It’s official! RiverHouse Farm CSA and Calliope’s Table CSA are now one! As I mentioned before, I have been doing more and more farming with my good friend Nikki Hill at RiverHouse Farm. Living on the land there together in Sellwood has given us plenty of opportunities to learn what’s important to us, and how we approach urban farming and growing food. We finally decided it made too much sense to work together on our CSA’s, which will free up time for both of us to pursue some individual pursuits related to farming.
For me, that’s cooking and feeding people. Calliope’s Table started life as a Personal Chef service, and my search for good ingredients led me to farming. Those few short years ago it felt like no one understood what I was talking about when I said that we all need to be growing more of our own food, supporting local urban farmers, and using unused and underutilized land to do so. Now, this idea has really spread wings. So many people get it now and are putting energy into embracing these things.
So I come full circle. I find myself understanding and totally agreeing with what Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton say in “A Nation of Farmers”, and that is that possibly the most important tools in feeding ourselves could be a kitchen knife and a cooking pan. As a culture we are losing our ability to cook food “from scratch”, work with raw ingredients, and understand how to intuitively make scrumptious meals with whatever is on hand that day. Your farmers eat this way as a lifestyle and it is one of the reasons we are farmers is that the food doesn’t get any better than this.
Since those Personal Chef days, I have taken a greater interest in canning and preserving since I know how to get the good stuff now. I no longer buy anything that is not in season, preferring what I’ve preserved from last season when things were at their peak. Other strategies play into this like growing greens all year round and planting enough root crops to be able to harvest all the way through winter until the new crop of spring vegetables emerge.
We are planning a new outdoor kitchen at RiverHouse Farm for this season, and plan to continue with great enthusiasm the tradition long held here of gathering people together for food and music next to Crystal Springs Creek which runs through the land.
CSA information will now be available at the RiverHouse Farm blog (http://riverhousecsa.wordpress.com/), and as the season progresses cooking and preserving info at Calliope’s Table (http://www.calliopes-table.com/). There is other exciting news about what is going on at RiverHouse Farm including our new association with GeerCrest Farm (http://www.geercrestfarm.com/) in Silverton. You can read all the latest at: http://riverhousecsa.wordpress.com/news/.
Thank you for your continued support. We couldn’t do what we do without you!
Peace,
Calliope
