. I could have stared into the bin for hours!

Sunday was our wine club pickup day. We visited Apolloni Vineyards, twenty miles west of Hillsboro, to get our wines and tour the vineyard.

They set up an outdoor tasting area among their small pear grove.


We were invited to return in the fall to pick as many as we like.


Alfredo the owner pulled us on a trailer with his tractor through the vineyards and orchards to teach us about the argicultural history and practices of the place.

The wine industry is very young in Oregon, the oldest vineyards were planted in the 1970s. Before then, much of the land was logged and planted with walnut and hazelnut orchards. The thin hillside soils turned out to be less than ideal for these crops, which are giving way to grapes such as pinot noir and pinot gris that do much better in the soil.

I am a big fan of wineries. Not only do they make a great product, but most are certified sustainable and they often have many acres of forested land on their properties. In addition, grapes require little to no irrigation and can be easily grown without pesticides or herbicides.

Now that we have gained an even greater appreciation for our food and wine growers, we look forward to enjoying their goods throughout the summer.

CSA Day!

After a dew days of blazing heat, the usual spring weather pattern of clouds, wind, light rain, and sunbreaks returned. At least it's not too hot to sleep at night.


Sarah and I have been looking forward to today for several months. In late winter, we registered to join a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). We sent a few checks to a small farm called Dos Sequoias and waited for the harvest to begin. Every Wednesday from now until October, we will drive a few miles north and fill our bags with whatever produce is available to shareholders. It is a bit of a risk to pay up front without knowing what the season will produce, but judging from today's pickup, I think we will get our money's worth.


After Sarah returned from work, we finally made the drive through the beautiful Washington County farmland and arrived at a small barn where we met the couple that is leasing the land.


Like many liberal idealists, I dream of such a lifestyle. The sacrifices would be big, but I think of a place like this as my own personal paradise where I could grow real food and conduct ecological research to my heart's content.

But back to reality....We did not expect much due to the cold weather this spring, so we were surprised by the amount of greens we were allowed to bag and bring home. We will be eating plenty of salad and cooking loads of greens with every meal this week.


We also grabbed a few bok choys, oregano stems, and mint sprigs, then drove home to begin the washing and salad spinning proccess.

Be sure to check Sarah's food blog to see what we do with our veggies.

Speaking of veggies, things are progressing nicely at our borrowed garden bed.


The kale are growing,



bushbeans have sprouted,


our small tomatoes have little blossoms,


and Andie approves of the snap peas' growth.


Sarah's grandfather Fred will soon till some extra space where we plant more tomatoes, winter squash, and whatever else we can fit.