After a particularly beautiful batch of Brookside Farm’s Meyer lemons arrived last week, we followed up with Welling Tom to find out what else is going on at their Brentwood, CA farm. Here’s what he had to tell us:

Our Meyer lemons are some of the few things we currently have available. We also have a few Oroblanco pomelos already picked, and available as long as supplies last. Growing in the field, we have fava beans, green garlic (now available), broccoli, and Lacinato kale. Fava beans are a slow-growing crop, and will not mature until April or May. The cole crops (broccoli and kale) have been producing since October, but not quite as much as we had hoped. A major problem has been the Bagrada bug, an invasive species of beetle that was not found in the western United States until 2008. So far, Brookside Farm has not taken any measures to combat this pest. Aside from that, there all the usual pests like gophers and cabbage moths.

We were hoping to have other crops available this season. Most cold season crops should be planted by October, but we failed to get that done merely because of some breakdowns on our tractor. These have been mostly remedied, but doing so took away the time that should have been spent in actually preparing the land for planting. So that opportunity was lost. But we still have a chance to plant new crops for the late winter. Our neighbor, Peter Wolfe, whose family has farmed here for over 70 years, has kindly lent me his disc harrow, which has allowed me to till a large area more quickly and effectively than I could with our rototiller. The current weather has been fairly dry, and at least partly sunny, so we should be able to get some arugula, turnips, spinach, and sugar snap peas planted soon, and we should be able to prune our fruit trees without too many delays.

Although we have had our share of setbacks, we are grateful for what we do have, for what we are still able to do, and for the support of our community of friends (including our customers at the farmers’ markets and restaurants such as Oliveto) and neighbors. We look forward to a brighter New Year.

Only once or twice a year does a fruit come along that I feel is featured best by serving on its own, without setting it in a composed dessert context.  That time has come with the wonderful Flavor King pluots from Brookside Farm in Brentwood, CA.

Upon their arrival, these pluots perfumed the kitchen, drawing Sous Chef Brian Murphy to the three cases I ordered from farmer Welling Tom.  Burying his face in the box, Brian came up for air and said “it’s like putting your face in a bag of mixed Jelly Beans!”  He and I also agreed the pluots tasted like bubblegum, vanilla, and Hello Kitty erasers.  If all of those things sound bad to you, consider Brian’s analogy: marvelous tropical flowers that seem to have been copied from overblown, tacky plastic flowers.   “It’s like Nature copying bad Art… except when Nature does it, it’s wonderful.”

Juicy, sweet, their golden flesh veined with fuchsia… these pluots are so delightful, I feel compelled only to peel off the tart skin and serve them sliced in a bowl to make for a sublime eating experience. Look for them on the menu this Thursday.

Jenny Raven Pastry Chef

Illustration by Jenny Raven

Then we headed over to Rick and Kristie Knoll’s Tairwa’-Knoll Farm where the Oliveto kitchen gets produce such as cardoons, beans, peas, figs, and chicories, just to name a few.   The Knolls traveled to Puglia and did some seed collecting so they could grow plants such as chicories for our use. Rick and Kristie showed us how they combine science and art to cultivate their harvests; they also provided us with what could be the freshest lunch many of us have ever had.

Also very worthwhile is the Knoll Farms website, where the Knolls provide in depth their philosophy, biodynamic methods, and history, and take on modern agriculture.

If it’s true that some of the best Italian food is the food of the poor, then toasted wheat pasta has to be a supreme cucina povera dish.

The predominant explanation for toasted pasta from Puglia, is that after the wheat fields are harvested and burned to remove the chaff and weeds, gleaners would come and pick through the ashes for the remaining charred kernels of wheat, which they would then mill and make into pasta. Chef Jonah found a reference on the internet for burnt Puglian pasta, and started an experiment.  It is hard to imagine a more labor intensive food, but as it turns out the effort is well worth it, as the results are truly delicious.

For me, this is particularly exciting because it is the first dividend from the Oliveto Grain Project (now Community Grains) begun 4 years ago.  Initially, we hoped that by creating associations with grain farmers, millers, bakers and chefs we could create innovations similar to the ones that have come from associations with all our great meat ranchers and vegetable farmers.  It worked.

We have toasted whole grain Hard Amber Durum pasta on the menu now, and for at least the next couple of months.

From the Life Is an Adventure department, comes lessons in farming corn.

We love our Floriani Red Flint corn, we think it makes the very best polenta. So, when we started to ask farmers to grow it for us several years ago, we found that the Rominger Brothers were up for the adventure. Their first crop, about an acre and a half, yielded 2,300 lbs per acre, but we thought some modest adjustment could improve that yield. (Yellow dent ‘field corn’ can yield over 12,000 lbs per acre.)

But the next year, the yield dropped to 1,300 lbs per acre.   This makes for some expensive, all-be-it delicious, corn polenta.  But we’re in it for the long haul, so last September, a group of us from Oliveto went up to Winters, California, to our 5 acre crop of Italian red flint corn to hand pick some for seed selection before the harvester came in.

Fred Hemple, a PhD plant-biologist-turned-farmer has now joined us in the adventure. At his farm, Baia Nicchia Farm and Nursery, in Sunol, he’s taking on the job of cleaning up the genetic lines of our corn. Fred will be blogging periodically about his progress, and working with us to develop our crop in the coming years. We’ll be following along on our Journal as well. We’re expanding the Floriani polenta service in the café, from lunch to close. It’s frequently on the dinner menu upstairs also.

We just got a hold of 23 different types of extraordinarily beautiful dried beans.  This is not the kind of thing you’d think of at the beginning of spring, but these are real beauties.  We’ll be serving Pasta e fagioli on the menu for the next week or so, each with a different bean.  Cannelini, Sunset Runner, Jacob’s Cattle, Snow Cap, Pigeon pea, Chestnut Lima, Pebbles, Flageolet and Hutterite.

Flavor King pluot in bloom, photo by Welling Tom

Here’s a report from Welling Tom of Brookside Farm in Brentwood, CA:

There wasn’t as much rain this year, but there was fog for most of January, so that constant wetness and lack of sunlight caused much of our broccoli to rot during that time. The soil has also remained too wet and sticky to allow for much planting of new crops. We did manage to sow some sugar snap peas during the past 3 weeks, and can only hope that it hasn’t been too cold for the seeds to germinate.

Last Saturday’s cold snap in the Bay Area affected Brookside Farm in a completely unexpected way. For the past couple of years, we’ve been ordering our tomato seedlings exclusively from Kassenhoff Growers, located in Oakland. The owner/operators have been our friends for many years, and Oakland has always had much milder winters than Brentwood or any other inland areas, so things have always worked without a hitch. But last Saturday morning, it was just as cold in Oakland as it was in Brentwood, so much of the earliest tomato plants were killed. A relatively small loss for Brookside Farm (as we will be getting more tomato plants that were started at a later time, and were thus under heavier protection), but a major loss for our friends at Kassenhoff Growers.

Tomato season will probably be getting another late start this year.

As of this week, many of our fruit trees (pluots, apricots, peaches, nectarines, and Asian pears) are beginning to bloom. Our trees always seems to bloom later than others of the same type located not too far from here. For this year, late-blooming may be advantageous. None of our trees were in full bloom last weekend, so perhaps we have avoided any frost damage there. It just remains to be seen after the petals drop whether any damage was done or whether the rain will have caused any significant interference in pollination.

Welling Tom

We contacted Jim Churchill of Churchill Orchards in Ojai, CA to find out how this year’s citrus crop is shaping up.  Here’s what he had to say:

The Seedless Kishus have been extraordinarily slow to develop sugar this season, and we’ve been holding off on harvesting til they get sweeter. We’re hoping to start picking for wholesale the week of January 10 and for mail-order the week of January 17.

At this stage of the game it’s hard to predict when the Page Tangors will be ready, but sometime in February seems safe. And Ojai Pixies — for us, mid-March is usually the earliest. The season for Ojai Pixies in general starts before we’re ready at Churchill Orchard — growers in the west end of the Valley, in the Ventura River drainage, get warm down-valley mountain breezes and their fruit gets ripe at least two weeks before ours. So Ojai Pixies will be available around the beginning of March, just not ours and not organically grown Ojai Pixies.

The biggest news is the arrival of the Asian Citrus Psyllid, an insect which vectors a disease called Huang Long Bing (HLB), or Citrus Greening Disease.  HLB is fatal to trees, there is no cure, and possibly worst of all if a tree has the disease, it doesn’t show for two-three years during which time the psyllid can be spreading it to other trees.  So HLB is what you call an existential threat; it’s all over Mexico (as well as Florida, Texas, Louisiana, and many other states) and will surely arrive within a few years, if it isn’t already here undetected.  There have been two recent finds of Asian Citrus Psyllids in Ventura County, which has triggered the imposition of a quarantine.  The practical effect of the quarantine for now is that we cannot ship any leaf-and-stem fruit out of the quarantine area, as the psyllids live on the leaves. The more dire possibility, however, is that, if a psyllid were to be found on or near our place, it might trigger mandatory pesticide applications which in turn would threaten our ability to farm organically, and hence our ability to farm at all.

Life of a farmer. O well.

Thank you for your interest in our comings and goings. Happy New Year.

Regards,
Jim

We have 5 acres of Floriani Red Flint corn growing, and an acre of Otto File.  That’s a lot, possibly 10,000 to 15,000 lbs. of grain.    It will probably be ready for harvest in late September or October, and ready to eat by this winter.   Most of it will be machine harvested, but we’re thinking of trying to harvest some by hand (sounds like a party).   And hopefully, we’ll be selling some of the grain.  More to come on that…

Last year’s crop of Floriani Red Flint polenta is served in the cafe every day and usually available on the dinner menu as well.  The corn is milled fresh and whole grain (or integrale).  So, not only do you get the nutty, distinct flavor of the red flint corn, you also get all of the flavor.

The Rominger Brothers also grew out some Italian wheat varieties for us, as we continue to work with them in our attempt to understand which wheat varieties grow best here in Northern California.   This is a massive yet extraordinarily interesting project.  Stay tuned…

Welling Tom, Brookside Farm:  The unusually persistent rains in February and March were the most problematic.  Most of our spring and summer vegetable crops need to be planted around that time, and our soil remained too wet for decent tilth. Our spring crops (such as sugar snap peas or spinach) were planted in lumpy soil and in greatly reduced volume, and were thus compromised in yield.  Only those crops which were actually planted in the fall (such as broccoli, chards, kale, fava beans and garlic–which is a spring crop as green garlic and garlic scapes), or crops like arugula (which doesn’t require fine tilth) produced much. We had to wait until the middle of April to begin planting our tomatoes in the field.

For our summer tree fruits, it’s been hit-or-miss.  When the trees were in bloom, the bees didn’t fly around to pollinate them if the rain was actually falling or even if the skies were just too overcast (the reason why beekeepers use smoke to sedate the bees before opening up a hive), so those fruit varieties whose blossoms came and went during constant rain (such as the Flavor Supreme pluots and Robada apricots) have failed to produce much fruit.  But if the blossoms did catch a few sunny days (as did the cherries, Blenheim apricots, Flavor King and Flavor Queen pluots, and Asian pears) then they did get pollination, and we will have some fruit, although not as much as in a normal year.

The unusually cool weather of the past couple weeks is slowing down the growth of our summer vegetable crops and the ripening of the cherries.

Brookside Farms can be found at the Montclair Farmers’ Market on Sundays.

Scott Mathieson, Laguna Farm: It is interesting how most people think all farmers love rain.   If your crops are dependent on the rain for all its needs, such as in the Midwest grain belt, these would be ideal conditions.  Here on the west coast, we tend to almost count on the six month drought common for California.  For this farmer in Sonoma county, the heavy rains represent delays in soil preparations contrasted by savings in irrigation costs.  Luckily we have a diversity of soils; from sandy well-drained soils that allow us to farm through the winter, to rich bottom lands that have a narrow band of moisture conditions to work it into plantable seed beds.

Every year is different.  The last two have been marked by very low rainfall in high contrast to the above-average rainfall of this year.  The key is diversity of crops and strategies. Yes, we are effected by this weather and are behind as far as field preparation and crops coming along.

Laguna Farm can be found at the Santa Rosa Farmers’ Market on Wednesdays, the Petaluma Farmers’ Market on on Saturdays, and the Sebastopol Farmers’ Market on Sundays.

Paul Underhill, Terra Firma Farm: This year’s cool spring has basically erased the temperature differential between the Bay Area and the Central Valley. Most gardeners in the Bay know that their tomatoes don’t ripen until August or September, and the longer it stays cool and wet here, the more likely we are to be in the same situation.

Our summer crops are running anywhere from two weeks (zucchini) to possibly two months (melons) late, with our famous tomatoes probably somewhere in between.

We are also having more problems with fungal diseases that we don’t usually experience.

On the plus side, the cool season crops we grow in the spring each year have been enjoying the weather and we expect to have an extended harvest of spring greens, peas, strawberries, etc.

Terra Firma Farm can be found at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market on Thursdays.