I Heart Farms

Thanksgiving and Thanks Receiving

I don't have a farm. I don't plant seeds, I bury them. So naturally ("nature" + "ally"), I am grateful to all of the farmers in my life. They're my heroes.

This year in particular, my appreciation has grown enormously, as I have gotten to be good friends with a handful of farmers, with whom my family have shared many beautiful dinners. These farmers and ranchers have not only supplied me with the meat and vegetables on the table, but they have shown me, through good times and bad, what it means to be a real friend.

Pictured above is Love Apple Farm, owned by my friend—more like a sister—Cynthia Sandberg. Tomorrow my family will join hers, and her crew of helpers who've traveled from around the world to work on the farm. I'll get there early to help with the turkey, which we'll cook using local herbs and shiitake mushrooms. My ex-husband and our daughter, as well as his two young sons, will be there, along with my biggest hero, Bob, who's been my partner for over seventeen years. The little grandson we having been raising for four years is out of town, but Logan is truly the center of our gratitude to a beneficent universe for his presence in our lives.

A Month of Sundays: Where I've Been

Pictured here: squashes and pumpkins at Love Apple Farm, where I've been visiting lately. There are many reasons I've not been writing—all of October, even. Foremost, I've got some steady part-time work, and second to that, we've had more visitors and socializing in the last three weeks than in the past ten years. Some other projects and interests have popped up—not the least of which has been the birth of a baby boy in the house next door, and I've been (self-)appointed Court Photographer. I'm behind in e-mails and in other areas of life.

I only have time today for three brief announcements of some events very soon, and maybe you can avail yourselves of them. And then I hope to get back in the saddle with blogging. Much is happening on the local farm scene, and most all of it is wonderful.

Making a Difference

Yet another cool thing to do with your kids and their schools. On October 18, my friends Lori and Jeff Fiorovich will host a Farm to School Day at Crystal Bay Farm in Watsonville.

Read the press release below, and see the faces of your host farmers, when Logan was just two and a half.

Harvest Festival at UCSC Farm: October 4!

Grab your kids: this weekend is the biggest event at the UCSC Farm all year 'round! I took this photo a couple of years ago, when we took Logan for the face painting, pumpkin painting, apple bobbing, and other great activities for kids. And the whole family.

The festival has expanded this year to include workshops and cooking  demonstrations among the already packed schedule of live music, apple tasting, an apple pie bake-off competition, and so much more! There are walking tours of the farm, tractor rides, and so on. And LOTS of good food to eat. $5 and under for admission to one fantastic farm event.

Highly recommended! To see the complete schedule, including the live music, visit the CASFS website here.

That's all until tomorrow. I've been under deadlines with four clients, and hope to catch a break in the action soon.

Here: a joke. "Sarah Palin is a post turtle." (I laughed, even though it's older than John McCain.)

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY, from Michael Moore: "The Rich Are Staging a Coup This Morning."

Thanks for visiting, and now get on the phone with your Congresspersons.

The Heisman Chicken Awards, & Farm Visit with a Baby

Sorry I have not been around as much as I would like: I've had paying work deadlines, and tending to business. And one week without a car.

TLC RANCH VISIT ON LABOR DAY WEEKEND

Yes, I am SO GLAD I did not attend the Slow Food event last weekend. We celebrated slow food without having to pony up to Carlo Petrini. [Edit: please read this post about Slow Food Nation's "Come to the Table." I was crying before I even got to the end.]

Last Sunday was fantastic. Rebecca Thistlethwaite and Jim Dunlop at TLC Ranch had invited some friends out to celebrate a real slow food event, and that included a tour of the ranch with Jim. That's him, hamming it up (so to speak) with a chicken who'd gotten out of the fence.

Since my car was out of commission (more on that in a bit: it brought a blessing), I got a ride with Guillermo and Amber Payet, of LocalHarvest.org. If you read my blog, you know they're dear friends, and I had the utter joy of sitting in the back seat with little baby Joaquin, eleven weeks old. I was in heaven, of course.

Hazon Is Hebrew for "Vision"

A fellow member of the Board of Directors for the Friends of the UCSC Farm & Garden gave me this postcard at our monthly meeting this week, and I promised her I would put it on my weblog.

Emily Freed writes:

Come be a part of the New Jewish Food Movement!

You are invited to join us at the 2008 Hazon Food Conference which will take place December 25 - 28, 2008 at the Asilomar Conference and Retreat Center, on the Monterey Peninsula, CA. The conference experience will cover the spectrum of food interests, from health and sustainability to food justice and Jewish tradition. Join hundreds of others from all over North America, Israel, and beyond as this group of young, not so young, singles, couples, families, rabbis, farmers, educators, chefs, writers, students and enthusiasts gathers to celebrate Chanukah, Shabbat, and the New Jewish Food Movement. To register or find out more about the Hazon Food Conference, visit: www.hazon.org/foodconference

If you have questions about the Food Conference or want to find out more information about Hazon, feel free to contact Emily Jane Freed at [email protected].

• • • • • • • • • • •

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: "The vision that you glorify in your mind, the ideal that you enthrone in your heart - this you will build your life by, and this you will become." — James Lane Allen

Thanks for visiting.

High Ground Farm's Open Space Alliance Farm Dinner

Set atop the rolling hills near a slough in Watsonville, beautiful High Ground Organics farm is a vision within a vision. I'm having trouble finding words to describe it, so here are some photos from a visit a couple of years ago.

High Ground Organics partners with Mariquita Farm in a robust CSA, and one of the charming things High Ground brings to the table (so to speak) are all the varieties of flowers they grow, which make the farm itself exceptionally beautiful.

On August 17, you can have the chance to dine on the farm: Open Space Alliance is hosting a farm dinner with Chef Jozseph Schultz (formerly of India Joze). About Jozseph's food: he catered the sit-down dinner at my best friend's wedding a couple of weeks ago for 150 people. The food, with all its Pan-Asian influences, was fantastic. See his menu below, and read the press release from Open Space Alliance: one of my favorite groups and causes in the county.

A Visit to Las Lomas: TLC Ranch and Serrano Organic Farm

I heart strawberries. But most of all, I heart golden raspberries. I found both, and more, at beautiful little Serrano Organic Farm, on a recent visit with Rebecca Thisthlethwaite, my friend who blogs at HonestMeat.com.

I'm trying out a new (to me) technology using PictoBrowser, since I had 24 photos of the visit and not nearly that much verbiage. But to see if it works, I have to publish this first, and then edit afterwards. You can see the photos at my Flickr set here, if it doesn't work.

[Note: it does show up, but the actual photos are cropped: you can see them full size at the Flickr set, if you prefer.)

Honest Meat: Ruminate on this

Pictured here: a new face to the world of weblogs, my friend, Rebecca Thistlethwaite.

She has just launched her new weblog, HonestMeat.com, and I think she is going go be a fabulous addition to the blogosphere—because the blog is basically about the good, the bad, and the ugly of raising livestock. She knows the right questions to ask, and she knows the answers to all your questions about raising meat: both humanely and inhumanely. And she hopes to get lots of comments, but none of the "non-anonymous pinhead" sort.

Rebecca and her husband, Jim Dunlop, run TLC (Tastes Like Chicken) Ranch out in Las Lomas, California, just a little past Watsonville. For several years, she was working with a non-profit, ALBA, for six years. Now she is going to be consulting, as well as taking time to garden with their little girl, Fiona, whose photo is below.

I had the pleasure of spending several days in Rebecca's company: we sat at opposite ends of my big dining table, working on our laptops. I designed her banner (we love it, because it's all about the grass), and helped her with some technical stuff.

Time's Running Out: Raw Milk ACTION ALERT!

SHORT AND TO THE POINT:

Make 17 phone calls to save raw milk in California, please.

LINK.

These are some of Jean and Bob's cows out in Watsonville at the very beautiful Deep Roots Ranch.