Being the journeyman farmer at Hidden Villa, managing the CSA, and running the farmers market stand has been an incredibly valuable experience for me. I have learned far more about small farm management and nonprofit management in the past nine months than I could have imagined. I honestly feel that I now have the skills and knowledge to successfully manage a small farm.

This morning I participated in our weekly intern class, this being the second installment of Swine (pig) Management. To start the class we opened with a narrative by Wendell Barry. In this passage the author speaks of the joy that he finds in farming, and the satisfaction and fulfillment a farming job can provide. The passage concludes with Wendell and his 5 year-old granddaughter sitting atop a wagon. Though it was at the end of a hard day’s work, she looks to him and says, “Isn’t this fun Wendell?”.

As members of our farm share at Hidden Villa, you are actively choosing to support a small farm and have a direct connection to where your food is coming from. And we thank you for that! That decision, whether it is for the freshness and quality of your produce, the opportunity to foster understanding within your family of where food comes from, or the practice of eating with the changing of the seasons, fosters a personal connection to, and understanding of, sustainable food practices. The framework for the CSA program that we offer here at Hidden Villa has become popular not only in California, but throughout the United States as more people are beginning to value the importance of sustainable agricultural production and find the most transparent ways to support food production they believe in. Yet not all of our food choices can be so easily traced to its source. As consumers, we have become tasked with educating ourselves on where food found at the supermarket is coming from, and how it was grown.

Olive season is coming. Hidden Villa has a 1/2 acre olive grove and many other olive trees lining our road and around the property.  The original trees were planted by missionaries in the 1880's and they were harvested and pressed for oil intermittently by the Duvenecks.  The grove had gone largely untended and overgrown until about ten years ago when we topped the trees in a long term project to reclaim the orchard's productivity.  Thanks to several recent years of diligent pruning the trees are once again producing substantial crops.

We finished harvesting and boxing up the last of our potatoes on Friday. At Hidden Villa we using a digging bar on the back of a tractor to turn up the potatoes and then we easily dig through the already loosened soil by hand and pick up potatoes. It is still a lot of work to harvest 800 row feet of potatoes, especially since it was a dishearteningly light yield of around 500 pounds.

Enjoy this zesty autumn salsa, sweet with apples and spiced with peppers. Perfect for a fall picnic! 

"I cannot endure to waste anything

so precious as autumnal

sunshine by staying in the house."

- Nathaniel Hawthorne

Every Monday night us three Hidden Villa interns who live in the quaint Creek House on site make dinner together, primarily using ingrediently from the farm. From New York Times Cooking section recipes for pork wontons to chicken pot pie made with Hidden Villa  veggies, chicken and Cleo milk, we've gotten very ambitious lately, putting meals we want to cook on a white board two weeks ahead of time.This lasagna was one of those amazing meals. It was fun to make together as a group effort, and the results were to die for!

It is October already! I can hardly believe it, especially because it has been so hot these last couple of days. It was hot enough yesterday that we braved the now algae encrusted swimming pool for a quick dip and cool down. The atypical heat and newly erected pumpkin patch in the education garden are telling signs that summer has passed and fall has truly arrived. The season is winding down which means that we are looking into the winter, making plans for work projects and talking about how to get the fields ready for a much needed break. As a year-long intern, I am also starting to think about final skills I would like to acquire, and I am developing plans for my post-Hidden Villa career.

This Saturday marked the Autumnal equinox and the first day of fall, and also marked the beginning of my fourth week as a CSA intern at Hidden Villa. This first month has been an exhilarating introduction to the farms’ systems, and these weeks have gone by fast. I arrived in early September, when the summer heat was still brilliant, and the sun would not set until after eight o’clock. My large collection of wool hats, blankets, and socks were out of place in the warm evening air. While the seasonal transition from summer to fall can be easily overlooked in California, with Indian summers fluidly stretching into October, the first day of fall is cause for celebration. The fall harvest celebrates a change in pace, and a time to commemorate the bounty of the harvest and prepare for the onset of winter.

On Monday evening we had our fourth annual heirloom tomato tasting with great success. Every year our tomato tasting has been bigger and fancier. This year we had two hundred people RSVP, though maybe only half of those showed up, and we had live music starting around five o’clock. Out of the ten heirloom varieties that we had available for the tasting the top three chosen in order of popularity were: Japanese Black Trifele, Striped German, and Vorlon. For the farm crew these results are a good reinforcement to continue and expand production of these varieties next year because these three varieties continually rank well during the tomato tasting.

This Labor Day weekend marked the end, and the beginning, of a new chapter for us on the Farm Crew. Last Wednesday we planted into the last few rows in the field, meaning that the vast majority of our planting is finished for the year. This, I think, is a cause for celebration. I can vividly recall my first few walks through the fields, looking out at waves of poppies and mustard flowers, not really believing that it would all one day be turned into neat rows of crops. We have steadily worked to till those cover crops under, create beautiful rows, and fill them with a huge variety of beautiful and delicious foods. In addition to this seasonal milestone, last week held further causes for celebration: birthdays, first corn in the share box,  the rediscovery of my favorite pair of pants, and a celebratory Farm Crew (and friends) trip to Nevada City.

Every year during our largest annual fundraising event, the Duveneck Dinner, the farm crew has offered a meal for 10 served out in our fields as an item for silent auction.  Selling this unique experience has been an important way for the farm to support our fundraising and has also been a specialized kind of mission-oriented outreach.

Beautiful dark purple and pink eggplants are now coming on in our fields. The Asian varietites we primarily grow are easy to cook because you don't need to salt them. Enjoy these eggplants roasted as a side dish or on sandwiches, or as Baba Ghanoush!

It is unusually quiet and calm this morning at Hidden Villa. At first everything seems normal, the rooster is sounding off at 5:30, the squirrel is running across my roof at six to steal golden delicious from my apple tree, and I can hear the crows cawing already even though it is just after seven. Then I realize there is no chanting or children's voices. Summer camp is officially over which means we have two hundred fewer people living here.

Tomatoes of all shapes, colors, and sizes are coming in on their vines right now. A great way to preserve or enjoy the harvest is to make salsa. Here is my favorite new salsa recipe from Put ‘Em Up, a great book on home preservation. You can scale it to the ingredients you have on hand. This recipe makes a bunch!

This week I am house sitting at a home that has a special perk: wireless Internet in the house! I have been saturating myself online, including some non productive catching up on friends’ latest photos, and some more productive perusing of websites of other small-scale farms. Last night I discovered a small farm in Vermont that offers a year round CSA, something I had not considered until then, especially for a farm in such a cold weather climate. Upon further investigation, I found that the farm employs people specifically to preserve the year’s harvest through canning and freezing. In this way they ensure that CSA members have access to farm raised food, year round. I was equally impressed and inspired, and started thinking more about successful marketing styles utilized by small farms.

Pounds and pounds of green beans are proliferating on their vines right now! A great way to enjoy the overload is to make pickles. Green beans make crisp, tangy, delicious "dilly beans," which use a brine of apple cider vinegar and fresh dill.These will last for at least a month in your fridge.

Last week there was a mother picking up her share box who was carefully explaining to her son that we did not have strawberries this week and that we would probably not have them this year. It is probably the saddest thing for me to hear when a long time share member has the expectation of receiving something with which I know we are having difficult problems.

Ingredients

2-3 summer squash (depends on your appetite)
3 T olive oil
½ bunch parsley
2-3 peeled cloves of garlic
2 T butter
1 lemon, juiced
one box linguine pasta (or one pound of fresh pasta)
salt
pepper

Slice squash into roughly ½” discs or medallions. Brush with olive oil, season with salt and pepper, and place on a preheated grill, flipping once to cook both sides. Meanwhile, follow instructions to prepare desired amount of linguine. With the flat of a large chef’s knife, crush the garlic repeatedly, adding a little salt to help soak up the expressed oil. Once the garlic is an even paste, mince well and sauté briefly in the butter. To assemble, toss pasta with butter/garlic mixture, lemon juice, and generous handfuls of rough chopped parsley. Top with grilled squash medallions and enjoy.