Our backyard garden is hopping, with seeds all over popping. The fruit trees are all budding and blooming, from plums to apricots, apples to walnuts. Pea shoots, potatoes, mustards, kales, lettuces, beans, summer squash, onions, sunflowers, and chards — all making their way up up up toward the sun. Noah is etching out the hillside garden beds by bordering them with old firewood. Bees have been busy tending to all of the annuals flowering. Here are some photos to share!
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Posted by Santa Cruz Local Foods in Uncategorized
Welcome To our Backyard!
Those of you who have been following our emails and blogs over time may remember the photo tours of our large-and-lush backyard urban garden/mini farm in Live Oak last summer. We loved that garden! So much time was spent in the special hide-a-ways between sunflowers and trellised tomatoes and peas, snacking and finding some shade.
This season, we’re planting a large garden once again, but we’re starting fresh. In December, we moved from our Live Oak home into the heart of Santa Cruz. Our new home is an amazing 1 acre parcel tucked away behind some redwoods with an old walnut orchard out back. Between the walnut trees and other fruit trees, Noah is crafting vegetable beds by following the contours of the gently sloping land, which makes for some uniquely-shaped beds. In the past weeks, Noah & housemates of ours have been planting the first round of direct-seeding; Salad greens, peas, kales, collards, broccoli, beans, squash, potatoes, onions, and TONS of flower seeds have been spread all around. These recent rains have come at just the right times to keep our seedlings quenched, and our well-mulched beds have been keeping that rain water cozy against the babies’ roots — not much city-water-watering neccesary just yet. Here are a few photos, and as more sprouts up, we’ll be sure to keep you posted!
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Posted by Santa Cruz Local Foods in Weekly Emails
South County here we come!
We’re re-opening our Freedom location this week, although we still find ourselves without a host in Aptos, where we had previously dropped off orders along the way. If anyone knows of a local business or private residence that would be interested in hosting, send us an email to
info@santacruzlocalfoods.com . We are also considering opening a Seascape location in the next week or two — stay tuned.
Pasture-raised Meat, Eggs, and Dairy return!
We’ve just hooked up with Marin Sun Farms out of Point Reyes. These guys produce / co-produce a wide variety of high-integrity, high-quality pasture-raised animal products, including beef, pork, chicken, duck, lamb, and eggs too! Wondering why we’re heading up to Marin?
We also recently discovered that Saint Benoit, a small family creamery in Petaluma, just began bottling their rich and creamy Jersey cows milk. This milk is processed at a low pasteurization temperature of 145° in small batches to maintain the integrity — and we think it tastes amazing! We also added Strauss Maple Yogurt, Lightly Salted Butter and Half and Half to the dairy category – great!
For variety lovers
With the new foods online we’ve upped the selection in or popular “Variety Box” category. Our Abundance Box and Fruitful Box have been a win-win since we introduced them last winter: Our customers love the surprise of not knowing what’s inside yet knowing it’s always good as well as the simplified shopping experience, and we love putting them together! So, this week , we’re introducing three more boxes to expand beyond produce.
Here’s the low down:
Bigger than a Bread Box: Companion Sourdough Round and Baguette, St. Benoit Milk, Pasture-raised eggs, and a stick of Strauss butter $24
The Udder Box: St Benoit Milk, Strauss Yogurt, one Stick of Struass butter, and two select wedges of artisan cheese. $20
Grassy Pastures Box: Ground Beef, Ground Pork, 1 of either (Beef Stew Meat, Ground Lamb or Sausage) and 1 (cut of Pork or Beef or Bacon) $35
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Posted by Santa Cruz Local Foods in Weekly Emails
This week, we’re welcoming Marin Sun Farms to the line up of SCLF producers. MSF’s main operation is located in Point Reyes, and they also work with sister farms in the Marin food shed to round out their variety when need be. We have been working with many other local ranches for Santa Cruz and San Benito counties over the past years, so you may be wondering — why source food from the North Bay?
The answer is complex. We know and love our local producers, but for many reasons they are currently unable to supply us with their amazing animal products. One of the main challenges has to do with the requirements a small producer has to follow in order to sell their meat through a retailer like us. The animals cannot be processed and packaged at the farm or a local butcher shop, but rather, they have to be processed at a USDA approved facility. These are few and far between, and there are none located within Santa Cruz or San Benito counties. Producers we have worked with have found themselves traveling 200 miles or more to reach one of these facilities, only to find that the animals they took so much care to raise have been processed differently from how they had specified or have been processed in ways that unnecessarily waste a portion of the animal that they would prefer to use or sell. Poultry producers we work with such as Hain Ranch in Tres Pinos or Fogline farm in Soquel rarely have a sufficient quantity of birds to sell through us, although we are hoping Fogline will for most of this coming season. The same goes for the beloved orange-yolked pasture-raised eggs — can’t seem to find a steady supply from the more-local producers we know at this time. Any of this could be changing soon, but in the meantime…
Marin Sun Farms offers a great option for us as a supplier of high-quality pasture-raised meat and eggs. They are still SCLF Local within our 100 mile radius, and they have their own USDA butchering facility in San Francisco, where they can cut and package the animals to fit our needs. And we’re really happy to be able to round our high-quality whole foods selection with meat and eggs once more!
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Posted by Santa Cruz Local Foods in Uncategorized
New Raw Cow’s Milk Cheese
We’re excited to bring two new cheeses to market this week. Rebecca of Garden Variety Cheese has been crafting award-winning artisan farmstead cheeses from her farm’s sheep herd since 2009 — some of the best cheese we’ve ever tasted! So we were excited to hear the other day that she is launching a line of raw cows milk cheese under a new label: Royal Oaks Artisan Cheese. Rebecca amazes us once more with the rich flavors of these aged cheeses, which are created with milk from two of our other favorite dairies in the area: Claravale Farm and Schoch Dairy. Damselfly, made from Schoch’s milk, imparts the flavor of its wine washed rind, with a creamy texture and a somewhat nutty flavor. Monarch, made from Claravale milk, is imbibed with the richness of brews from Santa Cruz Mountain Brewery, and offers a tangy counterpart to Damselfly’s smoothness.
Escarole is back, and you need to try it!
This is one of our favorite winter greens to saute. It melts down into the most tender of the winter greens, with a slight bitterness that turns sweet when cooked. We’ve been winging it when cooking at home, but we found this recipe below that is similar to some of our recent creations. We hope it inspires you to try something new this week!
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Escarole with Eggs and Cous Cous
An excellent way to enjoy this winter green
Ingredients:
2 large heads of escarole,
1 cup pearl couscous or fregola sarda*
About 5 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil
2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
1/2 cup reduced-sodium chicken broth
4 large chicken or duck* eggs
View the Whole Recipe. |
That’s right folks! When you’re experiencing that mid-week / weekend kefir craving and you already drank your stash, head down to River Cafe for an ice cold sparkling pint of our favorite probiotic beverage, complete with a frothy head. They will be serving our Raspberry flavor later this week. And while you are there, enjoy some of their amazing cuisine featuring local, organic produce!
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Posted by Santa Cruz Local Foods in Weekly Emails
Spring Time? The Trees think so..
For those of you who don’t know us personally, we just moved into an amazing old farm house (built in 1893) in the upper-ocean neighborhood, complete with a sloping acre hillside already planted with a great array of fruit trees. Right now it seems like everything is in bloom out there. They are bursting with all of our favorite spring time pastel colors — pinks and purples, and yellows oh my. This, combined with the stunningly warm weather, really shifts my attention to spring plantings. We’re starting to gear up for this season, and I am already planting out kales, chards, salad greens, sugar snap peas, onion sets, potatoes, lettuces in the fields and some tomatoes and peppers in the green house… definitely something to look forward to. At our homestead farm, we pay close attention to each plant — something the big guys don’t necessarily have the time to do. This makes for extraordinarily healthy and resilient plants, meaning more flavor and nutrition for all of us. We’ll be posting pics soon, so keep an eye out on our blog.
SCLF’s favorite Raw Cow Milk Cheese!
For those of you who haven’t tried
Schoch Dairy’s Monterey County Jack (The only Jack made in Monterey County!) or the
Junipero (Swiss style) raw cow milk cheeses, now is the time. We just picked us the wheels from Beau and Ty, and we’re cutting them up fresh for you! We love to make quesadillas with the Jack and grilled cheese sandwiches with the Junipero, but we also enjoy just cutting off hunks and devouring them on their own.
That’s right folks! When you’re experiencing that mid-week / weekend kefir craving and you already drank your stash, head down to
River Cafe for an ice cold sparkling pint of our favorite probiotic beverage, complete with a frothy head. They are currently serving our
Citrus Spritz flavor. And while you are there, enjoy some of their amazing cuisine featuring local, organic produce!
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Posted by Santa Cruz Local Foods in Weekly Emails
Perhaps few things have a greater force on keeping Santa Cruz weird than the Pacific Ocean. We often feel we’re blessed to have always unpredictable weather, especially when it means:
(more…)
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Posted by Santa Cruz Local Foods in Weekly Emails
Hey folks just want to let you know we are closed for ordering until 12/26. Seeya in the new year. If you need to contact us for any reason drop a line to info@santacruzlocalfoods.com. Until then happy holidays and happy new year.
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Posted by Santa Cruz Local Foods in Uncategorized
Our garden is growing! Our rototiller has been out of commission for a couple of months, so all of this work has been by hand! So much digging, but check out the rewards!
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Posted by Santa Cruz Local Foods in Uncategorized
We just returned from a brief trip south to Ojai, where we visited farmer friends and slept beneath the stars of our friend’s mulberry orchard. There, we enjoyed some of the most local food we had access to: mulberries of course! We agreed that Santa Cruz could use some more mulberries, and we’ve become quite inspired to plant our own mulberry orchard some day, when we acquire a space to do so!
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Posted by Santa Cruz Local Foods in Uncategorized
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