To all the wonderful people that went for it and got a share in the Boat Farm CSA,
On the edge of the oak and wild cherry forest and just behind the garden there is a small bridge that crosses the trail-head into the woods. We call it the Over Under, and over the course of the growing season here, its become my favorite spot to go and take a moment to sit, or play some music overlooking the garden. I’m sitting here now, the night before the final harvest of the our Community Supported Agriculture program. Before me is the garden, the fields, the coast range and the salmon colored sky of the setting sun. This has been my first garden here in Oregon, where I’m from, after almost 10 years of gardening in far away places, and this is my first year, after years of growing almost all my own produce, that I’ve done the same for others. The feeling of gratitude is overwhelming. When I set out at the end of last winter, my goal was to grow great food and to feed people. As a somewhat far-reaching idea, I also hoped that I might just be able to make a living and support myself doing so. Well, that hope has been a success and it never could have been without the support of you, my community.
In a lot of ways this has been a really challenging year. There wasn’t enough sunshine this spring to start seedlings in the south facing window that had been used for that in the past. I set up cold frames out in the garden to serve as greenhouses, but something got in and clear-cut a bunch of the seedlings a number of times. The soil was so heavy it might as well have been concrete, and even after it had been seriously worked and amended many of the young plants just weren’t strong enough to fight of the pests on top of it all. Lots of things bolted before they’d grown big, and some of the things that did grow well, like the cabbage, still haven’t headed up and matured.
But a lot of things were successes. I found a friend early on who donated unlimited tuck loads of compost from her horse farm. I was able to till this in, along with sand, grape compost and homemade complete organic fertilizer, and the end result was in many places a loose, dark and workable soil. Another friend donate a bunch of totes that we’ve been using for the harvesting all year long. The greens have flourished and so have the cucumbers, squashes and the potatoes. The experimental root veggies, many of which I had never grown before came through and saved the day when many of the more common vegetables struggled. I hope you enjoyed learning about and cooking the kohlrabi, turnips, parsnips and black winter radishes as much as I did. The tomatoes and tomatillos turned out amazingly productive, even despite the super wet spring and late year that this has been so I’m gonna send you all away with a good batch of green tomatoes and tomatillos for a final batch of salsa verde, which I’ve been living on the past few months, and is great when you roast them first in the oven on broil and then blend then with onions, peppers, garlic, salt and cumin. Green tomatoes are also great fried with some cumin and chili powder sprinkled on them, or just with salt and pepper. You all are getting a pumpkin, and its a sweet sugar pumpkin, so if you cant resist the urge to carve it, I recommend that you do it right before Halloween so that you can still eat it afterwards. I’m also sending you home with some hazelnuts from our orchard here, and they’re great eaten raw or roasted in the shell first. But the real treat will be a bottle of fresh squeezed grape juice, just off the press. Enjoy!
One of the things that really sets this kind of agriculture apart is not just the food, (which I’m convinced is way healthier, even if it doesn’t always look quite as perfect,) but the direct role that the consumer plays on the farm, even though lots of you never got to make it out here. Every dollar that you spent on the CSA went straight to the farmer, and every dollar that I got is going straight back into our local Oregon economy. Now that I’m gonna have a little free time I’m looking forward to finally taking some yoga classes at Amrita! None of that money goes to agribusiness, none to the trucking industry, none to Monsanto, none to any other corporation, and none to wall street! Instead you helped to start a local business, you provided a meaningful job for someone, and now Oregon has one more young sustainable farmer, at a time when the average farmer is over 65 years old and would retire if they could only afford to. Here in this beautiful, fertile part of the world, small scale, sustainable agriculture should be the foundation of a strong and thriving economy and supporting it now is an investment in making sure it has a chance to become that in the future. Even though its small scale, I really feel like doing things this way is the right way to do things, and that it makes big a difference in the long run.
So thank you all for taking a leap of faith and supporting a young local farmer’s first year doing it for real. I’ve learned a ton and I owe it all to you!
-Sara Wolk
farm manager at Boat Farm
