What a huge relief it is to get some rain and cool weather at long last! Water is a much needed balm for this parched land, and we’ll happily welcome every drop we can get. As the chaos of summer leaves us and the days turn towards dark and cold, the farm, like many of us, is moving into its most restful state. Over the next few weeks, we’ll continue to harvest what’s left in the field, supplementing with produce from our winter-share farm friends as the season continues.

This week, your boxes come complete with a final round of sweet, crunchy, hard-earned celery. To say that celery is finicky is an understatement - it’s slow growing, needs huge amounts of water and nutrients, plenty of sun, and a bit of shade (a hard combination to come by mid-summer). And although it’s certainly not the biggest star of the vegetable world, we think it shines bright just the same. However you choose to enjoy it, we hope that its versatility and delicate flavor lend depth and character to winter salads and hearty stews alike on these chilly nights!

Exciting news! November 1st marks the beginning of Nisenan Heritage Month, a Nisenan-led community educational opportunity that seeks to offer reflection and insight into the stories of Nisenan people and the Nevada City Nisenan Rancheria.

Nevada City and much of the surrounding area (including both of our Mountain Bounty farm sites) rests on land that Nisenan people have called home since ancient times. As a farm, we recognize that the land we operate on is unceded indigenous territory, and pay monthly “rent” to the Nevada City Rancheria’s 'Ancestral Homelands Reciprocity Program’ via our lease with the Bear Yuba Land Trust.

As a result of historically anti-indigenous government action and legislation, the Nevada City Rancheria is no longer federally recognized by the United States. This means that “tribal members are denied access to the federal Indian programs created to support their health, education, housing and economic stability.” Donations and reciprocity payments are crucially instrumental in the “preservation, protection and perpetuation of the Nisenan people and their culture into the future, while advocating for the restoration of the Nevada City Rancheria’s federal recognition.” (California Heritage Indigenous Research Project).

We encourage all of you to take some time this month to support local Nisenan culture and to learn more about their history and the interconnected story of this land. Check out the list of links below for more information, and click here to make a donation to this year’s Nisenan Heritage Month fundraising campaign. Thank you and have a fantastic week!

This week, your boxes come bearing so many of the incredible gifts that October has to offer, including our friend, the humble sweet potato. Rich, versatile, and nutrient dense, this vining, heat-loving root vegetable really shines in hearty fall dishes. We love them baked, mashed, boiled, and fried, although for sweeter preparations you’ll want to cook them low and slow (this article by Kitchn explains why). Added bonus- they store best at room temperature, and are perfectly content to sit out on the countertop or in a dark pantry until you’re ready to use them. With one of the longer growing seasons out of all the different crops we grow at the farm, these roots are a true labor of love. Enjoy!

As we near the end of this incredibly chaotic season of farming, it is our joy and privilege to have finally found the time and bandwidth to attend a handful of farmers markets! Hopefully those of you who visit the downtown Nevada City market on Saturdays had the opportunity to wave from a proper distance, or to shop the booth and say ‘hi’ to our farmers. The decision to step back from the market this past summer was difficult to make, and we’ve missed the in-person connection that markets give us to our local community. Needless to say, we’re happy to be back at it. Next Saturday (October 24th) will be the last market we work during this short-but-sweet season, and we’d love to see your happy (masked) faces. We’ll be stocking our booth with all of the best fall vegetables, and maybe even a pumpkin or two. Hope to see you there!

Slightly cooler temps were a treat for us all this week! Still, the rain our region desperately needs continues to elude us. The lack of moisture adds another pinch point for us at the farm, where we’re currently attempting to germinate large fields of cover crop before the days become too short. ‘Cover crop’ refers to the blend of beneficial plants that we seed into our fields each fall to protect and improve the health of our soil over the wet winter months. With no rain in the forecast, we instead create the rain - something that involves setting up and running an elaborate amount of very sizable overhead irrigation systems. It’s a big job, so let’s keep crossing our fingers and hoping that things take a turn towards stormy.

We’ve reached the far side of the arc of this year, where we tidy up and say ‘thanks!’ to the land for everything it has given us. What an honor it is to have a relationship with these fields, and to be charged with caring for them with love and respect. Enjoy your boxes this week!

As a CSA farm, we have moved away from the Summer and Winter Season distinction we've used in the past. With extensions to our growing season and capabilities, along with developing relationships with our farm share partners, we are fully embracing offering a year-round CSA to our customers. When you purchase a vegetable CSA subscription to our farm, the best deal is to commit for 25 deliveries, no matter the time of year you sign up. This tells us that you are committed to our service and willing to pay up front, regardless of what the harvest holds. However, with the ever-changing models of food delivery, we understand the need for flexibility, which is why we introduced the pay-every-4-delivery subscription option in March. These shares automatically renew, every 4 weeks, via credit card, until you choose to cancel. We also added the capability of you to place yourself on hold, which extends your paid deliveries one week into the future.

On Friday, when the air had cleared and the sky returned to blue at long last, we were reminded once more of what a gift it is to be able to spend our days outside. Farming isn’t easy, but moments like this are rewarding beyond measure. The fields of our Birchville farm site are overflowing with bed after bed of fall crops- beautiful to behold and worth driving by if you’re in the area! We’re excited for the opportunity to share all this goodness with you, and hope you’re enjoying the clear air and fall weather as much as we are.

Dark, smoky days are a big part of all of our lives right now. We’re keeping on as always out here at the farm, and making the best of this rather difficult situation. We hope you are all able to do the same! This year has been challenging in so many different ways for so many of us. May it inspire us all to take even greater care of ourselves, each other, and this incredible home we have here in the Sierra foothills.

Last week we harvested our kabocha squash, the first variety of winter squash to come in from the fields. Next up is our crop of beautiful amber-colored delicata squash- a reminder in the midst of a long string of hot and smoky days that fall is indeed approaching! We’re nearly to that wonderful time on the farm when lettuce and greens are abundant, and a little bit of everything you could ever dream of is in season. And while there’s so much food to look forward to, make sure to savor the zucchini, cucumbers, beans, and other high summer crops that will gradually begin to make their way out. Happy eating!

Right on schedule, our peppers have been ripening and steadily making their way into your boxes. Some of these gems are easily recognizable - the green bell pepper, jalapeno, and beloved sweet red pepper- while others may be slightly less familiar.

What a sad, difficult week it’s been for everyone. With wildfires burning near and far, smoky skies, and a heavy August heatwave, our minds have been far from the field. Despite difficult conditions, the crew has been working as hard as ever through it all with unrivaled optimism - it’s an amazing opportunity to get to farm with such resilient folks, and we’re grateful for it! Our hearts go out to those who have lost their homes or been displaced by the fires, to all of the firefighters and emergency staff working around the clock to protect us and the places we love, and to the beautiful river canyon, forests, and wild spaces that fire has forever changed. To everyone out there who works to keep this community safe in tough times - thank you for all that you do! It is imperative, now more than ever, to keep fighting for our world and environment in pursuit of positive, lasting change.

Despite the heat, we’ll still be out in the fields this week, working hard to make the usual veggie magic happen in your boxes. Farming is rain or shine, and with the help of our incredible crew, and the occasional cold lunch melon, we somehow manage to keep our cool. We hope you’re all able to do the same! In honor of heat waves everywhere, this week’s recipes all involve minimal cooking - we know you don’t want to turn on your oven.

This week, our story begins with a family of turkeys- five adults, ten babies - who have found a perfect home in the lush wild spaces in and around our fields. Turkeys are charming beings, and while we’ve occasionally found frustration with their antics (eating our table grapes the moment they’re ripe, disturbing straw mulch on our garlic, occasionally nibbling on row crops, etc.) we’ve managed to sustain a quiet peace. But much to our dismay, the turkeys had other ideas. In an astonishingly small amount of time, they’ve managed to decimate several plantings of lettuce, despite our best efforts and most furious fist shaking. Which brings me to this week’s box, which will hold an offering of lettuce from our friends at Coke Farm. We’re grateful for the support of farmer friends in helping us get this staple item into your boxes until our lettuce supply has made a comeback, and excited to beat the heat this coming week with refreshing summer salads. Enjoy!

It’s been a wild year for the farm thus far, full of twists and turns, challenges, and triumphs both big and small. Our membership is at an all-time high - a fact our farmers have taken on whole-heartedly in an attempt to feed as many folks as possible. One major constraint we’ve had to work around throughout this process has been the size of plantings made long before we knew what we were dealing with. The bulk of our planning is done in the winter, with seeding starting as early as January, and many crops going into the ground at the earliest opportunity. What this all means, really, is that we planted enough tomatoes in February for 700 CSA members, but are now harvesting and packing tomatoes into more than 850 boxes each week! Add to this the existing risks of farming, and multiply it out by many other crops, and it becomes clear what a puzzle we’ve been dealing with for the past few months.

As August approaches, we keep bustling to the same speedy rhythm - plant, harvest, pack, weed, rest, repeat. This is ‘peak season’ on the farm, an elegant way of saying that right now, everything happens all at once. Our crew is at its strongest and swiftest, using all the energy we can spare to get everything that needs doing, done. But with storage crops like onions and potatoes ready to come out of the field, the tempo can only increase from here on out. Wish us luck!

Ode To the Onion

by Pablo Neruda

Onion,

luminous flask,

your beauty formed

petal by petal,

crystal scales expanded you

and in the secrecy of the dark earth

your belly grew round with dew.

Under the earth

the miracle

happened

and when your clumsy

green stem appeared,

and your leaves were born

like swords

in the garden,

the earth heaped up her power

showing your naked transparency,

and as the remote sea

duplicating the magnolia,

so did the earth

make you,

onion

clear as a planet

and destined

to shine,

constant constellation,

round rose of water,

upon

the table

of the poor.

You make us cry without hurting us.

I have praised everything that exists,

but to me, onion, you are

more beautiful than a bird

of dazzling feathers,

heavenly globe, platinum goblet,

unmoving dance

of the snowy anemone

and the fragrance of the earth lives

in your crystalline nature

I’m happy to announce, with much joy and gratitude, that the ‘Forever Farms’ fundraising campaign has been a huge success! This 7-week campaign, led by the Bear Yuba Land Trust, Sierra Harvest, Briar Patch Food Co-op, and Tahoe Food Hub, raised over $780,000 towards the protection of critical farmland in Nevada County. Much of the funds raised will guarantee the purchase of the Birchville farm site where the majority of our produce currently comes from, to be held as agricultural land in perpetuity by the land trust. What an overwhelming relief it is to know that this incredible land we steward will be protected, that local land and food access will be that much more secure, and that our farm will be able to continue growing food for all of you far into the future. This is a huge triumph for local food and the future of our community, and we could not have done it without all of you - from the bottom of our hearts, thank you, thank you, thank you! To learn more about the Forever Farms initiative, or to donate, check out their website at https://www.bylt.org/foreverfarms/.

Last week marked the celebrated return of hundreds of shimmering dragonflies to the skies above our fields. It happens every year around this time - only a few at first, and then many more, floating quietly overhead. The nature of their flight is so unobtrusive, it’s easy to miss them until you take a minute to look up. For many of us, they act as a mark of the season, an ephemeral sign that time marches on and that we’re right where we’re supposed to be. And so we move through our days accompanied by these breezy creatures, until the moment comes when they vanish as mysteriously as they first appeared.

With all the scorching heat this past week, our crew is looking forward to the relative bliss of a week in the 80’s! This is the busiest time of year for us, with summer crops (and summer weeds) really coming into their own, even as we continue to seed and transplant for the fall. It never fails to amaze me how quickly things grow during this time of year - beans fatten and tomatoes ripen before our very eyes. Soon, we’ll be transplanting the first of our fall brassicas, like broccoli and kale, at about the same time as we’re saying goodbye to the spring iterations of these favorite vegetables. Beloved cool season crops will be back in good time, but for now we make room in our hearts, and in your boxes, for the undeniable summer bounty of beans, corn, melons, and tomatoes. Enjoy all that this week’s boxes have to offer, and stay cool out there!