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.

Fundraisers & Fun!

Next weekend is a good weekend to be in Santa Cruz: two wonderful fundraising events are taking place for farm lovers and foodies, young and old.

Saturday, September 27, between noon and sunset, Freewheelin' Farm(a little less than six miles outside of Santa Cruz, just off Highway One) is hosting its third annual Farm Art Show. I heard about the previous two from organizaer, Melinda Lundgren, and from plenty of people who attended that this event is a blast.

Freewheelin' Farm is the subject of adoration with locals: they run a CSA with 40 shares, bicycling the six miles into town to deliver their produce. I'd written about it after a stop on the Eco Farm bus tour a couple of years ago.

Amy, Darryl, and Kirstin work the farm together, and they run a great show—figuratively and literally. Check out the details on the flyer: organic brew, wine tasting, wood-fired pizza, kids' table, and more. All for a $5-$10 donation, and there is also art for sale. Great stuff!

The next day, a high-end culinary event is taking place in honor of The Vanilla Queen, my friend, Patricia Rain. Read on for "A Culinary Event Fit for a Queen!" It should be wonderful.

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.

Slow Food Notion: I Don't Think So.

Pictured here: a bouquet created by the apprentices up at UCSC's Farm & Garden (aka "CASFS") for a dinner last night. I shopped, chopped (500 cherry tomatoes, eight pounds of yellow wax beans), cooked (the beans), and prepped for eight great hours.

SLOW FOOD NATION 2008

So, unlike tens of thousands of people in San Francisco who are paying $58 and up for the privilege of suffering through traffic and parking and being crammed into buildings like sardines, I am absolutely committed to avoiding all things under the Slow Food umbrella this Sunday. Slow Food Nation: Come to the Table 2008 starts tomorrow.

When I first heard about it, it sounded exciting. But I realized I was Having Thoughts about it, and that most weren't pretty.

Turns out I'm not alone. (I might not be in the majority, but that doesn't matter.) With her usual graciousness and aplomb, Jennifer Jeffrey (who lives in San Francisco) wrote her plus-minus take on the event. She manages to find the possible positives, which honestly would have eluded me.

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].

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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.

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.

Whole Lotta Somethin' Goin' On

 These Orange-Red apricots are delicious, and beautiful, and Farmer Al at Frog Hollow Farm was kind enough to give me a couple to bring home from the Santa Cruz farmers market yesterday. Drippy almost down the chin, they were.

Orange-Red: today's theme, in a certain way. At least the theme of the hot and smoky afternoon in Santa Cruz, where yesterday I ventured from the vast distance of six miles away. Thirteen if you count the trip to the Community on the Hill, as UCSC is known: that is where I went to retrieve my beautiful daughter for a visit to the market.