ohmygato farm

Hello Farm Friends!

It’s the last delivery and box of the season. We do hope you enjoyed everything and want you to know that we had a blast growing food for all of you… It’s always a little sad to end the season, but we’re not going anywhere and we hope to see all of you at the Umpqua Farmers Market and/or at the Winston-Dillard Grower’s Market. We will also be offering a bread share during the winter season, so email us if interested in that. We’ll post more information on that on our blog in the coming week.

Please note: Bring a couple of plastic/paper or recycle bags to your pick up today and leave your box. Also, remember to bring your last weeks box back to the site.

On behalf of Ohmygato farm we thank you so very much for supporting small local farms and for being members of our CSA! It’s no small thing that you all decided to take a risk and to go for a ride with us throughout this season… We don’t take this lightly. We would like to express our deepest gratitude to each of you. You kept us going another year! It’s been the best yet and it’s only getting better. Please keep in touch and come January-April it will be time to sign up again, so put it on your calendars and we’ll also be sending reminders via email.

today’s harvest:

summer squash

eggplant

beets

carrots

tomatoes

strawberries

onions

rainbow chard

kale

potatoes

(subject to change)

Hello Everyone!

We hope all is well with all of you. It’s the penultimate week and we decided to make a video blog this week instead of the usual. We hope you enjoy watching! Below is the harvest list for this week and recipe’s of course:

Today’s harvest:

spinach

strawberries

onions

collard greens

rainbow chard

summer squash

french fingerling potatoes

chives

Sprouts

(list is subject to change)

Some recipe’s for you:

csa boxes from the perspective of a mouse

Hello Everyone!

How are all of you? We are already on week ten of the season..only two weeks left! my fingers are crossed that in the next two weeks we’ll be able to give you an incredible tomato harvest. They’re all just waiting to turn colors, but their lovely and beautiful heirloom colors have yet to emerge. waiting.

Production on the stove has stopped for now since we’ve needed to concentrate on digging the holes for the greenhouse. The kids from the Pheonix school did such a great job last week as they helped shovel gravel for the post holes and worked together with the two person post hole digger. That tool is brutal! Anthony and I rented one of those when we first began putting up our fences, about 4 years ago. It was after the first day of using that thing that we decided to buy our tractor with the auger implement. We’ve never been sorry for that purchase.

Last Saturday Ohmygato traded some of our produce for some beautiful ripe peaches from Dillard Farm. I made a strawberry and peach crumble that was super delicious. I highly recommend that you try this and serve with vanilla bean ice cream. yum! the recipe is featured below. Also one of our Egg Share Members, Buzz, gave us some of his families Blueberry jam. I have to say that we’re working our tails off, but we’re eating like kings and queens over here! This jam is so good. Thank you Buzz!

enclosure

today’s harvest:

carrots
zucchini
crookneck squash
mixed salad greens
eggplant or cabbage or cauliflower or broccoli (it’ll be a surprise!)
strawberries
potatoes

garlic
chives
parsley
basil

(this list is subject to change)

some recipes for you…

This one is from Kathy Stutzman in her words:

Hey guys!  I used your zucchini & summer squash to make some zucchini fritters tonight, and thought I’d pass on the recipe.  My mom has made this for ages, and it was difficult to figure out the specifics of the recipe, because it’s one of those “put in just enough flour until it has the right consistancy” recipes, but I tried!  Here goes:
1 medium zucchini
1 medium summer squash
2 eggs
1-1/2 cups shredded cheddar cheese
1/2 cup flour
1/4 cup milk
salt & pepper to taste

Grate the zucchini & summer squash into a large mixing bowl.  Add shredded cheese.  Add rest of ingredients.  Mix well.  Heat frying pan or griddle on stove or bbq.  Drop 1/4 to 1/2 cup of batter onto hot pan, spread out.  Brown on one side, flip over and brown.  Eat warm!

This is the basic recipe, you can add herbs as you like — I used the fresh basil from the box tonight and it was yummy!

Emma Stutzman attempting to eat an entire cauliflower all at once. Nice try Emma!

Hi Everyone!

Thank you Stutman’s for this lovely picture. Please folks do not try this at home!

I hope all is well with you on this lovely August morning. I forgot to go back and put recipes on the last post! I hope you all got through your boxes okay. I’ll be putting recipes up today for sure. I made a beet risotto last night in order to try out a recipe I was interested in posting. I went to Shop Smart and all I could find was a mixed grain rice. They didn’t have Arborio rice, which is the key base ingredient of any risotto, so I’m not sure if I can report accurately on the finished product… That said, it was yummy and the italian rice would’ve done a better job of showcasing the flavors of the veggie broth, onion, beets, greens and seasoning. Not bad, not bad at all though. I’ll post the recipe, but just take note that I thought that it may have called for a bit too much lemon. I would’ve cut back to 1/2 the amount suggested. This is a dish that can be made whenever beets are available, summer, fall, winter. The color is such that it makes a wonderful holiday presentation and taste.

We missed both markets this week. I had to shoot a wedding in Ashland and my partner got sick and wasn’t able to help me out. Anthony surprisingly stepped in and told me he wanted to shoot the wedding with me, so off we went down south. He did a great job and we had a lot of fun. This was a great couple who live in Portland and found me on the internet within a sea of other photographers. It turns out that the brides mom has a nursery down in Jacksonville and we’ll probably be keeping in touch with her, not to mention that Anthony got a chance to talk to another person who lived in Argentina. There were great connections all over the place. Some things are meant to be.

Please note that we will be at both markets beginning with this coming weekend. Anthony will be baking his Pissaladiere for the Saturday Market, so don’t miss out on that. Tomorrow the Pheonix School is coming with youth volunteers and we’re finally putting up our greenhouse!

All of our best to all of you!

Today’s Harvest:
mixed salad greens
spinach
summer squash
basil
cucumbers
strawberries
beets

onion

Hello Everyone!

It’s Thursday, August 5th and the summer is flying by. The cool mornings are a reminder of what’s to come and we’re already collecting wood for the cold months. But we’ve still got many warm summer days ahead of us, so don’t breakout your coats just yet! The cucumbers are getting ready to jump into your boxes in the coming weeks as well as much more summer squash. The strawberries are finally happening in larger numbers. We planted two rows of those babies and from time to time we’ve collected a pint or two, but that’s it. We’re hoping to put those in the boxes today. Tomatoes, peppers and eggplants are doing their thing and I do believe we’ll have a great melon harvest as well. The clay oven for our bread baking is 70% done and we’re getting more volunteers in the coming days in order to put up the greenhouse and to do lots of planting.

We have honey for sale, so let us know if you want a jar of local meadow foam honey and we can drop it in your box. a quart is $15, but you can get smaller quantities.

We do hope all is well with all of you and that you have a wonderful week of enjoying good food and summer fun!

Today’s harvest:
potatoes
mixed salad greens (with lots of arugula)
rainbow chard
broccoli or cauliflower
summer squash
spinach
strawberries
(this list is subject to a few minor changes)

some recipes for you…

Dexter on the farm! He's wearing ashes for this pic.

Hello Farm Friends!

The heat of the day dissapates, my body temperature feels the same as the temp outside. The playing ground is leveled, for a moment, as I sit and scan over the land, I  see the results of all the work that was done that day. The land where my sweat falls, where I place all of my hopes and dreams. The sky darkens and I bring myself into my house to cook for my family a meal which is made with the tasty and colorful objects we’ve pulled up from our very own garden. The heat from the sun has another life at night… on the burners of my stovetop.

I sure do hope you all are enjoying cooking up the garden goodies as much as we are. Again, I would like to invite all of you to send us pictures of meals you’ve made with the harvests and/or recipes that worked out really well for your families. All is well here at Ohmygato. Eric, our farm intern, had to jump right in as he arrived Friday night, the evening before Saturday market. We decided to work the Sat market in Roseburg last weekend because we had excess veggies and Anthony has been making a french style pizza and ciabatta bread that are so tasty that we thought people would really LOVE them, so we tried it out and it went very well indeed. We sold out of almost everything! I have to say that the pizza was a huge success. If you’d like to try some, come to the market this coming Saturday and check out our table. No worries though because we’re working on doing a bread share (CSA) for the winter. If you’re interested just send us an email and we’ll let you know more as we figure it out ourselves.

Anthony has successfully grated the plateau where our new greenhouse will be built. It looks like we’ve got a group of volunteers who’ll be visiting next week, so that’s when we expect to erect the greenhouse. We’ve got spinach coming down the pike and the summer squash is ready for harvesting! Yay! I do love this time of year. The Tomatoes still look like little green rocks, but the cantaloupe plants have begun to make their lovely orange fruit. We released the new little hens back into their brood, but one escaped and is really truly FREE-range. We can’t catch her, so we’re hoping she’ll hear the noises of her fine feathered friends and somehow fly into the coup! There is a sauerkraut recipe below and a link to the probiotic benefits of eating saurkraut down below that I recommend you take a gander at. If you’ve never made sauerkraut, it’s a fun family event. Eating it is even more fun!

A happy man.

prior to the final grating.

Also last week my friends Carly, Matt and their dog Dexter came for a two day visit. We had a blast. They worked all day with us and helped out with all the little things that we have a hard time getting done because we’re just maintaining sometimes. They are moving to New Mexico and are getting ready to start a whole new life out there… Good luck to you! We love you lots and I will miss you terribly. Ohmygato will just have to come for a visit so we’re not too sad. Thanks for the love, support and friendship!

This weeks harvest:

Potatoes
Carrots
Zucchini
Mixed Salad Greens
Buttercrunch Lettuce
Turnips
Onion
Savoy Cabbage

Speaking of that big green bowling ball in your CSA box…check out this link if you would like to explore ideas with what to do with all that cabbage!:

Member Sharon Herzstein sent us this lovely picture after her last box. Thank you Sharon!

Happy Harvest Day!

We hope this post finds you all happy and healthy. What’s new at Ohmygato? Well, we’re receiving another farm intern tonight and we couldn’t be more excited. There are many projects that need to get done in order to keep us rolling into fall and winter. The building of our new greenhouse has been up on our list of priorities this summer. Anthony has been grading the plateau between our goat barn and our house so that we can build the house there. We debated on whether or not we should keep it up the hill or down near the lower garden, but it’ll be easier to maintain the plants if it’s near the house which seems to be grand central station no matter what we do. Although our CSA season doesn’t extend into fall or winter, we would like to make winter veggies available for you all to come and pick yourselves or come to buy at the growers market.  We’ll have pumpkins, winter squash and lots of winter greens (collards, kale, spinach and chard). We’re also planning on growing lots of yummy mixed salad greens during the cold months in our new greenhouse! That’s the plan.

This week we’re digging up potatoes! It’s truly magical to see such beauties emerge from the dry earth. It is a sight to behold. I was smitten yesterday as I sat and uncovered the little red fingerlings…you’ll all get to enjoy them as they are the featured item in this weeks harvest. I harvested our first round of delicious baby summer squash this last Tuesday. There’s just not enough yet to go around into the boxes, but soon (possibly next week or the week after) they will make a surprise appearance in your CSA box. I have to tell you that our tomato plants look really great and have lots of flowers, but no fruit on most of them. I’m perplexed. I know they’ll come on later than usual because of this years very wet and cold june, but it doesn’t make it any easier to know this since it’s probably my favorite part of the season. The same story is true for our eggplants. The peppers are coming on and are looking very nice indeed.

Oh thank you Sharon for sending this amazing picture! We love it. Nothing is more rewarding than knowing that the veggies are in good hands. Send us your pictures and we’ll post them for everyone to see. Definitely send us pictures of meals you’ve made with your goodie box! We’d really love to see what you all are making with the harvest.

also, I know that you all probably have a couple of bunches of chives still in your veggie drawer in the fridge. Some of the potato recipes down below will take care of that problem.

This weeks harvest:

red ace beets
Nero Di Toscano (dino kale)
rainbow chard
turnips
french fingerling potatoes
buttercrunch lettuce
savoy cabbage

Italian Parsley (flat leaf)

(list is subject to change)

some recipes for you…

seared brocolli rabe with garlic (you may use collards or rainbow chard or a mixture for this recipe)

grelos salteadoes (portugese)

ingredients

1/4 cup evoo (extra virgin olive oil)

6 large garlic gloves sliced lengthwise

pinch of red pepper flakes

pinch of  kosher salt & freshly ground black pepper

clean and prepare greens by washing and cutting. fit a large pot with a steamer insert and fill the pot up with 1 inch of water, bring to a boil over hight heat. steam greens for 5-8 minutes. Meanwhile, in a large pan use medium heat and heat up the oil. Put your garlic, red pepper flakes, salt and pepper in the pan. brown garlic for approximately 5 – 7 mins. put your greens into the hot pan and stir around to make sure that everything is coated with your garlicky, red pepper oil. hear it crackly as the veggies get seared! enjoy with some roasted beets. you can even make a little side dish of rice. serve hot.

Roasted beets

the beauty of beets is that you really don’t need to dress these babies up in order to make them tasty. They taste pretty good on their own. this is how we ate our beets this week:

ingredients

a bunch of beets sliced and quartered

EVOO (extra virgin olive oil)

Spread your sliced beets out over a baking sheet and drizzle the olive oil over them so that they all have a little oil on them. Bake in the oven (we use our little toaster oven to save on energy and to keep our house from getting hot during the summertime) for 20 minutes at 350 degrees. Use a spatula and serve with the greens from the recipe above. Yumm!!

Hello!

the gato in ohmygato!

How is everyone? We do hope the summer is treating you all very well indeed. It’s Thursday, I’m back from North Carolina and it was a great trip. I’ll post a couple of pictures later, but for now I’m a little late writing this post so I’m going to get right to the point. The new baby salad greens are coming up very nicely despite the heat. Anthony had to do another planting of arugula because for some reason the bed turned up looking like a patchy beard! Chances are it wasn’t our best planting, but there are other things that could’ve occured in order to render the bed bald-like.

this weeks harvest & anthony

Thank you to those of you who have sent us emails letting us know how you are liking your boxes. I’ve also received a really nice recipe in the form of a link from member Tracy Baker.  Look further down in the recipe section of this post to see her suggestion from Rachael Ray’s Official Website :: Arugula and Pear Salad. Sounds Yummy! Thanks for the treat Tracy. I decided to use Rachel Ray’s website for all the recipe’s this week. There were some really amazing dishes I just couldn’t pass by.

Today’s harvest: (this list is subject to change last minute)
red ace beets (be sure to eat the beet greens too..their delicious in a salad or stir fry and they’re quite nutricious.)
rainbow chard
buttercrunch lettuce
mixed salad greens
snow ball cauliflower, brocolli or savoy cabbage (we mixed these up so some of you will be getting something a little different)
cilantro
sage
chives

.

Hello Everyone!

Happy fourth of July week! We hope that you are having a fabulous week. I’m posting this early because I’m leaving tomorrow for North Carolina and won’t be here for this weeks harvest. Anthony will be on his own or maybe not. We have a couple of volunteers who may help pack the boxes on Thursday afternoon. If any of you are interested in lending a hand, please contact us by tomorrow night to let us know if you can get here by 1pm.

Another week is rolling by and we’re on our fourth delivery of our CSA season. It’s all going so fast. Speaking of things going quickly, the other day Anthony and I planted more arugula and salad greens and they sprouted in just two days! The soil is just the right temp to help the little seedlings do their busy work. Now it’s our job to make sure those beds stay wet this week as the temperatures rise into the 90′s. Ohmygato! It’s going to be a hot week for sure.

On another note, I would like to post a huge THANK YOU to Dale Stutzman who lovingly made our boxes for this season’s harvest. You all must know that he harvested the wood from his property, milled the wood himself and hand built each box. This is AMAZING! We really appreciate you Dale and can’t say enough about what you did for the dynamics of our farm and CSA by building these boxes for us. Not to mention how much time it saves us.. Last year Anthony and I were scavenging tomato boxes from Subway each week, trying to make it on time before the boxes got recycled! Also, the new boxes definitely have a much better aesthetic.

These little beauties are truly local treasures. I would like to remind everyone who reads this that we can and should support the folks in our community who put everything they have, literally, into what they do. Order something from a local maker! It’s like supporting your favorite public broadcasting station.

If any of you are interested or know anyone who may be interested in having some boxes built please contact us and we’ll get you in touch with Dale. The boxes can be used for putting together a care package or for holding yarn or magazines. They can be used outdoors for carrying or holding garden tools, harvesting and for display purposes. The boxes can also be painted/finished and repurposed many times over.

I don’t know about you, but I love things that are handmade. The evidence and markers of the human hand, the flaws and irregularities are exactly what I think is beautiful about hand made objects.

That said, the following is a quote that I found from one of my favorite writers, Jeanette Winterson from her book Art Objects:

“Naked I came into the world, but brush strokes cover me, language raises me, music rhythms me. Art is my rod and staff, my resting place and shield, and not mine only, for art leaves nobody out. Even those from whom art has been stolen away by tyranny, by poverty, begin to make it again. If the arts did not exist, at every moment, someone would begin to create them, in song, out of dust and mud, and although the artifacts might be destroyed, the energy that creates them is not destroyed. If in the comfortable West, we have chosen to treat such energies with scepticism and contempt, then so much the worse for us. Art is not a little bit of evolution that late-twentieth-century city dwellers can safely do without. Strictly, art does not belong to our evolutionary pattern at all. It has no biological necessity. Time taken up with it was time lost to hunting, gathering, mating, exploring, building, surviving, thriving. Odd then, that when routine physical threats to ourselves and our kind are no longer a reality, we say we have no time for art. If we say that art, all art is no longer relevant to our lives, then we might at least risk the question ‘What has happened to our lives?’ The usual quesion, ‘What has happened to art?’ is too easy an escape route.

I did not escape. At an Amsterdam gallery I sat down and wept. When I sold a book I bought a Massimo Rao. Since that day I have been filling my walls with new light.”

Things that are coming up: squash, peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, beans and hopefully corn. We’re seeing lots of progress despite the cool weather up to now, so no promises yet until we see red, purple, green and yellow. All we see is green at the moment.

today’s harvest: (I’m writing this on Tuesday, so please make note that this list is subject to change. The list may be added to as the week goes on.)
mixed salad greens
arugula
cauliflower or brocolli
radishes

rainbow chard
kale
cilantro
italian parsley

No tags for this post.

Hello dear Farm Friends!

I hope this post finds you all happy and healthy!

Our farm just keeps changing everyday..Dward and Michelle have moved on to another farm and although we were sad to see them go, we’re happy for the fact that they will continue their journey and grow along the way. And as altruistic and nice as that sounds, we, here at ohmygato farm, don’t have too much time on our hands to mourn the loss of our new found friends. Did I mention the word change at the beginning of this paragraph? Well the concept of change continues to be one of my greatest lessons on our farm. When I lived in the suburbs and went to my job everyday I could at least fool myself into thinking that things were stable in my life. The farm reminds me everyday that life is unfixed and is constantly in flux…moving along it’s very own trajectory and not really stopping to wait for the unwilling or the faint of heart. I feel as if I’m running to catch up to it all.

Speaking of heart, we do hope that you are enjoying the recipes which we are sending out on our blog. If you have any recipes that you’d like to share with us, please email them to us and we’ll post them. This can help us understand better what kinds of dishes you all like to cook and help us all expand our culinary r’epertoire!

This is the last week of spinach for a while and we’ve got some great things coming up very soon. The summer squash is flowering and although the tomatoes still look a little puny they’re looking way more robust than a couple of weeks ago. A tip in order to get the full benefit of the brocolli is to check the cut part of the stem and if it doesn’t snap off easily, just cut it off so that you don’t get a fibery experience. Anthony is making an omellette with the rabe as we speak and is adding chives, salt and pepper. He loves butter, so that’s what he’s using to grease the pan, but extra virgin olive oil is recommended for a healthier version.

Anthony and I would like to give you all the web address one of the places where we look at market prices in the area for organic produce. It will give you a better idea of the value you are getting with each of your boxes and keep you informed about what is happening in the land of organic produce:

http://www.localfoodmarketplace.com/eugene/Default.aspx

A little something extra:

We’re having a Bill Evans week, maybe month. maybe more. We’re posting a beautiful tune by the talented yet troubled man who made some of the most beautiful music.  .You can bet that along side Los Tigres Del Norte, Bill Evans’ music is flooding our fields as we work. I’ll send you all some Tigres in the coming weeks. For this week, Bill Evans:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2LFVWBmoiw

This weeks harvest:
head lettuce
spinach
cauliflower
rainbow chard
arugula
thyme
cilantro
italian parsley
brocolli rabe
radishes

sprouts