Yokna(patawpha) Bottoms Farm

This Week’s featured food: Okra!

It’s mid-July and our fields are overflowing with great vegetables!  We are scurrying to keep everything weeded, harvested, watered, and generally happy.  This work is difficult, hot, and never-ending, but it is also tremendously rewarding.  It is sacramental.  We can feel the basic elements of sustainability working through and around us to create something out of almost nothing.  Our long hours and hard work are gratified by truckloads of beautiful, fresh heirloom tomatoes; firm cucumbers, melons, and squash; and plentiful beans and peas.  We are overjoyed by the ability to see a tiny seedling mature into a plant that can produce enough food for a family, and even more overjoyed by the potential for sharing our food with our community, thereby legitimizing what was formerly just a dream of sustainability and cooperation.  We are so proud of our farm and its bountiful spread.  Stay cool out there, and viva las locavores!

Fun in the Sun(flowers)!  Our neighbor James is growing a field of sunflowers just north of our fields. This is a wonderful treat for all of our bees and for Dakota.

Summer is soon to be officially upon us, and our fields are bursting forth with blackberries who come to celebrate with us. Ripening by the minute, these berries bring us a sweet treat with a just a touch of sour to remind us of balance, to sit poised somewhere in the middle if possible.  The summer season officially begins on the summer solstice,  when, for one day, we turn closest to the sun as we will be all year, before beginning the journey away from the sun again.  And, just like the sun, now is the time for the blackberry to shine, to be the star of the show, to brighten your life and nourishing you with life-giving goodness.  

We would love to share our blackberries with you, and we welcome you to come and pick from our fields. Just let us know when you would like to come, and we will be happy to work something out with you.

We also invite you to come celebrate the Summer Solstice with us at our drum circle next Tuesday, June 21, from 8:30-10:30pm. The blackberries will be right there waiting for you,too.

–Amanda Margolis

The farm is transitioning from a spring filled with warm weather and violent storms to the heat and hummidity of early summer. Many of our spring crops are sensative to the heat and we are rapidly coming to the end of any produce these crops are providing us. We still have some lettuce that is heat tolerent but all of our Asian greens, mustard greens, cilantro, arugala, turnips, and most of our radishes are done for the year. The good news is that as the season evolves, new spring crops are now being harvested in large numbers. This includes beautiful rainbow chard, tasty sweet and snap peas, red, yellow, and white onions, six varieties of perfect potatoes, and five varieties of the best tasting beets I have ever had. We are also going to distribute and bring to market a small sample of Cosmic Purple Carrots (see header above) that we grew in our test plot raised beds near the house. These remarkable carrots have purple skin, with bright orange flesh that tapers to a yellow core. They also have a delicious, sweet flavor. The two photos show potatoes and beets harvested about thirty minutes ago for distriubtion this afternoon. The first features 50 lbs of Mountain Rose Potatoes (a gorgeous pink skin with a shiney bright pink flesh), 50lbs of Yukon Gold (large, gold skinned, white flesh–market favorite), and 50 lbs of Red Norland (heavy producer with red skin and white flesh) sitting in the field waiting washing. The second features four types of freshly harvested beets. On the bottom left are Detroit  Dark Reds (Classic deep red beet,  Dark-green leavesstreaked with crimson veins.  Very attractive and flavorful as root orgreens), top left are Chioggia (Italian variety with sweet root, conentric rings alternating crimson and white when sliced), middle bottom right are Bulls Blood Beet (bright red, with brilliant almost garnet folliage), and orange beets (orange beet with mild flavor).

Mountain Rose, Yukon Gold, & Red Norland Potatoes, Harvest May 27, 2011

Detroit Dark Red, Chioggia, Bulls Blood, and Orange Beets harvested May 27, 2011