The summer has been kind to us, as the genuine heat wave typical of inland San Diego has not arrived, and we’re almost in August! Where did the summer go?
We’re excited to share a new item we’ve been experimenting with, our Sunflower Shoots. We included them in all but two (:/) Large Garden N Grove boxes. (We made up for that unusual slight by substituting other items; something we rarely have to do.) We’re still working on getting the timing and yields down. The other clamshelled item is our Purslane, which is among my favorite warm weather veggies. It has a lemony flavor with a very low-cal, satisfying crunch. I add it to salads, sandwiches and offer it up all by itself with a dip. It’s a great green to add to a rice paper roll up. I enjoy the stems as well as the leaves. We actually harvested two bunches of Swiss chard for Large Boxes, and one bunch for Small boxes, but ended up with only one bunch in each box because we couldn’t get the Large Box lids closed with two bunches.
Lots of folks are on summer break from our CSA, including those that were ordering eggs. We have no wait list for eggs! If you would like to order eggs, please let us know. Here’s the Change Order Link:
https://ww04.elbowspace.com/secure/20140302150121865577
I know I’ve said this…ahem…a few times; but all changes to your CSA box must go through our link. Facebook, Linked In, Post It Notes, Snail Mail, texts, voice messages, comments left with our delivery driver, comments left with your host, notes left on the roster… all have their place; but we have one crew member managing our rosters, and one place for any change affecting our weekly deliveries, and that’s our Link. I made it myself and I’m proud of it. Please help us out and use it when you have a change or quarter-end cancellation. Quarters end in June, September, December and March.
Morning Song Farm offers macadamia tours to the wholesale tour industry, and our signature “welcome to the farm” treat is a macadamia muffin that many have asked the recipe for. It’s been perfected over the years, and I share it here: Ingredients: 2 large eggs 1 cup sugar 1/3 cup vegetable oil 1 cup mashed banana 2 teaspoons vanilla 1 teaspoon baking soda 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg 2 and 2/3 cups of unbleached all-purpose flour 1 cup of heavy cream 1 cup crushed macadamias 1/3 cup pureed raisons 1/2 cup hemp hearts Preheat oven to 350. Procedure: Cuisinart raisins and sugar and set aside. Don’t try to puree the raisins later, as it doesn’t work. Combine eggs, sugar/raisin mix, and oil, beat together. Then blend in banana and vanilla. Set aside.
Combine all the rest of the dry ingredients.
Combine the raisin/sugar/eggs with dry ingredients, and then add cream and nuts.
Carefully spoon into the smallest muffin cups. Sprinkle hemp hearts like crumbs over the tops of each muffin, and then bake until just done. Overcook and the muffin isn’t tasty at all. So check, rather than rely on any particular time frame I can offer here. My oven requires 7-10 minutes.
Just a note about hemp hearts: Hemp cannot be grown in this country because of the War on Drugs as hemp is related to the marijuana plant. However, other countries allow their farmers to grow hemp…Canada for one, and Americans can buy hemp from others, we just can’t grow it here. I find my hemp from Sprouts.
It’s a rare week that goes by when we don’t get the “cannabis question”, most disconcertingly… by strangers knocking on my front door. Friends and unknowns alike: just because I know how to grow sprouts, avocados and well…a whole lot of edibles…doesn’t mean I’m WHATSOEVER interested in breaking federal law or have even the first degree of technical knowledge of how to grow medical marijuana; which is a highly specialized crop. Check out Robert Duncan’s story below. As a farmer, I never bought the subterfuge that it is legally safe to be involved in the cannabis business in California, and no one bothering to become informed should, either. Many farmers believed the current administration’s promise that state laws would be honored in regards to marijuana legalization. That promise, however truly heartfelt…has not played out in the real world. The problem can’t be blamed on President Obama personally; this blog isn’t an indictment of President Obama… who is on record for supporting a reduction on the failed War on Drugs; particularly in regard to marijuana use. Which is my point…despite President Obama’s position, things have continued status quo. People’s lives are being ruined because they think they can rely on state law, a lawyer’s sunny advice….or President Obama’s stated “hand’s off” position. The issue is much larger than a single American president. Enormous sums of money are being made directly from the War on Drugs, from privatized, stock-holder owned, profit-based prisons..largely populated by drug “violators”, as well as militarized law enforcement agencies demanding pricey gear happily sold to them at staggering tax payer costs so they can “fight” the War on Drugs…… an openly admitted federal policy failure. No matter…a tiny number of profit-based organizations…including the Mexican Cartel…have considerably more sway than any American president or the majority of Americans who want to see legalization of marijuana and a shift of focus to crime fighting that involves actual bad guys, not farmers and cancer patients. Can you imagine if the young man below was your son or grandson? How would you feel if you knew the prison he was headed to was privately owned and profit-based? Violated? Betrayed?
It’s so easy to write propaganda supporting the Drug War; it’s child’s play. But that propaganda supports an incomprehensible evil that can land at your front door, checkpoint, or business and harm you or your loved ones without warning. The collateral damage….the harm done to total innocents, continues unabated. The concept of prohibition is a complex one, as this country has seen before….and when we don’t look at how our laws affect us all, the simplistic propaganda forwarded by a tiny cadre of profit based organizations is legitimized. There are unintended consequences of all prohibitions, including the War on Drugs, and those consequences have to be weighted and balanced. Every innocent’s dollar lost defending against false accusations should be recompensed. Every door bashed in because a law enforcement agency ooops…. got the wrong address…s is a cruel reminder of the costs we all pay. Every terrified young person separated from their families at a checkpoint because some so-called trained dog “signaled” that drugs are present….and subsequently forced to strip and submit to cavity search….let’s call a road side “cavity search” what it is: rape….could be your family member next. (Little known fact: almost all American currency in circulation is contaminated by the scent of some drug, so don’t think that your complete and total innocence protects you, it does not.) Educate yourself on this issue…google “forced cavity searches”. See this.And this.Oooh, and this. Some law enforcement agencies don’t settle for failing to find drugs after “drug raping” a traveler; some, after finding no drugs…. defend forcing their victim to submit to a surgical colon inspection… and just as amazingly…doctors and some hospitals are complicit….actually sending the bill to the traumatized victim. What happened to a doctor’s oath of “doing no harm?” How can this be the United States I grew up in? Numerous documented cases have been published regarding victims being completely innocent after enduring these procedures. And here’s the thing….even if by continuing road side drug rapes…we discover some people have stashed their drugs in their bodies, are we willing to put our entire nation, ourselves, our families, our loved ones at risk of being forced into an invasive procedure to “get” those that have drugs on their person? How much personal danger are we as a nation willing to endure to prosecute possible drug possessors? Surely we can all agree that having this happen to yourself or someone you love would be devastating.
And here’s a final thought: if finding every last hidden stash of drugs requires stripping, raping, hand cuffing and dragging a traveler to a nearby rogue hospital for a surgical exploratory procedure…do we as a society need to find every last hidden stash of drugs hidden up travelers behinds? Is it THAT important to us? I’d rather keep my panties on, I’m just saying….and I’m willing to venture a guess that a vast majority of Americans concur. So, then, whose running this show?
Robert Duncan
Robert Duncan moved from Los Angeles to Northern California in 2010 to manage marijuana growing operations for a collective of medical marijuana dispensaries. Although California voters legalized medical cannabis more than 17 years ago, the plant remains illegal under federal law, and the Obama administration launched a renewed crackdown on marijuana in California in 2011. Read Robert’s Story Here
Here’s an issue that I’ve brought up from time to time: just how organic are foods coming from foreign nations that are labeled as “organic?”
Metal-contaminated soils and water sources do not affect organic certification. The certified organic label addresses intentional inputs like fertilizer and pest management practices. Farming on contaminated soils does not disqualify a farm from labeling their harvests “organic.”
Our math problem: If 20% of China’s farmland, and 90% of its surface water, are contaminated with toxic heavy metals, and if 1/3 of the organic food we import is from China, then…
This Saturday at 9am Pacific, the Food Chain Radio show with Michael Olson hosts Patty Lovera, Assistant Director of Food and Water Watch, for a conversation about the organic foods we eat from China.
Topics include why the United States imports so much organic food from China; how organic is the organic food we import from China; and who can we trust to tell us how organic is China’s organic food.
Listen live or recorded on your radio, computer or mobile device: Food Chain Radio#967
Green beans for all our friends, and favas for Large shares, only. Lots of avocados, probably dancing on the edge of getting complaints about too many avocados this year. On the other hand, limes are hard to come by..despite our 200-tree count grove, it has been a particularly bad year for limes. Which might account for the ridiculous price for them in the store. Wholesale price for limes (if we had any) is over a hundred dollars a carton.
The wind and fires out here are consuming are attention. Once again, just as we were scheduled to harvest our mulberries, they were blown to the ground.Unlike blackberries, mulberries fall off in your hand when they’re ready to pick. That makes picking easy, but accidentally knocking off dozens of berries while reaching for that just-of-of-reach-really- big one..also easy. So when the winds pick up, it’s over. Mulberry mulch for the whole grove. :/ This may be why mulberries haven’t become mainstream yet.
One of my favorite side dishes at Vietnamese restaurants is the vegetable-stuffed rolls that are wrapped in rice/tapioca skins. It never occurred to me I could make them myself until recently when I thought I’d give it a try. Ok…it takes some practice, but it’s worth the effort of a few failed “logs” because these things are so tasty! Rice paper (see image) is sold in a dry, paper-like form in most grocery stores. You dip each sheet individually in a bowl of warm water, and the inedible rice paper sheet miraculously turns into the flexible, tender skin that you recognize at once. I just couldn’t believe that the dry form could ever turn into anything edible…I thought maybe the ones I’d purchased were old. They come out of the package brittle and plastic-like. A quick dip in warm water, though, and they’re ready to stretch over whatever you choose to stuff them with. I put everything in the center, fold opposite edges in first, then just roll, dip and eat.
Ingredient List
Purslane
Avocado slices
Spinach
Cauliflower–diced fairly small
Cilantro
Carrot
Sea salt
Quinoa (I added just a little in each roll, you could use rice or amaranth as well)
Dipping Sauce
(I could have gotten more creative here, but this was delicious and very easy)
Mixture of Balsamic Vinegar and Local Olive Oil (I source both of these from Temecula Olive Oil Company, they have a website for mail order, as well as a CSA for their farm’s olive oils.)
Our Pakistani mulberries continue to offer up sparse yields after losing the early harvests to the high winds of April. This week, only large shares will see the unusual fruit. We’re hoping to be able to offer everyone tastes next week, weather permitting.
You’ll note a clamshell this week of an odd succulent vegetable: that’s our purslane. Grown for its nutritional value as well as its satisfying “crunch,” this year’s leaves seem to be more “lemony” that last year’s. The stalks are just as tasty as the leaves. I’ve included a couple recipe ideas for this hard-to-find veggie this week.
Super excited about our newest CSA box addition: our pea shoots. I guessed wrong on how many peas we’d need to plant to provide bunches for all, so only large shares receive them this week. We’re also trialing sunflower shoots, which are really tasty, too!
Despite our pleas, we still are not getting everyone on board with returning their boxes each week. So we’re going to have to find the time to go back to the old time-consuming check off of box returns. It’s a shame to throw away our box each week, and about half our subscribers are doing just that. We’ll start to check off missing returns starting next week, and communicate with drop point hosts/participants to see if we can solve the problem. Please, if you are having a problem remembering to return the box, keep it simple and just don’t take it home to begin with. Bring something you can transfer your beautiful produce into, and leave the box behind for the host to store for our driver the following week.
Harvest shot for this week. We lost much of our early mulberry crop to unseasonably windy nights. Just such a disappointment to see so much of our beautiful fruit on the ground. Squeaked by with very small portions for all Large Shares this week from our earliest trees. We do have half an acre of later fruit coming in, and look forward to a less meager provisions.
The summer has been kind to us, as the genuine heat wave typical of inland San Diego has not arrived, and we’re almost in August! Where did the summer go?
