Hi guys,

This week you will see lettuce in your box that Jason grew at our Pacifica Campus Farm. We have not grown anything for you guys in such a long time. Over two years. When the drought got really bad, we quit hand farming for you because we didn’t have a good water source. Instead, we focused on teaming up and learning from farmers that were better than us, more established, and had access to water. This is where our relationships and partnerships with John Givens, Jose Alcantar, Alex Frecker, and Jesus Salas were born from. And this is where our extended CSA really came from. For those of you that don’t know the term CSA, it stands for Community Supported Agriculture. The idea behind it is that a farmer sells directly to the people . When we started, that was our vision. But as we quickly realized, it was very hard to grow enough diversity on a weekly basis. There are only so many weeks you can get beets in your box without losing it. That’s why we work deeply with the farms we do. So, in essence we are a multi-farm CSA. The only thing is that our farm never gets to provide anything for our CSA.

The reason you don’t see anything Jason grows in our boxes is because everything he grows is gauranteed for Pacifica Graduate Institute and their cafeteria. His lettuces, carrots, kales, eggs, broccoli, beets, strawberries and the like all end up in the mouths of Pacifica students. This week is different as the students were on Spring break last week, and we had a surplus to harvest because of it. So while I said you were getting Salanova lettuce from Alex Frecker, you could definitely end up with some red leaf lettuce from our garden. ((We’d hate to waste it right?)) While this small campus farm has been a blessing and a fun opportunity for him to share his passion for Organics in an educational setting and to trial and error Bio-dynamic principals and small farm strategies, he is getting super itchy to start growing on a bigger scale again for all of you guys.

So, he is deep in the hunt for some nice, clean farmland to start cultivating and he has had some good luck recently. We may just have found a nice spot in Carpinteria with a prolific well and flat, level ground for him to start prepping out for the fall season. Keep your fingers crossed and wish us some good luck as we put our feet back in the deep end and start putting what we have learned to good use.

Katherine.

p.s. A word of warning from his wife: Once we get going again, he is going to annoy all of you guys to death with his permanent bed, minimum till, soil mycorrizhae, compost tea infused, weed occultation, mechanical cultivation can change the world mumbo jumbo. Or maybe you are into that sort of stuff…. Either way, we hope you enjoy some good old compost fed, biodynamic lettuces this week.