Dear Shareholders,

CSA shareholders of Clark County, your farmers may require your assistance.  I address this message not just to my own CSA shareholders, but to the larger community of "supporters of agriculture."

By way of a caveat, I have to admit that I have been neglecting my relationships with my fellow CSA farmers for the last year or two, so check with your farmers to check the relevancy of my remarks to their particular situation.

Here's the deal.  The word on the wire is that CSA farmers are having trouble filling out their complement of shares this year.  Various theories are circulating to explain this problem, such as: "It's the economy stupid!", and "We're just getting too many CSAs in the county."  While these two factors may make the job of finding shareholders a little more difficult, I think it would be sad if our farmers despair on the basis of these theories.

But you can help!  Shareholders helping out was an integral part of the original North American CSA model as it developed on the East Coast, but somehow we rugged western individualists have seemed to leave that piece out of the puzzle.  As the pioneer CSA farmer in the county I stand guilty as charged as a poor role model.  But even I from time to time accept a little help and even rarely, ask for it.

So the kind of help I'm asking you to offer your farmer here is in the area of marketing.  For we introverted, "I'd rather be out in the field talking to my plants" farmers, marketing can be tough.  And its getting to that time of year that our fields are exactly where we should be.  If every CSA shareholder copied off three brochures and handed them out to likely friends or co-workers, that just might be enough to get the job done.  Our latest shareholder was signed up through such an effort (Thank you Eric and Eileen, and Clay).

Are there sympathetic businesses you patronize that might lay out some brochures?

But there is another level at which CSA members might want to help.  The traditional image of the help shareholders give farmers is spending an afternoon weeding or harvesting crops.  But might it not make even more sense if shareholders offered help that came from their own area of expertise or labor of love.  Natural born marketers might offer to help design and implement a marketing campaign, avid speakers might offer testimonials at social, trade or religious gatherings, writers could write articles for newsletters (this techno- illiterate can't even conceive of the new electronic media possibilities).

A few shining examples of this kind of help come to mind.  Our own CSA member Heather Lehman (of atrocityarts.com), first offered, and then insisted on building and maintaining our web site.  Heather claims we are allowing her to use us as a guinea pig, but the quality of her work and her known dedication to the local food movement bely any selfish motivation.  Heather's offering has been incredible.  Occasionally we show our gratitude by "allowing" her to come pick some surplus, or past prime produce that we are too exhausted to pick and market ourselves.

On a more community wide level, the work of Glenn Grossman and Sunrise O'Mahoney come to mind.  Glenn's "Clark County Food and Farm" website offers a comprehensive view, with commentary, on the farm and food scene in the county.  Whatever role Sunrise plays whether it is struggling to grow a food co-op, or coordinate plans for the 78th Street Farm, Sunrise always keeps an eye out for the welfare of local small farmers.

These folks have made giant contributions and no one expects that kind of "agricultural support", but maybe you have a skill that you could "guinea pig" on "your" farmer.  Call her and find out.

Diane & Jim Hunter, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Hunters' Greens CSA, http://huntersgreens.com
Brush Prairie, WA.  (360) 256-3788

Tumultuous weather continues here in Brush Prairie.  So what's a farmer to do?  When we're not climbing back into bed with the rainy day blues, gray weather is for doing the things that don't get done when we're busy planting in the sun.

One of the projects that's been creeping up the to do list for the last few years is to expand our green house space.  Even before Clark County Farmerette Brenda Millar of Rosemattel's CSA arrived on the scene, we were feeling pinched for seedling space in our eight by twelve fibreglass quonset hut, but now divide that by two.  So it was time.

Jim was not born a carpenter.  Unlike his brother Mike and sister Meg who can both create clothing patterns in their mind, Jim cannot visualize how to construct a finished product, so building becomes an arduous process of trial and error.  For the first two weeks Diane complained of seeing no progress.  What she didn't see is that Jim had begun and tore apart several versions of a rough foundation.  In the process of laying them out, their fatal errors became apparent, sending Jim back to the drawing board.

Adding to the complexity of such projects, everything at Hunters' Greens is cobbled from re-claimed materials.  Each window or glass door for the greenhouse walls is a unique dimension.  Every two by four is a different length and has it's own notches, cracks or rotten patches.  Putting all this together takes time, but when it's too wet to plant, cash for new materials is much dearer than are the endless hours of waiting.

Jim was just getting to the rafters when the sun broke.  The thought process went something like this:  "So, Jim you think you can just lay a two by four on top of the top plates for a rafter, think again.  Remember how you struggled just to copy the notches and angles on the Kapus Granary."

"How much pitch do you need?"  "

"You know your roof panels are eight feet long, and you've made the building seven feet wide, anticipating pitching the roof."

"It's simple geometry, why didn't you learn those formulas?"

"The sum of the square of the legs equals the square of the hypotenus.  That's all I can remember. "

"That helps a little, but what about angles.  You need angles."

"Isn't a carpenter's square supposed to give me the answer?"

"Remember when Mike came and helped you with the Kapus rafters.  He looked at your pattern, asked for a calculator, determined that the length was three eighths of an inch off, and took an afternoon to mass produce all the replacement rafters for the whole building.  This should be way easier."

"Well, it's time to consult Time-Life and Reader's Digest.  Off to the basement "how to" library."

"Aw, they just have you scribe the angle on the wood."  "

Well let's try that."

Jim had just ruined his first rafter on the final cut when the soil dried out enough to plant.  The value of time just shot up several fold.  The greenhouse rafters go to the back burner.

"Hmmm..., maybe I should just call Mike."

This season feels like we're getting off to a solid early start.  The garlic crop looks great, more than a foot tall and virtually weed free since we weeded in January.  The dry weather has allowed us to work up the fields for the spring vegetables, while we leave cover crops to continue growing on the summer vegetable ground.  The first planting of peas is about an inch high, while the second planting is just poking shoots through the surface.  We've planted some short rows of Walla Walla onions, and seeded two long rows of the sweet Mokum carrots.  We've never got carrots in this early before.  Carrots need well worked soil, and it is usually too wet to do that this early.  The catalog suggests around April 1, so we fudged it a little.

Another reason for the early start is the inspiration that having another farmer on the property has provided.  Jim has always envied how early Brenda Millar of Rosemattel CSA gets crops harvested, and this year we get to watch it happen.  Brenda's passion seems to really be for growing things, so she is chomping at the bit the minute the sun peeks out.  She already has all the ground we've allotted her tilled up with her little "pony" tiller, and is looking for spaces to interplant between the rows of existing crops.  Brenda is a much more savvy composter than we are, and uses the compost as a mulch to retain water, reduce compaction and feed her plants (which explains the lovely tilth in her garden beds).  Jim has never been much of a mulcher and tills organic matter into the soil, prior to planting.  It will be interesting to watch our two systems side by side.

It is of course the time of anxiously waiting for new members to sign up.  We're approaching half full with two months to go.

So that's the news from the farm.  We'll keep you posted.

With Inoli's invention of "The Great Escape" game, the warning that Australian Shepherds would invent their own games came home to roost.  From that day forward we have dedicated ourselves to regular runs around the property and endless games of fetch the tennis ball.

But Jim just couldn't leave well enough alone.  His years of championing the cause of the human "underdog" wouldn't allow him to let this seemingly unfair game of fetch continue.

Inoli's awkwardness on the athletic field is partly a consequence of his lack of tear ducts.  The constant accumulation of sticky mucous in one's eyes can't help but affect ones vision, despite our faithful adherence to the owner's regimen of cleaning goo, adding artificial tears and treating with antibiotics.

So.... Jim endeavored to level the proverbial playing field.  His first scheme was to occasionally throw the ball directly to Inoli.  This was often futile, because Bhalu was so good.  A ball gently lofted to Inoli would be snatched out of mid-air by Bhalu passing between Jim and Inoli.  Jim began to feel like a second string quarterback passing to a bench warming receiver being defended by an all-pro cornerback.

Jim eventually learned that occasionally Inoli would get the ball if he threw it out in front of him at exactly the point at which his dim eyes would be expecting it to land.  With Jim's and Inoli's combined skill levels, this increased Inoli's catch ratio from one in fifty to one in ten.

Of course, on can ask whether all hell breaking loose very ten throws is an improvement over one in fifty.  It appears the conflict lies in Bhalu's and Inoli's different interpretations of the goal of the game.  Bhalu will chase the ball and return it all day.  Inoli wants possession of his "precious."  About the second time Inoli gets the ball, he will lie dow and start chewing on it, sticking out of one side of his mouth like the butt of a cigar, ignoring Bhalu's piercing barks in his ear.  We have decided this chewing is an effort to infuse the ball with his own saliva, thereby marking it as his own "precious."

Jim continued this new game of "keep away from Bhalu" for a while, until we learned what "all hell breaking loose" could really mean.  On occasion, the boys would reach the ball at the same time.  When this happened, the would each grab the ball, jaw to jaw,  and a terrifyingly intimate garme of tug of war would ensue.  Following these battles, the meeker Bhalu would seek refuge between Jim's knees with his teeth chattering, and would lose his enthusiasm for the game.  When we learned that it was possible that occcasionally a stray tooth would sink into an opponents lip, we took measures to avoid such encounters.

So Jim's next version of egalitarian fetch was to throw two balls.  This game was complicated by the dogs' different motivations.  Bhalu will chase whatever ball is thrown, but the jealous "Cain" Inoli is only interested in the ball that is currently in play, usually the one Bhalu has caught.

Inoli focuses on the ball with great concentration, staring at it in an effort to keep track of it with his poor eyes.  If Bhalu returns a ball to our feet, and we throw another one that was in our other hand, Inoli will ignore it.  If we throw another ball near where the ball "in play" had landed in order to trick him, he will sniff it and walk away.

The twa dogs way of returning the ball also betrays a different attitude.  Bhalu dashes back with the ball launching it out of his mouth at your feet panting, and often heads off eagerly to fetch the next throw.  Inoli ambles about as if he's chasing a butterfly, and then returns the ball to a place of his own choosing, sometimes behind you  or sometimes half way back from where you threw it.  His signal that he wants you to throw it again is to stare at it intently.

This behavioral dynamic has challenged Jim's skills at inventing egalitarian games.  Our current version is played like this.  Jim throws out one ball and keeps another in his pocket.  Nine times out of ten, Bhalu catches this ball.  So we're back to Bhalu chases the ball, and Inoli chases Bhalu.  When Inoli eventually catches the first ball, Jim throws the second ball to Bhalu, and we shift to the two ball game.

Jim throws it long for Bhalu, and a high short throw to Inoli, aimed so it will fall a few feet in front of him.  As long as the ball is bouncing into the air, Inoli can follow it; once it lays in the grass, he loses sight of it.  When this happens he begins  a zig zagging, sniffing search that may take a full minute, sometimes with him passing by the ball within six inches.

Experience has taught Jim that he must hold Bhalu's ball until Inoli has found his.  Sometimes throwing a second ball knocks Inoli off his scent.  But having two balls in play can also betray that even the purest Abel character possesses a little of the dark side.  Some times in his impatience Bhalu will look for Inoli's ball while still carrying his own in his mouth.  When he finds it, he will sometimes drop his own ball and pick up Inoli's.  When Inoli finds the supplanted ball, he recognize the ruse and goes chasing after Bhalu.

On occasion, Inoli's rage results in a most poignant image.  When Inoli approaches Bhalu with the intent of ripping the ball from his jaws, he walks up casually facing Bhalu and passes his snout parallel to Bhalu's, so his nose is near Bhalu's ear and voices a low growl.

This always reminds of a scene from one of our favorite "cult classic" movies, THE USUAL SUSPECTS.  The two fearless bad boys of the heist team, Hockney and McManus get into an argument over some loot.  Hockney slides his face within inches of McManus' in much the same position as Inoli does.  When the argument is resolved and the tension breaks, Hockney quips, "You wanna dance?"

Jim always pondered this scene as involving some underlying homosexual theme, but Diane sees it as an example of "getting in your face," and Inoli's Cain-like aggression supports Diane's interpretation.

By now we've implanted an image of Inoli in the reader's mind as one bad ass Cain.  So now its time to jerk the chain on the black and white imagery we've recently been criticizing and fill in the finer shades of gray.

If John Steinbeck didn't come right out and say as much in his many letter about his work, He strongly implies that he finds the morally challenged "Cains" of this world much more interesting than the pure "Abels".  After all the story of Cain and Abel is really much more about Cain, his choices, actions and their consequences that it is about the apparently righteous Abel.  Cain is subject, Abel is object.

And so it sometimes seems with Inoli and Bhalu.  Despite Inoli's runtish disfigurement and awkwardness (or perhaps because of it), Inoli displays some remarkably endearing qualities.  Every once in a while he puts the cutest little hop of his left rear leg into his gait.  To watch him display his frustration by "killing" a towel as he shakes it back and forth to "break its neck" is pure mirth.  When he rolls on his back, rubbing an itch in his coarse coat, he closes his eyes and his tongue lolls out of a wide open grin, giving one the impression he is experiencing a great sensual joy.

Inoli gives and receives physical affection in quantities greater than any dog we have ever met.  He loves to walk between our knees, squeezing between them or leaning hard against one and then stretch his hind legs so his stomach almost touches the ground, while we massage his hip joints.

Much to Diane's horror, Jim lets Inoli lick his face.  Inoli doesn't just give the customary two licks.  He licks your whole face including ears and forehead.  Diane threatens to stop kissing Jim if he continues this practice, but Jim has never learned how to say no to a dog, once he has said yes.

Well as we look back on this essay, it appears that Inoli has gotten a lot of ink, and perhaps like Steinbeck, we are more drawn to the "Cains" of this world.  But the Cain/Abel dichotomy is a fiction, so know that we love Bhalu for his boundless energy and his "dog-like"   loyalty.  Perhaps we should invoke the words of Chuck Hunter, Jim's dad, when he wisely said, "I love all my children equally, but differently."

Don't worry, this title does not introduce a recipe suggestion.  It does introduce an essay based on the saying "If life gives you lemons, make lemonade" as it applied to CSA farming.  More specifically, we will discuss how the commitment of consumers to a CSA farm allows farmers to be more creative in utilizing their less than blemish free produce, and where in the case of garlic, that has led us here at Hunters' Greens.

Garlic is a perverse crop to grow.  On about September, as we are exhausted and ready to put the farm to bed for the winter, it is time to plant garlic.  It is a rare year when we are adequately prepared.  Sometimes we venture out to Hillsboro to buy some select varieties from our favorite seed garlic grower, but as of late, Jim runs down to the supermarket and buys ten pounds or so of garlic to plant.  Actually, the last few years, we have begun planting back some of the last years crop, so we can begin to call the seed garlic our own.  One has purple skinned cloves and the other pink, so we might call them "Winco Wine" and "Fred's Red".

Once you get some bone dry ground or spongy wet ground prepared (depending on whether you beat the fall rains in planting), the poor little garlic cloves face a long winter of incessant rain, compacting the ground around them.  As early spring arrives, weeds spring out of the sopping ground and threaten to bury your garlic.  Early on, we lost track of whole garlic crops in the weed.  An early mulching might help these problems, but we are always waiting to see the tops of the garlic out of the ground before we mulch, and it always seems too late.

So recently, Jim has become a mulching monster, and mulches every thing he can.  Garlic was one of his first victims, so as soon as he gets the garlic weeded on the first dry spring days, he lays down some hay mulch in the hopes of supressing weed, retaining moisture and softening the rain compacted ground.

Now this may be a fine idea, in theory.  But last week we discovered one of the pitfalls of poor implementation.  Every year in July, Jim digs out one of our Rodale garden advice books that has an entry about how many skins a garlic bulb should have when it is harvested.  The advice of some intrepid garlic farmer had been queried, and the farmer asserts that when it has seven skins it is ready to harvest.  If you wait too long, the cloves begin to break through the skins and you have a bulb with dirt in the top that won't store well.

Some of our CSA customers may remember getting a few bulbs of uncured garlic in July.  That garlic had seven skins.  So what happened to the rest of the crop?  Well, this leads us to another of the perversities of garlic.  It wants to be harvested when we are still busting our butt, trying to finish up planting summer crops and itching to get started planting fall crops.

This year with the hot dry weather, Jim gambled that he could just stop watering the garlic and it would cure in the dry ground, and be ready to harvest when he got around to it.  By the time the poorly forecast soaking early August rain began falling it was off his radar screen.  Last week, he decided he'd better get the garlic in before it rained again.

As Jim began harvesting the Winco Purple he realized he'd waited too long.  The bulbs were breaking open, the stems had rotted away and even the layers of skin down to the naked clove were breaking down.  It was the evening before delivery and he raced to finish a row before dark.  And this when he started making garlic lemonade.

As Jim dug through the mildewing mulch, he suddenly realized that the mulch was contributing to the problem.  Now Fred's Red matures a little later than Winco Wine, so Jim immediately stopped harvesting and began pulling the damp mulch of of the remaining rows of Fred's Red.  Their skins were breaking open but were not in as bad shape.  Jim spent the rest of the twilight pulling off mulch and abandoned his plans for including garlic in the harvest.

But what to do with the now black skinned Winco Wine?  The next step in making garlic lemonade was to triage the bulbs.  The best good sized bulbs would go into next week's share.  The main problem with the broken down skin is storage, and CSA shares get about as much garlic in a season as Jim uses in a week, so storage shouldn't be an issue.  Because we are marketing to a captive and generally sympathetic market, we can at least try this garlic out on the CSA members.  A single crop garlic grower marketing to the broad public would never get away with it and may have to ditch the garlic.  A single crop grower would never make this mistake, but neither is she trying to juggle twenty or so crops at once.

The second branch of the triage brings us to another perversity of growing garlic.  The intrepid garlic grower will save the largest cloves to replant, with an eye toward maintaining and increasing clove and bulb size.  Now, as the cook in the family, Jim knows that when it comes to garlic, "size matters".  There is nothing so frustrating as being pressed for time and trying to peel twenty tiny cloves to put in your spaghetti sauce.  On the other hand, as a marketer, it is really hard to pass by the biggest bulbs that would impress the customer.  The blackened Winco Wine offered and easy out.  Some of the biggest bulbs had broken open the worst, and were quite unsightly.  These we will save to plant.

The third branch of the triage are those bulbs we will save for our personal use and those that we will plant for green garlic in the spring.  Medium sized, ugly bulbs will suffice in our kitchen, but we now save our frustration by planting the tiniest bulbs whole for the early green garlic.

In the coming weeks we will see what the triage for Fred's Red will look like.  We anticipate some prettier, more storable garlic since Jim discovered his mistake before all was lost.

So that's how you make garlic lemonade.  Oh, and one more thing, you squeeze out the last bit of sour lemon juice, and write an essay about it to entertain and edify your customers, while spinning a cautionary tale about timely garlic harvest for your fellow intrepid CSA farmers (as if they don't already know better).

As we've been pondering Cain and Abel, we've had daily reminders of brotherly behavior from our recent canine guests here on the farm.  Inoli and Bhalu are brothers (litter mates, we presume).  From first sight, one would recognize them as a pair in which one brother had received all the blessings.

About the time we were coming to terms with the loss of Chevy the civil defense dog and our feline companions Whenny Penny Woo and Helen Belen, we were offered the opportunity to provide a temporary home for two Australian shepherds.  We googled Australian shepherds and learned that they are highly intelligent animals.  Because they are bred to work as herd dogs, the web page suggested that they need to be given games to play, or (they warn ominously) they will invent games of their own.  When Jim described the breed and their behavior to our farmy friend Erin, she replied, "Oh yes, they are 'shadow dogs', they want to be your shadow wherever you go."

Physically, Inoli and Bhalu have the appearance of a cross between a border collie (the black and white herding dogs of BABE fame), and Australian cattle dogs (sometimes known as blue heelers).  They are a little stockier that the border collie and taller than the cattle dog.

In general terms they are black and white, with patchy intermingling on their backs, and white "socks" covering their paws.  Upon closer examination, their coats are more elaborate, the inside of their legs being tan, and the black is flecked and undercoated with mahogany.  It wasn't until the first rains of fall, when their feet were washed on the wet grass, that we noticed that their toes are an adorable bright pink.

The contrasts between Bhalu and Inoli are fuel for endless fascination and amusement.  Bhalu was clearly the "Abel" brother who received all the blessings.

The name for Bhalu and Inoli's coloring is called "blue merl", and while the "blue" in animal coats has always looked gray, to us, Bhalu's coloration gives an inkling of the name's significance.  The light patches on Bhalu's back are actually a pale gray with a blue cast, perhaps a couple shades lighter and a shade bluer than battle ship gray.  His coat is about an inch and a half long and silky smooth, and he gazes at us from bright walnut brown eyes, accented by a tiny tan patch above each eye.

Inoli is a couple inches smaller than Bhalu, in both length and height.  One can imagine that Inoli was the runt of the litter.  His coat is short and coarse and his patches of black and gray are indistinct in color and pattern.  One of his white "socks" is a knee sock, while the others are anklets.  But the place where Inoli really missed the blessing was in his eyes.  You see, Inoli was born without tear ducts, so despite diligent use of various medications, the whites and rims of his eyes are always blood shot.  The mucus that would be washed away with tears collects along his eyelids in a yellowish green crust.

Two media images come to mind when looking into the face of Inoli.  When he approaches to lick your face, his eyes remind us of the smiling wise of Yoda, welcoming Luke Skywalker, but when he is about to rip a tennis ball from the jaws of Bhalu, he is more reminiscent of Gollum, protecting his "precious."

Since we have reduced Inoli to a couple of popular images, perhaps we should do the same for Bhalu.  Bhalu reminds us more of actor/sports star Mark Harmon, for besides his charming good looks, and steel gray locks, Bhalu is the quintessential graceful athlete.

You see, the game that the brothers' owners chose to keep them entertained was "fetch the tennis ball," and Bhalu is a master.  When the brothers first came to the farm, the game was played with a "chucker," which the anthropologically trained owners referred to as an atlatl for tennis balls.  Played this way, forty-nine out of fifty balls "chucked" would be fetched by Bhalu.  On a short high throw, Bhalu jumps and catches the ball out of the air with a "POP!" that sounds like a hard ball hitting a fielder's glove.  On a high bounce, he leaps into the air, catching the ball at the top of it's arc.  When chasing a grounder, he runs full tilt and then skids to a stop in order to snatch it up.  He can run full tilt toward a fence and stop in time to avoid hitting it.  Inoli, on the other hand ran headlong into the side of a plow once, chasing a ball at dusk.

Bhalu's grace, by the way, extends beyond the playing field to the potty field.  When Bhalu concludes making a "solid" deposit, he scratches at the ground, as many dogs do, but at the end of the scratch, he extends one leg backward and stretches it out into a perfect arabesque, and then thrusts it, as if to shake any trace of the deposit from it.

But back to the game.