Fall 2020

ThinGs we've been meaning to share

It has been far too long since the last newsletter. We’re still here. We miss you.

It has been hard to write for all the reasons that progress on any of our to-do lists has been tough this year - the (a)rhythms of work and family over these last many months of COVID. 

But it has also been hard to write about blossoms and badgers, or to celebrate or fret about the coming crop (it looks smallish), when there are many other important things to be said and nothing to say that feels right and sufficient. There has been lots to fear this year: fires, losing your home because of a lost job or the country of your birth or your parents’ birth, fear of violence, fear of getting sick or making someone else sick. And so, to keep things in perspective, the fear of writing isn’t such a big problem. 

To put it plainly, Black lives matter to us at Flatlands. Black bodies, Black ideas, Black visions for the future, and those of Indigenous people and people of color. We are certainly late to writing this down, and it’s not clear enough in how we talk about our farm and food, but it’s who we are, what we care about, and it’s part of why we started farming. 

Agriculture in the US was one of the initial pretexts for enslavement and dispossession, and the legacy carries on through the usurpation and degradation of land, the exploitation and marginalization of Black and Brown people, nationally and globally. Yet, humans need food, and so we work to be a small part of the food system that does not extract data, exploit labor, concentrate power, or imperil ecological resilience. We work to be part of communities that advocate for change and seek new voices. We hope, at the very least, to be no more racist than the systems in which we participate. We strive for the farm to be a contribution to a just and environmentally sustainable world. We want to get people closer to the realities of food production and the influence that land and human labor has on the tastes and textures of life. And yet, systems of economic inequality and privilege still benefit our farm and our family.

What does it mean to do more? These are a few of the folks in ag that we learn from: 

• Soulfire Farm

• The Secret Ingredient podcast

• Chris Newman & Sylvanaqua Farms

• TrueLove Seeds - @seedkeeping

• Kristyn Leach - @namu_farm

• Sogorea Te

• Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation

• https://cagj.org/anti-racism-resources/

There are many more. We turn to some of the people and organizations above for ways to rethink and re-energize our work at Flatlands and day-to-day life. We join them where possible. And in the meantime, we also continue with business as usual - heads down and one foot in front of the other (a sustaining flaw of humans). And in that vein, more of the usual newsletter is below.

On the Farm

What can and should we say about the rest of life on the farm? We report that olives are still growing and animals scamper through the grove - check out the American Badger den we stumbled across near the farm’s riparian corridor. Trees are pulling water from the earth, converting sugars, and storing energy in oils - processes truly remarkable and blissfully mundane. A run of hot weather in August (then September, then October) should have done away with any lingering fruit fly. That same run also fueled massive wildfires up and down the west coast. The LNU Fire burned 350,000+ acres in the hills just west of the farm and came within 10 miles or so. Though friends, neighbors and coworkers have been impacted directly by these fires, the farm has been fine, and besides some smoky workdays - and fewer days outside at the farm for Tanager and Cypress - we’ve been fine as well.

The crop is looking fairly light this year - a symptom of cyclical fluctuation that seems to heighten as trees get older. We’ll be piloting a new harvesting rake and a few other tweaks as we jump into harvest and milling of Leccino olives for our Olio Nuovo.

Dotted red line is LNU fire boundary; dark green dot shows where the farm is.

A badger burrow near the creek. The first we've seen.

OILS

We know many of you are wondering about club renewals. We'll send out more information in a few short weeks - don't worry, you won't miss the next distro (mid-Dec). We’re working to set up a new club management system that will hopefully make all of our lives easier- though you can subscribe/renew at any time.

Since we’ve haven’t written for a long while, below are a few highlights of oils that have been distributed through the club this year. We’re at the end of our 2020 inventory, but still have limited quantities of Harvest Blend, La Volta and Mission Yuzu. If you need some (via mail order or pickup in oakland), email us or order directly from the website. 

• La Volta Blend: This exciting blend features our first official harvest of Coratina and Aglandau. Planted in 2015 (when we were younger, childless and much less tired), these trees are now large enough to generate a harvest worth milling. Coratina, a variety from Puglia - the heel of the Italian boot - is known for its very high polyphenols and corresponding punch. It’s a powerhouse of an oil and one of the favorite varieties in Italy. Aglandau, a French variety, is fruity and aromatic. We have blended these two with Leccino, which has a more moderate bitterness and less pungency, yielding an oil with an early spiciness, medium to high bitterness and pungency, plus notes of green almond, hay and a subtle undertone of clay. We call this blend La Volta, marking a turn toward the energy of the new planting and varietals, not to mention the need for a planetary “shift”.

• Harvest Blend: Standing in contrast to La Volta is this year’s Harvest Blend. With 30% Moraiolo and 70% Frantoio, this is a much softer, rounder oil. Cut grass, green tea, unripe fig - these are elements on the nose. Low bitterness and just a hint of pepper in the finish. This oil is fabulous poured over humus with a sprinkle of coarse sea salt and paprika - a delightful way to dress up this wonderful dip.

• Mission Yuzu: This is a special oil that we produce in very limited quantities. The fruit has a fanatical following and is often featured in Korean and Japanese cuisine, as well as cosmetics and aromatherapy. Typically utilized for their zest or the fragrant oils in their skin, Yuzu are intensely aromatic. Milled together with our Mission olives, it yields oil that is one of a kind. Unlike an infused oil, milling and pressing Yuzu directly with the olives make for more nuanced flavor. This year we find a particularly floral profile, with notes of peony and rose; somewhat less fruity and herbal than previous years. The Mission brings a distinct doug fir aroma, not unlike a freshly cut christmas tree.

In the Kitchen

Dinner. We have tried to bring some new inspiration to our kitchen with 6 Seasons, a cookbook we heard about from members Erin (Portland) and Emily & Chaim (Oakland). Recipes frequently call for “a glug” of good olive oil and encourage deviations from the script to suit your taste, pantry or fresh vegetable aisle.

Dessert. Courtesy of CA member Carrie comes a recommendation for “Black Mission Fig and Olive Oil Cake.” From Lei Shishak’s Farm-to-Table Desserts. I’m able to access the recipe here, but email us if you can’t get to it.

Snack. EVOO on yogurt. This recipe comes from KyKy, 4 year old son of California members and friends, Jade & Derrick. KyKy recommends “the best drinkable” oil mixed into yogurt -- a “green grassy hopper” oil.  

Freezer.  A bit of normalcy late this summer as we finally got to tomatoes. Brushed with olive oil; dusted with salt; 250-ish degree oven for long enough to condense flavor but keep a pocket of pulpy goodness.

For now, be well, wherever you are and whatever you are thinking about. Let us know what’s on your mind. Share inspirations and concerns with us. We’ll be thinking of you as we look at the trees, rakes in hand, nets at our feet to catch and gather. We’ll be thinking of you as we think, listen, and go about the slow work to change how we do this work, how we raise our kids, how we go about life.

- Susan, Colin, Cypress, and Tanager

The Flatlands crew: playing in the grove and looking for fish in the creek.

Fall 2019

On the Farm

The days are still warm but we’ve had several welcome rains to wash the dust off and freshen up. Looking ahead to harvest, we are cleaning out tanks, repairing nets and shining up our tractors. At Flatlands, we mill our olives on-site, immediately after harvest, to ensure the freshest possible oil made from the highest quality olives; this means olives without damage from transportation, which can result in heat build-up and even fermentation. This year, we will be testing out a new centrifuge. After the olives have been crushed and malaxed (amazing word describing the gentle turning of the paste to facilitate oil release), the paste is pumped into a centrifuge which separates the oil from the water and olive waste. Our former centrifuge was damaged last year and the newer one has slightly higher capacity - spinning at around 5,000 rpm! We’ve got our fingers crossed it’s going to run like a dream and improve the efficiency of our small operation.

(left) Valves and other fittings for our stainless steel tanks, clean and ready for new oil. (right) We were only half kidding about shining up our tractors. Who doesn't love a shiny tractor?

Olive This, Olive That

Despite 100 degree days last week, it feels like fall and the grove looks great. After taking a year off, the trees have a heavy crop, which can mean late ripening. Unlike many fruit trees, olives have a long harvest window, allowing us some flexibility. A mix of green and dark fruit, harvested at a couple different points in the season make for a balanced oil.

Our Oils

In addition to the varieties that make up our core oils (Frantoio, Leccino, Taggiasca and Moraiolo), this year we will be harvesting two newly planted varieties - Aglandau, of French origin, and Coratina, from Italy. The trees are still small, planted in 2016, but have a nice crop. We should have a small and delicious batch to share with our club members.

As a reminder, Flatlands markets its oils primarily by way of an Olive Oil Club. Subscribe now and you will receive a year’s worth of fantastic and unique oils in four annual distributions. Visit our website to learn more and contact us with any questions. Refer a new member and receive a bonus bottle! The next distribution will be in early December, featuring Olio Nuovo.

For those who don’t live near a distribution site, Flatlands now offers Club Memberships by mail.

(left) Cypress, our official olive ripeness tester. We keep reminding him they don't taste good. (right) Olives experience "veraison", the slow change from green to black, just like grapes.

In the Kitchen

Eggplant season is winding down and pomegranate season is winding up. This recipe by Yotam Ottolenghi is one of our favorites, though we often do the eggplants on a grill - sliced, cross-hatched, and painted with oil until it stops absorbing. Oakland club member, Emily, also sent us this pic of slow roasted tomatoes (one of our favorites too!), and raved about roasted potatoes with the yuzu-bergamot. Put that on a notecard for next year!

(left) Slow-roasted cherry tomatoes and garlic with Bergamot-Yuzu oil. (right) Single, Family and Oil Lover memberships now available by mail order.

Farm Day and More

More than one of our savvy club members shared this recent NY Times article with us. Take a gander when you have a moment. The big take-homes that we couldn’t agree with more: drink olive oil early and often - it doesn’t improve with age. Also, as with most product labeling, fraud is rampant. That’s why we feel it’s so important to know your farmer.

Speaking of knowing your farmer, we will again be inviting our members and friends to join us on the farm on Saturday, Nov. 16 to help with harvest and learn a bit more about Flatlands. Please contact us directly if you are interested in attending - flatlandsoliveoil@gmail.com. We have a limited number of spots open to non-members. Members will receive an update with more details soon.

Enjoy the shorter days and falling leaves,

Susan, Colin, Cypress and Tanager

Spring 2019

Hi Friends of Flatlands,

Pruning is wrapping up. Days are drying out. Spring is a time for reflection at the farm.

On the farm

Harvest time gets the headlines. It’s glorious and rewarding: fresh green oil trickles out to fill waiting tanks. It's exhausting, demanding immediate and full attention as olives continue to ripen and the calendar ticks toward possible frost. It is hard to look past harvest, so we forget that it’s followed by Pruning. The deadline to finish pruning is squishier. We need to have prunings on the ground, in neat rows, before the chipper comes through and before the trees flower, pushing energy out into branches that we don’t want to then cut off.
Pruning is time-intensive and hard work. But it is also a wonderful time to be in the grove. Hills to the west are popping – vibrant green as the grasses wake up. Sunny days bring out owls, hummingbirds, baby praying mantises. Following rain, mushrooms push up, tiny and red or lumbering brown.

During pruning, there’s time to look at the olive trees. Really look at them. Pendolinos, the universal pollinators, have vertical waves in their bark and disorderly branches that drape and cross over one another. Moraiolos have graceful branches that go straight up. Leccinos seem more prone to gnarl and surprise you than do the Frantoios. Or maybe we just haven’t quite figured them out yet.

Learning to prune is learning to see the future. As you look at branches, you have to picture where the coming fall’s fruit will be. Olives grow on second year branches. We need to imagine the harvesting pole in hand and figure out where olives will be hidden or inaccessible. Patches of soft, black olives left in the tree point to areas that are good candidates for removal - so do last season’s bird nests. We ask: which gaps in the canopy will be filled over the course of the spring and summer? which branches will get taller? which way the sun will pull the tree? And then we must make decisions about what to take out, hoping that the tree will respond as hoped to the new gaps and structures.

Each season foresight gets a little stronger. Each year we have a new and richer dataset: we can see what happened in response to last year’s decisions, and what happened 2, 3, 4 years downstream. And like with teaching (and probably any profession), each year’s experience lightens the cognitive load and lessens the overwhelming feeling of so-much-to-remember, so-much-to-figure-out-all-at-once. There comes a point in teaching when you can start to see the students instead of the class. With pruning, you begin to see the trees instead of the forest. It is at this point that advice you’ve gotten from mentors (if you can remember it) finally starts to make sense.

Diviner's tools: loppers, chainsaw, pruning saw, polesaw, pole pruners, gloves, knife.

Vision gets better, but like with anything, what you see (future or otherwise) depends on your tools. When pruning with a chainsaw, you look two years into the future and study parts of the tree closer to the ground. Small branches are excluded from perception. With clippers, you see the inner workings: eyes find things out of place and follow a winding branch back to its source. You picture the coming fall, trying to maximize yield and harvestability. With the new pruning saw, you can throw a leg up and pull yourself into the middle of the tree and look out, light coming through the branches from all sides. It’s best to make a pass with each of these tools, but time is short and sometimes one predominates. Sometimes it’s also nice to change things up, leave the chainsaw off for a day to hear the birds, frighten fewer lizards, and get a new perspective.

The view from pruning-with-clippers.

And speaking of seeing the future.... This is how we ended a recent Sunday morning of pruning – celebrating 1-year with Tanager. Lunch on a blanket at the farm, followed by a stint at Winters’ City Park. (If you’re ever on I-505 or I-80 with kids who need a pit stop, this park’s playground is giant and amazing)

Our Oils

Right now, it’s looking like we won’t have a drop to spare beyond the club distribution. We’re getting ready to send out a unique citrus oil this year – Yuzu Bergamot. Last year we were eager to try a bergamot oil, making use of the organic bergamot tree on the farm. This year, with a larger crop than normal, we had a chance to try this, but ended up combining the bergamot with yuzu because we needed to do a larger run of olives than expected. The result is lovely. Slightly milder citrus than the past years’ yuzu oils, it has some some bright lemony, herby notes from the yuzu, then some earl gray complexity wafting across. We’re looking forward to hearing feedback and thinking on whether this will be an oil we try to do regularly.

Olive this, Olive that

Always looking to learn something new, this winter we partnered with one of our Yolo Press mentors, Dianne Madison, to put to use some of the 2017 harvest surplus oil. Dianne has been mastering the science and art of olive oil-based cosmetics and crafted a range of natural bar soap with delicate fragrances like lemon verbena, citrus-mint and cedar lavender. While Castile soap is historically 100% olive oil that has been saponified with lye or ash, modern recipes also use other oils like shea butter and avocado oil, to improve things like stability across different temperatures, foaminess, detail and release when used in molds. Our soaps aren't available for purchase (this year), but members may soon get a sneak peak.

In the kitchen

Lately, we have been getting back to basics in the kitchen. Avocado, cucumber, roasted potatoes. Dress heavily with fresh oil and a little salt.

This focaccia from club member Lilly in WA is an inspiration. From a new cooking show that has some great shots of hillside olive harvest in Italy, here is a recipe (and video) you could work from.

We also plan to try something like this, burrata with pickled onion, squash, grapefruit, roasted coriander seeds and bergamot oil, but probably simpler.

That’s all for now. Below are some more pictures from spring at the farm. Look for another update soon. And thank you for being part of the Flatlands community.

With appreciation,

Colin, Susan, Cypress & Tanager

Mystery in the grove. Why is the patch of grass on the right growing so much faster than the other areas around it? Clue: the whitened leaves above it.

More colors in the grove - from many points along the circle of life.