This process began in July, when we planted the leftover plants from market, including several dozen San Martino's Romas. Now we're picking them in big colanders full, and today was our first can. My first-ever time peeling tomatoes, seeding tomatoes, pureeing tomatoes, then cooking them down and then canning tomatoes. Because this is tiring, I'm writing a post.

We live in tomato country. Yolo County produces a goodly share of the California canning tomato crop, which in turn comprises nearly all of the canned tomatoes we eat in the U.S. Starting in the spring, the fields begin to fill with millions of the little spidery plants, and by this time, early fall, the last of the harvest machines is scooping them up. The machines take a whole plant, and using some kind of eye, pick out the red from the green tomatoes. Then people sort the good red tomatoes from the bad ones (so says this guy), and the good ones go onto a belt into a wagon about 15' high. It's all gonna be ketchup anyway, so it's OK if it gets a bit squished.

We have seen the tomato trucks everywhere, and breathed the tomatoey fumes from the Woodland tomato plant.  We have sold dozens of starter plants and planted dozens more.  And now at last, our first batch of homemade tomato sauce is in the can.

And you know what?  The work has been a pleasure, up til now.  I have enjoyed the little seedlings, and the tilling of the ground, and the running of the irrigation lines, and coming home with baskets full of bright red fruit.

And now, there are clear jars of bright red preserves on my counter, and friends, I am so done with this process. Come and take my tomatoes away. There are green ones and red ones and Cherokee purple, and various cherry tomatoes as well, and if I peel and seed one more joyous bowlful, that might just be one bowl too many.

Today is Indigenous People's Day, which we celebrated by harvesting the Tarahumara sunflowers, and leaving some out for the birds. I can't tell you much about the Tarahumara/Rarámuri, except that they are famous for running, and they managed to escape the Spanish colonizers who showed up at what is now Chihuahua, Mexico. I think these facts are linked. Also, they wear flat shoes made out of old tires, which have inspired Evan's current choice of footwear.

We brought in the sunflowers, we brought in some beans, and we brought in our first batch of chiles! Oh, crops of the Americas, you never disappoint. Tonight we are making chili in celebration. Here is my approximate recipe for chili (different every time): 1–2 onions 2–6 sweet peppers [now saute the above with 2–4 cloves garlic in plenty of vegetable oil] 1–3 pounds tomatoes as many hot peppers, and as many different kinds, as you like dry beans, or fresh shelling beans, cooked to near-doneness. The more kinds of beans the fuller the flavor.
salt, oregano, pepper, and cumin to taste

That's it, just combine all of the above and let it simmer as long as you can stand it.

We are lucky to have a big space for our garden. I think of myself as a beginning gardener, but an experienced eater. This means I know what to plant and how to cook it, but harvest time still feels like a miracle. Wow, food came out of the ground! Again!

I must share with you one more thing about the garden, which is that we almost never weed, and it works out fine. We just weed at the beginning to give the crops a fighting chance, and then we let the many plants come as they will. This is the kind of thing you can do with a big garden, because who cares if you lose a few beans in the grand scheme of things? This is also the luxury of growing food for ourselves, rather than as a business. Our business is plants and lamb, possibly duck next year and the almonds, but the vegetables are all ours.

Ours and the sheep's. There's a case of the sniffles going around the flock, and they say that sheep benefit from C the same way we do, so we're cutting the oranges up and feeding them to the sheep. More greenery would help, too…beet greens are up next on the menu. Then beets, if we can devise a cutter. People used to feed beets to their stock, and they'd have a beet cutter, which I gather is just a large hand-crank food processor. Tell me if this sounds like something that you could invent, readers. We need it.

What I meant to tell you, is it's beautiful right now. The second rain of fall is here, and tiny shafts of grass are poking up out of the dirt and thatch. They seem so precarious now…I don't know if we'll get enough rain to sustain them or if they'll just die. But all around us, if the rain should allow it, are acres and acres of sheep feed, just waiting to grow.

The main benefit for the farmer in a CSA is that the money is front-loaded. They get all the cash up front, in return for a promise to provide so much stuff at intervals over the course of a season. But it's that front-loading that puts a lot of people off, since they have to put a lot of money on the table all at once. Since a lot of CSAs aren't particularly financially sophisticated, this is about the only way they can run it, and the farmer at small CSAs don't have a lot of time for customer service.

I think that the best way the government could help here would be to set up some sort of intermediary. The customer would enter into a contract with the farmer, but the intermediary would loan the farmer 75% of value of the subscription (up front). The customer would then make monthly payments to the intermediary. At the end of the season, the farmer would get the remaining 25%, less any money from people who've defaulted on their contract to pay. Farmers servicing low-income areas and customers would get 100% of their money in advance. The grant money in this case would go to covering the cost of the loans and the shortfalls in large losses from defaulters, if there are any.

It'd be interesting to see the two approaches trialed against each other in different regions, but I wonder if the CSA scene isn't too different in different areas to make it a good comparison.

UPDATE: Because this was really boring, here is a picture of some ducks:

Here are a few of the things we've been eating this summer…from easiest to hardest (but best):

Cucumber Salad:

Revised, due to Katy's fuzzy memory!  Shred cukes, sprinkle with salt, let them sit awhile while you dissolve some sugar in vinegar.  Mix everything together, add pepper, chill it a little while, and enjoy.  Tastes good with everything, and the juice is the best part.  Credit Krystof's mom for this recipe.

Yet Another Way to Eat Pasta:

While you're boiling the water, brown some zucchini slices in butter.  Once they're brown, add thin slices of garlic and 1–2 chopped tomatoes. Throw some good olive oil in at the end.  By the time your pasta is out you will have a fine sauce for it.

Chiles Rellenos:

Follow this great recipe, but make a completely different stuffing, as devised by Evan: brown 1/2 pound pork and an onion, set aside, saute a couple pounds of summer squash and 1 of the poblanos from the recipe because you broke it accidentally, and then mix in the pork and about a third cup of farmer's cheese or goat cheese or probably cream cheese would be good.

We also made moussaka, filling in zucchini for some of the eggplant, which was lovely but much too complicated to convey in 1 sentence.  The lesson learned there was: breadcrumbs on the bottom and top make your moussaka extra good, and leftover pork from the relleno project just makes everything good.

So this morning I got up at 6, packed the van up for Evan's trip down to the market, fed the cats and ducks, and went back to bed.  It was Sunday, and I was determined to stay in bed as late as possible, sleeping and reading and avoiding business decisions for a few hours — or even all day, if I could.  Thinking maybe I'd go into town for a paper and coffee and eggs, maybe raid the remains of the Borders bookstore in Vacaville.

Late morning came, and it was time to water plants and feed the sheep, so I managed to hoist my book off of my chest and get dressed.  I put the hay in the truck, I drove down to the pen, I stepped out, and there was a sheep in the tree.  Forefeet up, leaf in mouth, black eyes open, not moving.  Looking for all the world like a taxidermied sheep.

So I put some hay out and some flaxseed meal in the feeders, and refreshed the sheep's water, and went up to look.  Ewe lamb number 1010 had managed to strangle herself in a tree.  There are so many things they don't put in the sheep books, like oh, trees are deadly, watch out for that, folks.  Poor thing must have stretched up too high, stuck her head in a notch for a leaf, and then got stuck.  And no hands around to pull her out.  I keep noticing the tragedy of not having hands.

I came inside, read an article on how to compost your dead animals, and called Evan, who heroically offered to haul the sheep out of there for me, and assured me that it wasn't going to be too gross if we waited until evening.  Decided I'd better start building the compost pile, so we'd be ready to go when he got home.

And then I thought about that coffee and the paper and the eggs, thought about the hot sun outside and another day of exposure and work.  And I thought, well, she's not going anywhere.  And it's still Sunday.

So I had my paper and (it being too late for eggs) my BLT, and built a bin out of some random stuff we had around, and home came the heroic Evan.  We untangled the sheep from the tree and had her turning into plant food in no time.

There is a saying among ranchers, something along the lines of "as soon as that lamb hits the ground, it starts trying to die."  I think it helps people feel better about the myriad ways you can lose a lamb in its first few weeks of life.  But I can't really see what this 5-month-old sheep could've done differently — she wanted leaves, she went for them, her feet went out from under her.  I applaud her ambition and we buried her with starthistle, a favorite food.

So I'm moving the sprinklers this evening, and it's a hot one.  I am walking kind of zombielike at this point, having well and truly cooked my brain during a midday fence move.  I lurch to my right and say "OH god."

For there, where my hand was reaching for the sprinkler, a long snake lay twined in the grass.  Frozen.  Hoping I didn't see it.

"Well, you scared me too!" I said — and then crouched down to get a closer look.  No rattle and no diamond-head, whew.  Rattlesnakes are so common here that (1) the hay guy warned us not to put our hands between the bales — the snakes hide there — and then we did it anyway and found a skin, and (2) the cemetery has a prominent "Rattlesnake XING" sign right as you walk in.  Really puts one in the mood for some peaceful reflection on one's own mortality.

So it took me awhile, but eventually I found its picture online — this is the common Pacific gopher snake, which is friendly and sweet, and may even eat rattlesnakes.  A friend indeed — a snake, a snake.

If you would like to see a gopher snake befriending a baby, you will have to click here.

Like this, but bigger.

So guess what we found next!  A mushroom-mushroom.  Evan found this puffball about the size of a baby head.  (Baby heads are bigger than softballs, right?)  And to make matters stranger, it was damp (from the sprinklers) and very firm, and warm, so I half wondered if it wasn't something's head as I wiggled it out of the ground.

I think it was Scleroderma polyrhizum, which according to this expert, is at war with his suburb, creating "plump pustules on patiently preened promenades."

Because you haven't seen it in a couple years, and because we are 2 for 3 on wildlife sightings today, I bring you:

Evan: Desparado.  Never has a song about an outlaw been less trangressive.

And today, live from Inderkum High.…

Evan:  Noooooooo!  Not Landslide.….….losing will to live…

Katy: Did the landslide bring you down?

Evan: Have been killed by awful guitar music

Katy: At least they did it softly, with their song.

Evan: Also by sophmoric wordplay

In conclusion, our mystery squash:

We came a little late to the game this year with our tomatoes and peppers.  We tried to get to market by late spring, when folks are really gardening in earnest, but we hit some obstacles (weather, hoophouse, insurance) and started instead in late June.

Cute little earnest tomatoes — too late!

So now we're trying to figure out how to offload all these summer vegetables before it gets too late to plant them and still get a good harvest.  I figure we have about 2 weeks.  When it gets too late, we're just going to plant them ourselves, as we have already done with a few hundred Martino's Roma and Cherokee Purples, which I guess will become some purple tomato sauce this fall :)  (Is that gross?)

Any ideas?  I put an ad on East Bay craigslist, and one in Sacramento, and we're putting all our summer veg on clearance ($1.50/pot).  I have toyed with the idea of driving the van around to all the community gardens, sound system up loud, selling plants out of the side door.  Evan points out that there are never more than 2 people in a community garden at one time.  Gardening can be a solitary art.

Then I thought about the Underground Market, but then the Underground Market was shut down.  Then I thought about school gardens, but people should really give plants to school gardens for free.  We could probably sell them all if we went to 6 farmers' markets per week, but then we would need more canopies and cars, and if we're buying another car we should probably sell something more expensive, like I don't know, plants made of gold.

We still have fall to look forward to, and we are starting a whole bunch of cabbages, kale, pumpkins, herbs, lettuce, etc. for the fall season.  But these summer plants have got to go!  And if I plant them all here, then everyone's getting a cute pot of zucchini marmalade for Christmas this year.  And also for birthdays, and weddings, and just-because!  Don't make me do this, people.  Don't make me become the squash lady.

Jack London Square Farmer's Market — every Sunday from 9am to 2pm in Jack London Square, Oakland.

New! Laguna Farmer's Market — Laguna and Big Horn Blvds in Elk Grove — every Saturday from 8am to 12pm.

And speaking of the weather, all accounts say it is going to rain tomorrow.  What the hell?  Can I say that on the internet?  I guess this isn't preschool.  What the hell??  We covered up our small haystack with tarps by flashlight.  Evan could not resist shining a light on the ducks.  They were sleeping, Evan, they were sleeping.

Our friend Reed came by today and weeded the 300 tomatillos he brought over and planted last month.  If you need any tomatillos, talk to Reed.  They'll be ready in awhile, all million of them.  He reminded us that we have a plum tree, so we went over and relieved it of the ripest plums.  I am sure that tree was so grateful.

Finally, Evan dug up the first batch of garlic today, which we had in our dinner, with homegrown greens and local pork sausage.  Everything's good.

Except apparently, that tomato they put on your sandwich at Subway/Togo's/anyplace they add tomatoes to sandwiches in winter or spring.  That is not so good.  According to this piece on Florida tomatoes (which are all the fresh tomatoes you can buy, in winter and spring), Florida growers are dumping ridiculous amounts of chemicals on the plants, thus ruining the health of their workers, some of whom are actual slaves.  (More about that here.)  Now I know it's exhausting to go out and buy ethical everything, but maybe we can start with tomatoes, because (a) out of season tomatoes are gross, and (b) slavery.  We're against it.

Yeah!