Week 4, Fall 2023
Hey all! Claire Ivey here back with this week’s farm journal to keep you all updated.
Last week was a hectic one! Every day was packed and it seemed as the temperature increased throughout the week so did our workload. A lot of time went into planning our Sukkot festivities for our event over this weekend, which was so fun and went off without a hitch.
On Monday, most of us were actually in Chicago to observe Yom Kippur. The few people that were on the farm started our normal monday harvest routine by rounding up (you’ve heard me say this 1,000 times now), the winter and summer squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, okra, green beans, and mushrooms.
On Tuesday, the folks that were in Chicago for the holiday packed up early in the morning and got back to the farm around lunch (a drive I heard that was filled with bad traffic and torrential rain). Everyone then helped pack up our orders for market for the week, since we usually split the work between monday and tuesday it required all hands on deck for the rest of the day. Then our star Amy packed up the car and went to drop all our lovely veggies off to be distributed to the people of the world.
On Wednesday, things really began to pick up! We packed our Sukkot kits with our stunning blessing cards made by Acacia and got them off to the post office. In the morning, Acacia headed to the Sheldon food pantry for a few hours to give out some fresh produce. We fixed some drip lines (they are notoriously sensitive), inoculated mushrooms with golden oyster spawn, and gave our tomatoes some TLC (trellising, love, and care). We harvested sweet peppers, radishes, turnips, cabbage, mushrooms, okra, green beans, and shishito peppers! It’s always fun to harvest things that we haven’t yet harvested much of, like turnips and radishes.
On Thursday, we harvested all the regular culprits plus even more cabbage. Some folks had a meeting on agroforestry, which was a general check in about crops, trees, and planning where new agroforestry plantings might go. We also started the process of seed saving for our qishium! This season we are participating for the second time in a project with The Jewish Farmers network that involves growing qishium, an ancient fruit. The Jewish Farmer Network explains, “In the story of Exodus, after the Jews escaped Egypt and were wandering the desert, they grew nostalgic for the fruits they left behind. One of these fruits was qishut, a non-sweet, hairy, oblong cucumber melon. These are true melons, botanically speaking, but they're harvested under ripe when they look and taste like cucumbers.” This process proved to be a little sticky, as we have to open up the qishut (sometimes rotten) and scrape all the seeds out. After all the seeds were out we cleaned the guts off of them, we sorted out the bad seeds, and then laid them out to dry in our shed. The purpose of seed saving qishium is to connect with the fruit of ancestors and honor those histories.
In the afternoon many things were happening all at once—another mushroom inoculation was done by Frances and I whilst others started various Sukkot planning meetings and actually building our Sukkah. Amy and Claire Pryor started prepping and cooking our Chuseok dinner! Chuseok is a Korean harvest holiday originally known as “Hangawi” that celebrates the harvest moon and is spent by visiting ancestral homes and having large dinners with traditional dishes. Our dinner spread was japchae noodles (one of Amy’s favorite dishes growing up), vegan modeumjeon (pan-fried squash blossoms, chicken of the woods mushrooms, and zucchini), braised kabocha squash, tofu lettuce wraps, and oi muchim (Korean cucumber salad). For dessert we had sujeonggwa (ginger cinnamon punch), dried persimmons), and yakgwa (a traditional fried pastry coated in ginger and honey).
On Friday we started with our regular harvest and prepping for the farmers market on Saturday. Claire Pryor and Margalit did a ton of cooking for everything we would eat with some guests on Saturday. Gavi supplemented the meals for the weekend with 4 loaves of challah, and 8 loaves of sourdough bread. We finished building the Sukkah and Martina and I thought up some fun nature themed decorations people could make. Gavi and Acacia focused on planning the Sunday morning welcome circle and morning ritual, and others worked on planning the layout for the event and the different learning sessions we were thinking of hosting during the day.
Friday night was our first meal together in the Sukkah! Martina and I cooked, with huge help from Amy’s partner Saugat who was in town for the holiday. We cooked butternut squash and sweet potato curry soup (this was really all Saugat), sauteed zucchini and kousa squash, some rice, a salad, and an apple and butternut squash mash that was sweet and delicious.
On Saturday, most people woke up in the Sukkah! Sophie and Gavi were off for the farmers market by 6:15am, and spent the morning selling produce and chatting with the Watseka locals. The rest of us had breakfast together with a few guests and then everyone went off to prepare for Sunday. Margalit, Martina, and Claire Pryor pretty much spent the day in the kitchen cooking for dinner that night and lunch for the around 40 people that would be coming tomorrow to celebrate! They absolutely killed it and worked SO HARD to nourish all of us and our guests. For lunch we had quinoa with eggplant and green beans, a salad with beautiful edible flowers, and potato and zucchini kugel. For dinner we had salad and various kinds of lasagna with mushrooms and squash.
On Sunday, we all woke up bright and early and began to prepare and set up for the day. At 10 the event started and we welcomed people as they came. Once people showed up we started the service led by Acacia and Gavi. After the service we led a tour around the farm that concluded in the Sukkah to say the Sukkot prayers and shake our Lulav and Etrog! Lunch was a huge spread, we cooked tomato soup, roasted squash, cucumber salad, beet pesto, and fresh bread made by Gavi, plus SO much food that our guests had brought, our tables were quite literally overflowing with food. After lunch there was a lot of time for chatting and meeting people as well as live music with JR, local musicians, and a special appearance by one of our guests. Lexi led a learning session about native plants that concluded with enjoying the taste and medicinal properties of sassafras and mullen leaf tea and golden rod tea. Sophie and Margalit then led a lively discussion exploring various texts that offered different perspectives on what the Sukkah is and represents. Around 5:00pm, most of our guests departed, but everyone that stuck around went on a sunset hayride through some woods and fields with Johnny, our favorite local farmer (don’t tell the others). It was a perfect rap up to the day. After cleaning for what seemed like forever, we were all beat. We decided to end the weekend by curling up on the couch and watching Dirty Dancing and eating cookies.
We are so happy that so many people were able to come out and celebrate Sukkot with us and share in the fall abundance here at ZA! The weekend was so tiring but so fun and we can’t wait to be eating leftovers from it this whole week!
Until next time,
Claire (Ivey)
