I enjoy writing these blog posts to you from the farm, as I grew up with many local CSA programs, farmers markets, and farm stands. I always loved how the fresh produce was delivered right to the neighborhood, and also loved seeing the farms that we visited for on-site pick ups. My parents would tell me how important it was for the farm and how our involvement helped the vegetables grow. I loved that. I also grew up attending seasonal events that the closest farming family to us, one that focused on orchards and livestock, would throw for the community. I vividly remember the smell of apple cider and selecting our family’s thanksgiving turkey from the field.
I always assumed that these were how small farms ran; CSA programs, farmers markets, and some who had the space and location to host community events. I had never thought that a small farm might sell to restaurants or grocery stores. The two concepts seemed separate to me, for the only grocery stores I had known were the Safeways of the east coast. My area of rural Pennsylvania had no natural food stores, nor anywhere that one could find fresh, organic produce other than directly from the farmer. Obviously, times are changing. And Eugene happens to be blessed with many food stores that provide local fresh food, some that have been around for decades. I am really enjoying living in a community that was one of the original radical pioneers in a movement to expand the reach of fresh and healthy food. Back in Pennsylvania, it’s nice to now be able to supplement the produce of a CSA box with other local staples that support other farms and artisans.
Here at Horton Road, each of us five apprentices is assigned a specialized job for the summer. Among our many other farm tasks, this is a job that we manage and learn in depth throughout our time here. My job is to deliver our produce every Monday and Thursday into town. This includes both the deliciously packed CSA boxes and bulk orders for local grocery stores and restaurants. So the farm mornings here differ depending on what day it is, and thus where the harvest of the morning is headed. We typically harvest four out of five work days. I thought that I would take you through a typical Thursday morning harvest, in which our focus is harvesting for Thursday afternoon wholesale deliveries.
By this point in the season, I hope you have all have had the pleasure of enjoying a refreshing and tasty salad mix. Getting to know the tastes of the separate greens is fun, as is seeing what they all bring to the table when mixed together. We each have our own green that we cut during morning harvest, allowing us to get to know it on different levels, one of which is where exactly to make the cut on the stem. This is a lovely task at 6:30am that requires precision and alertness, since we are all wielding sharp knives. My green has been red mustard. So I head out to the bed of mustard leaves, many times spotted with morning dew and delicately soft before the sun has peaked out above the neighboring mountain, and cut a few cases worth. The plantings of each bed of greens are staggered and are done often to ensure that we will be cutting them in their ready prime on these mornings. Then I head to my next crop of the morning (this is the point where many of us go our separate ways to different crops). I have been harvesting a lot of kale within the last two weeks. Kale usually follows salad greens and spinach, as it needs to be harvested before the heat of the sun affects the tenderness of the leaves. Kale is fun in a different way…no tools are involved during the harvest other than my hands. The stem of a good, large, and well-colored leaf is snapped at its lowest point, with caution to not crack any leaves as my hand descends down the stem. This is a plant that can be “picked hard”, which means we can pick each until there is only one or two small leaves left per plant. They respond well to the this and grow new leaves back quickly and fully. A bed of kale can provide over and over again. Once our number of kale bunches is met, I head to again to a knew crop awaiting removal from its home in the ground.
This is when we focus on many of the plants that are not under such a time requirement of the sun. This includes carrots (which would usually be next), radishes, green onions, beets, zucchini, green beans, celery, and cucumbers, among others. Cucumbers have been one of my favorite to harvest recently. They are grown in two of the five greenhouses and have just begun to be included in our morning harvest as of two weeks ago. These are a sort of a jungle to navigate through in order to find mature cucumbers, which are very very close in color to the large leaves they hide behind. This lends the harvest to being sort of like a puzzle, or an I-spy. We scan the plants in this manner from one end of the greenhouse to the other, with plastic buckets that we place the mature and clipped cucumbers into. We usually fill about ten or so of these buckets each harvest. I love doing this barefoot, since we need to find places to step amongst the plants that don’t crush any leaves or flowers of future fruits. This allows me to find good placement and it also feels great to have the soil in between my toes early in the morning.
Once this is finished, the packout (where we gather, prepare, and box the produce) is full of various vegetables, including those that others have harvested this morning. At this point, a few of us focus the rest of our morning on washing and packaging the produce, labeling, and organizing them into our walk-in fridge. Here they sit, harnessing the flavors of the early sunrise harvest, until I pack them into the farm’s pick-up truck after lunch and drive them into town. By the early afternoon they are in the hands of those who are ready to enjoy them. There’s nothing like the taste of vegetables that were in the soil just hours before.
Derek is from Eastern Pennsylvania and is here for his first organic farming apprenticeship. He is enjoying his first time living in the Pacific Northwest and is excited to see where and what his experience at Horton Road Organics may lead to.