CSA Harvest #23

Hi farm friends! I've spent a few late night hours trying to find something to use as a makeshift website.. hopefully this will work for awhile! As many of you know we hit the first frost mark last Friday and Saturday mornings and awoke to find our tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, eggplant, beans, corn and basil done in. One row of tomatoes survived the frost and hopefully each of you will get another ripe one or two- the rest of the tomatoes we picked green and will be including green tomato recipes from here on out. The frost came much earlier than we had hoped for or anticipated and we are not yet sure if we will be able to meet our deadline. We will take the CSA season as long as we can of course but want to make sure you are still receiving enough food. One idea I would like to throw out is credit for next year if we are unable to go past Thanksgiving (so you receive X amount of weeks free next season to recoup the shortened season this year). We are still at least hopeful to make it until Thanksgiving but just wanted to give you all a heads up in case we fall short of our goal.

The end of every year farming is a bittersweet one, all the crops you carefully tended at the end of the season get pulled out, and thrown in a big compost heap. Our tomatoes that we lived with in our trailer and formed a close bond with have joined their fallen comrades in the compost. But their branches, leaves and over ripe fruit will decompose and help to form the rich soil for next year's crop so their legacy will continue. The crops that managed to survive the cold were the rainbow chard (hip hip hooray!), the Italian flat leaved parsley, a new crop of broccoli, turnips, baby greens, corn mache (still too small to include), beets, carrots, cilantro, daikon radish. We still have boxes and boxes of potatoes, recently harvested winter squash, apples, kiwi fruit, garlic and onions.

I spent yesterday at a Think Local Umpqua meeting run by a group called AMIBA. AMIBA helps to facsilitate alliances with local, independent businesses in communities around the USA. When we spend our dollar with a local, independent business in our community that dollar recirculates several times (the business owner lives here ,they own a house here, they pay taxes here, they shop here). I am excited about the energy that Think Local Umpqua has been bringing to our county. If any of you would like to learn more about the alliance for local, independent businesses in our county please contact Lily Brislen at the Umpqua Comm Dev. Co 673-4909. Also I still have tickets for the Think Local Umpqua Benefit Dinner for this Friday. If you are interested please remind me tomorrow for a ticket!

Today I wanted to give an introduction to one of Big Lick Farm's key helpers and that is M.A Hansen! Many of you met M.A during the potluck but for those of you who did not I wanted to include some information about the dynamic, tireless, awesome volunteer who orchestrates the washing, packaging and packing of each of your shares!

1. Why is it important to you to eat locally AND organically??
It is important to me to eat locally and organically for several reasons :
A-I want to know what the eco-system of my food source is. (where does the water come from, what has been done to
the soil, does anyone in the area use herbicides or pesticides, where did the seeds come from, etc.)
B-Eating locally grown foods saves and enormous amount of energy and lowers the carbon foot print. If everyone
ate locally the energy savings would include: reduced manufacturing of food transportation systems (trucks, trailers,
railroad cars, etc), reduced road building and maintenance (tractor-trailer trucks cause a lot of wear and tear on the
roads they travel) , reduced supermarket and parking lot building and maintenance, reduction of canning, bottling
and packaging of food, reduction of transportation fuel use, reduction of building and maintaining the vehicles
people use to get to and from supermarkets, reduction of electricity,(lighting, air conditioning, refrigeration, heating
etc. to keep the doors of the supermarkets open, etc.
C-Supporting organic foods eliminates use of GMO (genetically modified foods and organisms-(Monsanto's quest
to control the food supplies of the world)) food from our meals.
2. What other programs are you involved in or do you volunteer for in our community? Umpqua Bio-Alternative Co-op
(UBAC Treasurer), Native Plant Society (Treasurer), Douglas County Global Warming,(Advisory), Partnership
of the Umpqua Rivers, (water monitoring of the Umpqua Rivers and their tributaries for healthy fish survival),
Oregon Citizens Against the Pipeline(No LNG-foreign liquid natural gas), Zero Waste, Sustainable Living,
Children's Creek Week ,Myrtle Creek,(educate children on how to care for the fish habitats in the local creeks)

3. Why did you decide to devote your Thursday's being a volunteer at Big Lick Farm?
I believe in the CSA program. I feel privileged to be involved in such a good program to promote local and
organic food for everyone, rich or not so rich (also known as the have and the have not's)

4. What is your favorite part of the CSA day? Arriving in the morning and seeing what goodies we are going to fill the
boxes and bags with, planning how to do it and working with Suzie, Asinete, Violet , Robin, Jeanne , boss
Sally dog, and 3 righteous geese(couldn't have a better more devoted crew).

Thank You M.A for all your hard work!!

Next week we will hopefully be hearing from Asinete (who is too shy to ever do the newsletter!) and hopefully our other two key volunteers husband and wife duo Robin and Violet!

I will post this now before putting up the recipes just to make sure this is going to go thru and that you will all be able to access it! Yikes! I feel very exposed at the moment!