When the Almond Tree Blooms

For the past week I've been on vacation, since the farm is closed for two weeks over the holidays.  I've spent most of my break so far up in Seattle, with family and old friends.  Amidst the busy holiday schedule I snuck away to my favorite Seattle food spot, Aladdin Falafel Corner, located on the 'Ave', the street I spent many hours wandering as a high school student.  Aladdin is one of the few businesses left from those days in the late 90's, and anyone who has tried their falafel knows why.  For those of you unfamiliar with falafel, it is a food of Middle Eastern origin made of ground chickpeas (garbanzo beans) and various spices that are formed into a ball and deep fried until the outside becomes deliciously crispy.  The falafel then gets wrapped in a pita along with lettuce, tomato, cucumber, tahini sauce, red onion and at Aladdin, a dusting of red sumac powder.  One can find Aladdin falafel at two outlets, the Aladdin Gyro-cery and the Aladdin Falafe...

On Monday of last week I finally got around to harvesting the quince tree growing along a country road in South Sutter County.  I passed along this stretch of road many times on my way from one rice field to another and always found it pleasing because it is lined with walnut groves and homesteads whose yards abound with fruit trees.  I noticed the quince tree but never stopped to collect the fruit until that chilly December afternoon.  Quince Tree, Striplin Road Sutter County, CA For those of you unfamiliar with quince, it is a lumpy yellow-green fruit whose size ranges between apple and football.  Unlike most contemporary fruit, whose growers and buyers prize uniformity and perfection in appearance, every quince has a unique shape and is covered with a thin fuzz.  When eaten raw, quince has an astringent, mouth puckering taste, but when cooked it becomes very delicious.  Quince's popularity throughout the world in countries like Turkey, England, Spain...

Towards the end of last week, strong gusts of wind began to pummel the Sacramento Valle, clearing out the dense fog and the most of the leaves clinging to the trees on the farm.  The mulberries, willows, black walnuts, figs and the majestic valley oaks that dot the landscape of rice country are transforming into their skeletal winter forms.  The wind blew the thin white chaff off the corn being moved around the mill and it drifted like snow throughout the farm.  Like flakes that never melt it even settled on the dusty break table inside the machine shop.  I spent most of the past few days in the unheated shop, where I counted weeds in the rice samples I took from each field before harvest.  The work revealed striking differences in the weed populations of the fields, but grew tedious and made me realize that I wouldn't want to do this all the time, say, as a PhD student in an agriculture-related discipline.  Luckily, as the light faded over the Great Valle...

A thick fog has descended over the Valley this week.  At night it swirls around the trees, houses and cars on the street, imparting an eerie stillness to the neighborhood.  For the past few mornings, the fog hasn't lifted in South Sutter County, imparting a mental fuzziness which requires that I consume ever more coffee.  The weather makes it a good time of year to bake and make some soup.  I've included a recipe below of a really tasty winter squash soup I cooked last night.  First Apple Pie I've ever baked Fall colors on 2nd Ave, Oak Park, Sacramento Fall Gardening Projects The gardening never stops in the Central Valley My roommate brought masa from LA--it made delicious tortillas Here's the recipe for the soup I made.  I adapted it from one I learned from Sandra Morales, who was the parent liason at Park Elementary School where I taught for almost four years.  We cooked the soup on a family day around 3 years ago, and ...

Even though it comes a day late, I write this blog post in keeping with the theme of Thanksgiving, so I'll mention a few of the things that I am grateful for.  I am thankful to Katy and Evan Vigil-McClanahan for hosting such a wonderful Thanksgiving gathering at their farm in Esparto.  This was only the second Thanksgiving in my life I've spent away from my family in Washington State, and so I really appreciated the company, conversation and the delicious food.  The oven-baked turkey rivaled the bird my dad usually BBQs, and the grits and gravy were a new addition to the Thanksgiving spread (I was excited about grits and gravy because a character from Dave Chapelle's 'World Series of Dice' sketch draws his name from that delicious dish).  This morning however I awoke feeling none too ready to slap some leftovers in a tupperware and hit the road at 6:30 AM for the trip up to the farm.  My overindulgence in the Thanksgiving feast led to my contraction of a...

I am pleased to report that both the sweet potato harvest from a backyard garden in Woodland, California and the rice harvest on Pleasant Grove Farms have both reached their successful conclusion. The latter involved over a month of four combines working into the night 7 days a week cutting over a thousand acres of rice. The former entailed three people digging through 12 ft garden beds for a hour in search of delicious sweet potato tubers. Both mark the end of two very different agricultural adventures (described in previous posts). I walk away from this harvest with the satisfaction of having been part of the production of food: a milk crate's worth of sweet potatoes and well over fifty 55,000 lb truck loads of rice. Sweet potato patch before harvest The fruits of our labor Peppers still going strong With harvest completed, my farming job will begin to look more like a regular 8-hour office job. I have rice samples to sort, weigh and analyze, data to enter, ...

Sacramento Valley Summer Garden A major motivation behind my somewhat bizarre and masochistic decision to stick it out in the Central Valley is that I was really excited about the summertime abundance that flourishes in the intense heat. The previous summer I had spent at the UCSC Farm and Garden Apprenticeship Program in Santa Cruz, where an especially fog-cloaked, gloomy July stunted the warm weather crops, spread disease and kept us from harvesting much besides kale, carrots and lettuce. Those three vegetables are delicious in their own right, but in the summer, I want to eat summer stuff, like peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, watermelon and even some okra. Save the greens for the rest of the year, when I gladly will cook up kale, collards, broccoli raab or any other leafy vegetable and eat it with much gusto. In Santa Cruz, the problem we faced in enjoying the bounty of summer was a lack of heat and an overabundance of cool, damp weather. Out here in the Valley, what I lacke...

Ready for another day of field work Spending long days in the cab of a John Deere 8410 belted tractor gives me a lot of alone time. When I'm not staring at the sheaths of earth left tossed up by the powerful steel disks in tow behind the tractor, I watch the rice trucks on Highway 99, which runs next to the field, or I observe the chickens, cranes and the crows as they feast on insects unearthed by cultivation. And I wonder how of all things I ended up driving a tractor on a farm in South Sutter County. It is because I spent these recent days alone on the tractor--and because Fall is the season for remembering and for contemplation of life and death-- that I have resurrected up this blog yet again. Sutter County Mornings I could go back years, trying to figure out how I ended up where I am, but a good starting point would be the Summer of 2009, when I began my fourth year as the Nutrition Education Site Coordinator, aka 'Garden Teacher' at Park Elementary...

It's been nearly three weeks here in California, with many adventures taking place. I have a lot on my mind as I try and figure out work, life and all the rest, but I'd rather just share some pictures I've taken so far. Check them out on my picasa site: The first set (some repeats from previous post): https://picasaweb.google.com/rfadam/CaliforniaEnRouteSantaCruz# More recent ones from Davis, Capay Valley: https://picasaweb.google.com/rfadam/BackInCalifornia# That's it for now.

Happy 2011 readers! I've been in California for the past week or so, I have a lot to write about but instead am just going to share some photos from my time so far. On Wednesday, December 29, my Dad and I set off for California. We left on a dark evening after dinner, with clear skies over Seattle. Around Kent (15 miles south of Seattle) we ran into a snowstorm, complete with lightening. The snow turned to hail in Tacoma, after that it was clear sailing all the way to Longview. The next day we continued our journey, enjoying a savory breakfast at a Denny's outside Portland, pie and coffee at Peggy's in Rice Hill, Oregon and this beautiful evening light on Mt. Shasta after crossing the Siskiyou Mountains: More Mt. Shasta We stayed in a Travelodge in Red Bluff and continued south the next day. A chilly morning at the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge, near Willows, CA Snow geese at the Sacramento NWR I celebrated the new year in good company, in a karaoke boo...