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PHONE: 619.662.1780
CSA Inquiries, please email rodrigo@suziesfarm.com
Local Chefs, please email robin@suziesfarm.com
For Farmer's Market Info, please email britta@suziesfarm.com
ADDRESS & DIRECTIONS:
For scheduled farm tours, our Kiki Town address is:
1856 Saturn Boulevard, San Diego CA 92154
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Restaurants & Chefs
Did you know Suzie’s Farm delivers in San Diego five days a week? Not only that, several acres of our farm in San Diego’s Border State Park is dedicated to custom growing for the specific needs (and imagination) of our local chefs. Can you say boutique and convenience all in one breath? You don’t have to. Just say Suzie’s Farm. Visit our Chef's Page to view our delivery schedule and learn more about our partnership with restaurants.
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Most recent entries
- We’re Jammin’
- Box Contents September 7-12
- September Newsletter
- Winter Squash with Caramelized Onions
- Box Contents, August 31-September 5
- Eggplant Salad with Dill and Garlic
- moon gardening…
- Box Contents, August
- Have your Way With Fava Beans
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- Upheaval
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Robin and Lucila and one of their beautiful, loyal dogs Calamity (Kiki for short)
Thank you so much for your vision for Suzie’s Farm, for your love of gardening, your love of community, for all the hard work that you do and all the love you show to each person you come in contact with. We love you and we are blessed to be apart of Suzie’s!
—-Farm Crew 2010
Here are the box contents for the week - plus/minus. You know how it goes. We think it’s going to be good, and then sometimes there isn’t enough!
Onion Sprouts
Strawberry 3-pack - Incredibly enough there are still strawberries left after the picking party!
Sorrel
Spinach
Arugula
Lettuce
Cucumbers or Peas
Swiss Chard
Summer Squash
Basil - If this doesn’t say summer, I don’t know what does!
Onions or Leeks
Here is a cool spread-out picture of what one of our typical CSA box contents actually looks like, so you can get a better visual for what this much food actually looks like. (One of our fans posted this picture without the date, but I’m assuming it was during the summer/fall transition since there are peppers AND squash)
It’s a lgood amount of food, and it’s delicious, not only because it’s organic but because its real, it’s local, and its been grown and harvested and washed and delivered by people who live and work here in San Diego. Your neighbors, maybe your friends. Our neighbors and definitely our friends.
Sometimes it seems less full, and sometimes it’s definitely more full, but you’re always getting between 8-15 items. We often select certain items specifically for our CSA members, crops that we might not even send out to our farmers’ markets.
Try us out. If you love it, we’re happy that we can grow food for you. If you don’t love it, we won’t be hurt and we won’t hold it against you, because we still love to grow food and there are a few other good farms and places in San Diego where you can find healthy, delicious produce.
Thanks for the support, and all our best wishes to you as the seasons change!
-Suzie’s Farm Family
We have had the pleasure of working with many chefs over the past six months.
The first chef I approached was Christian Graves from JSix. I was terrified. He is part of the Cooks Confab - a group of some of the most prominent, innovative and influencial chefs here in San Diego. If you look at their bios they range from formidable to magnificent. At the time I approached Christian, we didn’t have any chef partners, we had not received responses from the various wholesalers we had tried to connect with, and our CSA membership was quite small. We were planting for potential customers. We were desperate for business. We knew we were producing quality product and knew that we had lots of items that not a lot of our farmer friends had, but how to get our name, our reputation and our food out there?
So I emailed Christian and told him who we were - a 40-acre certified organic farm located south of Imperial Beach and run by me and my husband. His response was enthusiastic and totally approachable. We set an appointment for me to show him a sample box.
The day came and I entered the kitchen, excited but with great trepidation. This was make or break it time. If he thought the stuff was lousy, then Robin and I were living in a fantasy. We didn’t have quality products. We were going to have to do something else. Maybe Shaklee for him and Avon for me.
The kitchen was busy - they always are. Someone was making bread, a couple of guys were washing and prepping vegetables, waiters swooped in and out. I worked in restaurants for 6 years both in front and in back of the house. There is so much energy in the back of the house, it can belie the calm professional experience that the front of the house cultivates.
And there was Christian, busy, gracious, impressed and genuinely glad to meet me. He thought the product was beautiful AND delicious and wanted to order. We were set! Our first chef partner! Yay!
Fast Forward 8 months, we’ve got a few more CSA customers, a few more Farmer’s Markets and a few more chef partners. We still need business to meet our payroll, so I continue to visit restaurants, presenting them with sample boxes, telling them the story behind the farm and our values, letting the produce speak for itself. Most of the chefs I have the grace to meet are like Christian, gracious, impressed and genuinely glad to meet me. But there are a few who think that They Are Somebody.
These Somebody chefs don’t look me in the eye as they suspiciously peer at the sample box from a distance. Or if they do look me in the eye, they are defiant; arms crossed against their chest, demanding I defend the farm, refusing to try the product in my presence.
The difficulty with these Somebody chefs is that they believe their own press. Their own hype. They believe that They Are Somebody. And if They Are Somebody, it seems that they believe that You Are Nobody.
And it is true. They Are Somebody. What they don’t understand is that I am Somebody too. And So Are You. We are all Somebodys.
We are all important in our own way. We are all special. We all do something amazing in a way that no one else has done before. We all have value. We all offer meaning to this Life.
Of course this is not a “chef” thing. This is a “people” thing. This is a “being alive” thing.
When I first encountered this it would make me upset. I felt devalued and inadequate and worse of all, dismissed.
It’s a hard thing to put yourself out there. Anyone who knows me knows that when I am revealing myself I basically cut myself open and lay it all out there. I don’t know how else to be. I’m completely transparent. I am conspicuous. I am big as life. I would make a terrible politician.
So when I’ve basically told a chef (if I’ve gotten a chance to get this far) about naming the farm after our dog, who is now dead and it’s a family business that my husband has dedicated his life to since he was 17, and that this business is something that we committed to 8 months after getting married and that we wanted to create a life for our family that now includes our 2 3-year-old daughters and that we want nothing more than to feed the people in our San Diego community and the chef is basically, rude, it can be hard to shake.
I realize now, that it has little or nothing to do with me and everything to do with that Somebody. I can only continue to be myself; joyful, sensitive and inconsistent. Robin will continue to be himself; dependable, caring and genuine. We will continue to do live our dream with passion and honor, trying to improve ourselves and our product for all to enjoy. And we’ll take anyone who wants to go along for our ride. Including the Somebodys.
Now I know, even though their actions and words hurt, what the real deal is. The real deal is this: these are our products. You know me. I’ll shake your hand. I’ll give you a hug and a smile and my ear. You know our integrity. We aren’t hiding anything. You can talk to us anytime. You can visit the farm. You know our values. Our dreams. Our goals. You can call me out, right or wrong, and I’ll take it and try to make it better. I’m not perfect, but I’m doing my best. I like you. I want to help you. I think what you are doing is cool. Maybe you think what we are doing is cool. Let’s do something cool together and show it to some other cool people.
Now, off to meet more chefs!
Yesterday, Robin came into the office with a 20 pound box of Stupice tomatoes and a pocketful of Padron peppers.
We’ve known that the Stupice were coming soon. For two weeks we had observed the hard green fruit and been waiting for it to turn red. That day has finally come.
We checked the first box. I see some green ones in there. I see some red cracked ones. Going to have to have a chat with our harvest team about those. That’s a quality issue.
Funny though. The green ones inspired some fried tomatoes. And the cracked red ones were magnificent with a shake of salt and a grind of pepper. Determining quality is curious. All of us in the office got jam funky over those red cracked tomatoes. Biting into them like apples, juice running down our chins, slurping out the seeds. Good enough to eat, but not good enough to sell. Says who?
Well, the customer says sometimes. And sometimes it’s the warehouse or produce manager. But ultimately, I feel like if you give the food a chance - especially the ugly or bad looking food - you’ll find that it is a contender.
Case in point, this Sunday Robin went grocery shopping as he does every Sunday (Thanks Honey!). Usually he goes to Hillcrest Farmer’s Market and purchases most of our produce, eggs, olive oil, bread and the occasional chicken from our Fellow Farmer Friends. Then he heads to Henry’s for the fill-in items. He didn’t have a lot of time this Sunday because he had to run to the farm to pay the tractor mechanic, so he only went to Henry’s. I asked for Grapefruits and Oranges, things he would normally get from Barry Korbal at Hillcrest.
Looks-wise, the citrus was perfect. Cindy Crawford perfect. And likely cheaper than Barry Korbal’s citrus. Robin was there, the citrus that I wanted was there, transaction complete.
I wanted to eat a grapefruit for breakfast yesterday and guess what? It was terrible - dry and flavorless. I read the little label pasted on the rind - it says product of USA. But where? By whom?
Later Sunday afternoon, we went to a wedding. Robin always worries that there won’t be anything for me to eat, but invariably there is a crudite plate and fresh fruit platter and I manage knowing that a wedding meal is simply a mini-course to sustain me, not a feast to savor. The essential point of the wedding being the community support for the couple. Still a celebration of such magnitude must include a meal, as all celebrations do.
On the omnivore menu - salmon, cheese ravioli and roast beef. He followed behind me, ladling the same things on his plate - beets, steamed veggies, grapes, artichoke hearts. When we got to the protein section of the buffet, he passed on everything but the ravioli. This surprised me as Robin has never met a protein product he hasn’t liked. I asked why he skipped that food. He replied that the food just wasn’t that good. It all looked fine - the melon slices were symmetrical and even-toned. The salads weren’t wilted - although they were accompanied by a raspberry vinaigrette. Lemon garlic potatoes right out of a freezer bag. I asked for plain bread and the inexperienced server told me it didn’t come that way. It wasn’t just prepared, it was pre-prepared.
Robin worried that he was getting snobby. Or judgemental. Or sanctimonious and smug. Were we “foodies” in the worse sense of the definition?
I wonder about that.
Granted, most wedding food tends to be dreadful. Even some of the richy-richest weddings I’ve attended have had mediocre food. So I wonder if it is even possible to do good wedding food. But that’s a separate blog post.
Perhaps with the sudden exposure to good food, we can finally taste inferior food. Certainly we are partial to our own product. We grow food with care and specificity. We are surrounded by chefs who do wonders with our food and by people who are excited for our next Big Thing.
Does the palate become more refined with age? Do we refuse to spend our hard earned dollars on paltry products? Can you taste your food’s soul? Can you feel it nourishing yours?
I’m not saying that the guy at Pizza Hut doesn’t care about me, or the pizza he is crafting, but I believe the guys at Blind Lady Ale House do . And I believe I can taste the difference.
Which gets us back to quality. Robin and I train our teams to determine the quality. Some members of the team get it, some don’t and we have to retrain them. Robin and I educate our customers about our product. It doesn’t look perfect sometimes and we explain why, without making excuses. We are not the Emperor in his new clothes; when our product is inferior we take the note and look for a solution. Constantly refining and remembering that every person has their own definition of quality. Most people care about the quality of the vegetables. More times people seem to care about the quality of the work.
This Saturday, May 22 come on down to Kiki Town (1856 Saturn Boulevard, 92154) to pick your own strawberries!
Leave your car on Saturn Boulevard and take a stroll past our summer production toward the west end of the property. There you will find Ellie and Karina waiting for you. Ellie will explain how to properly pick a strawberry so you don’t damage the plant. Karina will have a small farm stand set up where you will weigh and pay for your strawberries ($2.50 per pound). A generous sampling of our late spring/early summer crops will also be available for purchase.
Strawberry picking will go down between 9-12ish. Or whenever the wind starts to pick up. But certainly no later than 1.
Just the facts:
This Saturday, May 22, 2010
9am-12:00ish
Kiki Town - 1856 Saturn Boulevard, 92154
Leave your car on the street and head west onto the property toward the canopies
You Pick Strawberries - $2.50 per pound.
Kids - Yes, please!
Dogs - No, thank you.
Get there early before the best berries are gone!
For more details or questions contact (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Hope to see you there!
What a good lookin’ box of grub! This is what Robin has in mind for next week’s CSA, just to give you a sneak peek and a head’s up about all the delicious things coming your way.
Did we tell you that we’ve started to see the first fruits of our Early Girl and Stupice tomatoes? Not to mention a TON of cucumbers exploding out of their quiet, shaded vines, and already hundreds of delicious, robust summer squash growing un-proportionally and unhindered in our fields.
Check it out- we’re out of potatoes already, and as the week goes other items from the list may change, but this is the projected forecast:
Onion Sprouts (2oz box)
Strawberries (3-pack)
Chard
Spinach
Arugula
Fennel
Broccoli (2 lbs)
Beans (2 lbs)
Summer Squash (yellow floridor, large zucchini, green eight ball)
Mint
Green Cabbage
I had a great question in my in-box today.
A CSA shareholder was asking why the boxes felt “lighter” than usual. She gets a bi-weekly box and it used to last her the entire two weeks. Now she’s finding that it only lasts about a week. What gives?
As you may or may not know, a CSA box typically contains between 8-15 items per week and costs you $25.
Previous to signing up people will ask us what a box weighs, or what comes in the box. The answer can come off as tricky, since we don’t base our boxes on a standard weight. Understandably they want to know what they are getting for their $25.
So, here is how you get what you get in your box.
In addition to insuring that you get a good variety of products in your box over a 12-week (and hopefully longer) subscription, meaning that we try not to double or triple up on things too often, we have to figure out a fair box value. Fair to our shareholder and fair to us as your Family Farmer.
Because you are conceding the “I want to pick it myself” choice to us, we give you a 20% discount on the items as they would normally be priced at the Farmers Market. So your box value is actually closer to $32 +/-.
You receive what the farm has in abundance and what the farm can produce seasonally. In my note to the shareholders this month I commented on the fact that we are between seasons right now. So while you are getting a respite from the greens (and greens and greens) you received all winter, you have not yet received all of the summer goodies. At the time of the letter, we had not yet harvested any tomatoes or cucumbers or beans, but we could see that they were this close to being ready. In spite of this, this week’s CSA box contains 11 items, still well within our self-imposed constraints.
When the farm is producing things in abundance, CSA shareholders also receive them in abundance. Remember all of those greens? Greens at the market usually run about $2 per bunch. So if the discounted value of greens is $1.60 per bunch AND the farm is producing a grip of them that translates to a LOT of greens for our shareholders. The thing about greens though, is that the plant holds well, so you can also harvest the plants for a sustained period of time without any effect on production. Which means you can harvest gradually and languidly. The plant isn’t going anywhere. It’s probably not going to bolt with the good weather. The plant is in season which means it is strong and can defend itself against pests. And greens are pretty indestructable; they hold up well against inclement weather and trips to the Farmers Markets.
Now that summer is coming up the farm will produce a grip of tomatoes, although I’m not sure that anyone will complain. The difference is that fruiting plants must be harvested immediately when they are ripe or close to ripe. The harvesting is continuous and frantic. Every dropped tomato or eggplant is real-time cash both in labor and in overhead. Fruiting vegetables tend to be more delicate, more susceptable to pestilence, and need to be consumed shortly after they are picked. Forget this buy-my-veggies-for-the-week mentality. If it’s ripe, it’s ready! Typically if the tomatoes don’t sell at the Farmers Market that’s the end of the road for them. We’ve planted almost all heirloom varieties and they are grown for taste not travel.
At the beginning of the season, when Suzie’s may be among the first to have field tomatoes (and cucumbers and haricot vert and summer squash) we can charge a higher price for them because the demand is high (no more greens, PLEASE) and the supply is low. Later the price of tomatoes will flucuate and eventually drop because every farmer will have the same summer crops.
Supply and demand, right?
Right now the boxes contain what we consider to be two big ticket items; 3-pack strawberries and potatoes. We have chosen for you, based on feed back we have received, to put 3-packs of strawberries and potatoes in our boxes instead of, in the case of our potatoes, selling them to our chef partners. Also at our shareholders’ requests, we are including Microgreens, which have a higher value. These things add up and change the box dynamics and weight.
Later this season the boxes will also be “heavier” literally, because they will contain more fruits and less greens. And when I say fruit here, I mean the vegetables that are technically fruits like tomatoes, cucumbers, squash and eggplant. Greens weigh less than zucchini. So not only will you begin to receive a greater variety of items, you will also received a higher volume of each item.
Come November, we cycle back the other way. You’ll be getting lots of things like winter squash and pumpkins (remember those) and you’ll start to get your early winter dose of greens. Yay! Some of you may remember our greenhouse tomatoes and our late field bell peppers in December.
So that’s basically how you get what you get in your box.
It’s really interesting as a shareholder, especially if you’ve been with us for a while, to cycle through an entire year. Then you get an inkling of what is growing when and how. And you start to sense what “between seasons” means or what abundance means. Luckily we are blessed with a fantastic growing season. We are able to supply our community 52 weeks of the year. Some farms’ CSAs only have a 14-week subscription for the entire year! Can you imagine?
But that’s for another blog post.
Of the 10 different varieties of cucumbers we planted, we’ve already harvested some delicious, and may we say BEAUTIFUL, samplings of Adam, Miniature White, Poona Kheera, Sabre, Parisian, and Akito.
I’m dreaming of thin slices drizzled with honey, pepper, minced coconut flakes and soaked lentils, or a cool cucumber & mint infused green tea to make the best ending to a warm afternoon. I’m thinking future spicy pickles, or middle eastern fresh summer salads with tomatoes, cucumber chunks, sesame seeds, olive oil & lemony balsamic vinegar…just to make your heart throb and your cheeks salivate.
hope you get a chance to stop by the markets soon or come to our next farm tour or begin a CSA membership. we wouldn’t want you to miss out on all this goodness!
Micro Rainbow Mix
Strawberry-3 pack
Spring Mix with Snap Dragons
Beets
Carrot
Fennel
Potato
Broccoli
Summer Squash
Chive Bunch
Green Cabbage
Don’t forget that this Saturday is our farm tour day!
The 1030 tour has filled up, but there are still spots available for the 9am and 12noon tour. Cost is $10 per person.
Please email me at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or call the office at 619-662-1780 to reserve your spot!
At the old Suzie’s Farm propety - or should I say the original Suzie’s Farm - we had bunnies. Anyone who was reading along last year at this time knows thta I was only working about three days a week about six hours total.Tthe girls were cared for very graciously by friends, while I worked.
We didn’t have any customers. Not one. We were growing summer squash, salad greens, herbs and arugula in greenhouses and a few rows of peas and beets are what passed for our outside row crops. Robin did all of the harvesting by himself while working the Sun Grown business, and Ellie worked the same amount of hours a week planting, while I did? I can’t even remember how I filled those six hours a week. Ordering and organizing seed. Trialing. Thinking about our impending squash harvest and wondering to whom we were going to sell things.
At this point last year I think we had started a small trial CSA box. we had four pick up spots, and 55 Trial CSA customers. What we had in spades was belief. I was amazed by what we were growing and I knew, I believed like I believe in love or the moon, that we could do this. That people believed in us and that we could serve our community and prosper.
Also, we had bunnies.
EVERYTHING we put in the ground was eaten by the bunnies. We knew we needed a fence but didn’t have time, money or labor to build one. So they ate. And ate. Devoured actually is what they did. And we stood by, despondant over the wreckage. Knowing we could do more. Frustrated at our failure.
The first thing we did at Kiki Town when we moved over last July, was build a silt fence. Basically a fence made of tomato stake posts and landscape fabric. We weren’t going to let the bunnies eat an all-you-can-eat buffet of beans and broccoli. Heck no. It seemed to keep them in check. The fact that it was July and mostly past bunny season helped.
Now, we are tilling in the Winter Fields. Robin was out there today. Finally. Our landlord has hassled us to take care of it. The old saying is 1 year of weeds, 7 years of seeds. As much as we tell ourselves that we will return all that organic matter to the soil and rebuild the structure, all he sees is his family land going under the ruin of amateurs.
Ergo the tilling. Finally.
When Robin came home, tan from the soil kicked up by the tractor, the first thing he said was, “We got rabbits out there. A lot of them.”
All of those abandoned rows of collards, beets, fennel, and greens are Man High. Prime cover from the hawks, owls and coyotes that case the field. That smorgasborg of delicatable goodies to feed rabbit families will be gone by Wednesday.
Robin tractoring revealed hundreds of wascaly wabbits running for new cover. Robin is about to mow and recover 14 acres of choice bunny real estate.
The Recession is hitting everyone hard. Four-legged mammals included.
Exposed as they will be, I wonder where they will head.
We are bordered in the North and West by streets, and on the South by a tributary of the Tijuana River. Silt fence runs the South and West side, which they can easily burrow under. We’ve already got about 30 rows of beans in the ground, so at least that is safe. But there really isn’t anywhere for them to go.
I suppose it’s not really my problem, considering the hassle they’ve given me in the past. I often cheered for the hawks to scoop them up for lunch. I dreamed of staking posts 3 stories high upon which hawks would build their nests; a close threat to the bunnies. Now I’m hoping the bunnies might find a new home and keep on. I’ve forgotten that Nature doesn’t really work like that. If they are going to live, they will. The hawks, coyotes and owls will devour the appropriate amount of rabbits. A few will get smeared into the ground by our ATV-ridinig neighbors at the Border Patrol station. And the rest will cycle through doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing; Keeping the vegetation in check.
I drove by one today. He shamelessly stood his ground in the road. The gall!
Maybe it’s a good thing that the bunnies are moving on. Greener pastures, I say. As long as they stay away from the beans.
Here we go, y’all! You are getting potatoes this week! Our first harvest!
And that’s it.
Just kidding.
There are a few other interesting things in this week’s box - your first, but certainly not last, round of early summer squash. They are some real beauties! We’ve got Starship - a green patty pan, Romanesco is the variegated long zucchini, Dark Star is a traditional zucchini, Sunburst is a yellow patty pan, Floridor is a yellow round squash and 8-ball is a green round squash!
Here’s this week’s list.
Potatoes
Dill
Red Romaine Lettuce
Strawberries
Broccoli
Summer Squash Variety
Micro Basil
White Icicle Radishes
Chard
Wild Arugula
“May” we be your CSA?
You know we’ve planted 13,500 tomato plants, and 29 rows of summer squash and 19 each of cucumber and eggplant, not to mention the melons and red and green okra. So what are we going to do with all that produce once it starts to come up? Have a CSA Membership Drive, of course!
With the fields buzzing and brimming with new plantings, we are going to have an abundance of produce. This is specifically what the CSA is for…to pass our harvest on to our shareholders. So we’d like to ask during this month of May, “May” we be your farm? We hope you think your CSA box is the best in town. If you do, chat us up!
What’s in it for them? Farm fresh produce! Convenient Pick-up! Host sites around the county! Unique boutique items they can’t get from other farms! No Joiner’s Fee in May!
What’s in it for you? Either a Suzie’s Farm canvas bag (perfect for picking up your produce) or a jar of Suzie’s Farm strawberry jam! Plus the profound satisfaction that comes when you support local agriculture and your family farm. You can’t put a price tag on that!
Make sure they mention your name when they join so you can get your referral credit!
Crucial points to remember; No Joiner’s Fee and Strawberry Jam.