Live Earth Farm Newsletter - Week 25, Season 15

Partnership to Preserve the Season's Flavors
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Over the last couple of years we've been fortunate to establish a wonderful and complimentary relationship with Todd and Jordan Champagne, owners of Happy Girl Kitchen- an artisan food preservation company, who share a very similar food and farming philosophy to ours. As a farm we want to provide you with the tastiest and freshest fruits and vegetables the land of this farm can provide. Todd and Jordan's mission is to preserve the best of what small organic
farms along the central coast have to offer by "tucking their seasonal bounties into jars". Happy Girl's logo sums it up well: "Preserving the local organic harvest one jar at a time" and "make food that feeds your soul"

When the season really gets going and the harvest is so abundant that some of it would spoil, Happy Girl Kitchen Co. is just a phone call away to help transform and preserve our seasonal bounty into a value added product.

As Todd so poetically describes: "The best way to continue eating locally grown produce (i.e. tomatoes) all year long is to nicely tuck them into a jar".   Working with food artisans such as Todd and Jordan, who learned their preserving skills while working on local organic farms, is a real pleasure. They are creative, flexible, skilled, infectiously passionate about food, and best of all, they enjoy sharing their secrets with everyone who is interested.

This last weekend Todd held two Tomato Preservation workshops here at the farm. Tomatoes, the "jewels of summer" (another of Todd's poetic descriptions) are reaching their peak of ripeness, flavor, and abundance. Especially dry-farmed tomatoes are abundant right now, all our extra fruit is going to Happy Girl where it is immediately transformed and rescued into jars as ketchup, salsa, crushed whole tomatoes, and tomato juice. All our preserves are being stored to be offered during the off-season in our wintershares. Other harvests we are preserving for off-season enjoyment are several kinds of berry jams and pickled vegetables such as dilly beans, sauerkraut, kimchee, carrots and beets.

When I checked in with Todd on Sunday afternoon after the workshops were over, he was resting on a bench, visibly exhausted, but still energized and inspired from the community spirit present during the workshops. I got a sense of it when I dropped in to greet the group earlier in the day. Everyone seemed to be having a great time, the mood was not like that of a classroom but much more celebratory, everyone was enjoying a delicious lunch, having conversations, food and salsa ingredients were cooking on the stove to be canned, and some jars were already filled with colorful heirloom tomatoes. Looking at the jars I thought to myself:" how amazingly empowering to have the skill to seal a little bit of "summer delight" into a jar."

It is really unfortunate that food is becoming more and more commodified, relegated to something we fear. Almost every year the media has a heyday reporting on national recalls of contaminated food - usually originating from large factory farms, often undermining small scale agriculture producers who strive to promote what is good and wholesome about growing, eating and celebrating food.
Food is not just something we stuff down into our bodies but is meant to be shared with friends, family and the community we live in. Supporting the local farmers and food producers will help bring the celebrations around food back into our communities. With every meal we can celebrate food that tastes naturally delicious, grown with care, harvested at the right moment, and brought directly to us the eaters.

The farm serves as a place for the community to enjoy sharing and celebrating food, to experience the cycles of the seasons, and recognize the earth as the ultimate source from which all our food comes from. Through our seasonal celebrations, community harvest days, field trips, children camps and many other on-farm activities the community has a place to stay connected beyond the weekly harvests we share.

There are two wonderful food and farm celebrations in the fall. One coming up in a couple of weeks, which is our Live Earth Farm Discovery Program Fundraiser on September 25th and the second in October our traditional Community Harvest Festival held every year, on October 23rd.

Let's celebrate, hope you can join us!