Harvest Week 4, July 10th – July 14th, 2018

Your Box This Week – Saturday Deliveries:
Please note: this summary is written before we pack your box—be aware that some guesswork is involved. Share contents often vary over the course of the week. And, as always, be sure to thoroughly wash all of your vegetables.

Salad Greens — Lettuce, Pea Shoots (maybe)

Stem Crops — Fennel, Celery, Kohlrabi

Root Crops — Carrots

Fruiting Crops — Cucumbers, Summer Squash

Alliums — Sweet Onion

Herbs — Basil

Sign up for the Free Recipe Service
Make sure you sign up for the Local Thyme CSA meal planning service we offer with your share. Local Thyme offers storage and handling tips and recipes customized to each week’s share. It has received many great reviews from our shareholders. Check out this sample recipe: Kohlrabi fries.

We’re harvesting our early carrots this week. Cucumbers are coming on now. Sweet corn is growing dramatically fast; I think it will be ready for week 5, the week after this week. We do five plantings of sweet corn, with the intention that it will be in the boxes for 5 weeks straight, from mid-July to mid-August.

Words
Words are of utmost importance to me. The first thing that drew me to my lovely wife Haidy was her beautiful voice and the way she used her voice to eloquently form words, making her sentences almost into melodies. Now, several years into our marriage, I am even more enamored of how she speaks and of how she writes with such crystalline clarity and thoroughness.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of the movement for Transcendental Meditation, claimed that there was a time even earlier than the time of the recorded Vedas when words were identical to the things they described. He said there was no room back then for confusion due to communication, because a verbal description of an event would convey the event with exactitude, including every detail of the action and of the setting in which the action occurred.

Bruce Chatwin, in his book The Songlines, described how the Aborigines of Australia sang their world into being. A stretch of land would be assigned to a singer, and the singer would sing that stretch with exactitude, each boulder, tree, hill, ravine. If a word was mis-sung, the singer was put to death, because the error in the song would subject the land to destruction. 

A shareholder recently told me, “most people lie. We have to get used to it.”

Rudolf Steiner said that lies kill spiritual beings.

Why am I expounding about words today? Because I have recently encountered some especially disturbing ways with words.

Symptomology—a sanitized term for any misfortune—he died of symptomology. If it hadn’t been for that symptomology, he’d still be alive. 

War, famine, domestic abuse, theft, incarceration, a speeding ticket, a lost pet–all woes and misfortunes can be attributed to symptomology. It’s the contemporary version of karma.

If you don’t receive lettuce this week, it’s due to symptomology.

The Beatles Let it Be

Lesley Littlefield and Farmer John Used to Bee

What is the cheery label above, I wondered when I first spotted it before reading the accompanying NPR article? Is it the logo for an ashram, for a new religion, an old religion renewing itself, a meditation movement?

Upon reading the attendant article, USDA unveils prototypes for GMO food labels and they’re…confusing, I found out that it is one of the proposed labels for GMO food, soon to be officially known as bioengineered food. 

The article states, “Other options include a smiling sun, or a circle with growing plants. The letters B-E stand for bioengineered — a term critics say is unfamiliar to the U.S. consumer, compared to more commonly used phrases like genetically engineered or GMO.”

Huh?
To make sewage sludge less objectionable, it was long ago renamed biosolids. Crop chemicals are now crop protectors. Dicamba disasters in soybean fields are symptomologies. Genetically engineered crops will soon radiantly do their be-ing.

Words are Our Legacy
I encountered a lot of words from distributors, promoters and journalists when the film The Real Dirt on Farmer John and Farmer John’s Cookbook were released. A lot the words were lies–a plague of lies, it seemed. I documented many of the lies in pages and pages of carefully constructed accounts of the lies, and submitted them to my attorney. He said over the telephone, “oh, lying is legal. Only if you can prove that lying hurt you financially is it considered illegal.” 

I hung up the phone, thinking, but words should impart truth and accuracy. They are divine instruments, our precious legacy. Words are sacred. We must not abuse or mis-use words.

Bounty
Please tell your friends that we are continuing to sell shares as we enter the harvest season. Send them to www.angelicorganics.com/receive-our-vegetables/

Please Fold Your Boxes Properly and Return Them
The farm re-uses the vegetable boxes. Flaps are easily torn when the boxes are dismantled improperly, and then the box bottom might later burst open with fresh, organic local produce heading towards the floor. Please carefully flatten your box and return it to your delivery site. If you receive home delivery, place it in the location where your box is delivered.

Have the Best Shareholder Experience
For the best shareholder experience, visit www.angelicorganics.com/best-shareholder-experience/

Let us Know
Let the office know anything you’d like to share about this week’s box at email hidden; JavaScript is required. Please note the week and day of delivery, your site, when you picked up your box, and any comments about your box.

More from Shareholders
Visit us often at www.facebook.com/angelicorganics, where we post exciting farm developments regularly, and shareholders post recipes, tips, and photos.

Warmly,
Farmer John

 

Angelic Organics Learning Center
Angelic Organics Learning Center is an exciting and engaging place to learn about food, farming, and caring for the earth. They even offer overnight programs. Sign up for a workshop at www.learngrowconnect.org/events