CSA Week 20: Last Box Of the Season
Farm Share Newsletter - October 23, 2023
This Week's Share:
Kale
Carrots
Garlic via Twisting Tree Farm
Collars via Northbourne Farm
Tomato
Komatsuna
Sage
Scallions
Thai Bird Peppers
Housekeeping
That's a wrap! This is the final share of the season. It's been an absolute pleasure bringing vegetables to your home. Feel free to keep your boxes this week or chuck them.
We plan to continue the CSA next season with expanded offerings, including a half-share option. As a member, you will get first dibs on a 2024 share. Stay tuned to this newsletter for dates and more. Also, look out for an end-of-season survey!
Changes
When Elizabeth and I started Tian Tian Farm in the spring of 2021, we consciously focused our crop plan on "Asian heritage vegetables," a vague term whose origins I do not know. I think I feel comfortable saying "Asian heritage vegetables" (or more accurately, "East Asian heritage vegetables") as an American concept followed the ascendence of Asian cuisine in prestige restaurant culture in the mid-Aughts. Or maybe it's just a phrase I saw on another farm's Instagram. Either way, we chose to limit ourselves to this amorphous category, which to us was largely informed by the Kitazawa Seed Company catalog. (Kitazawa, now more than a century old, was acquired by a conglomerate last year.) Both of us had our reasons.
Elizabeth wanted to connect to the Chinese side of her family. Her late grandfather (or as she called him, her didi, 爹爹) and grandmother (nainai, 奶奶) always eagerly pumped her sisters and her full of home-cooked Chinese food. Her grandfather grew up on a farm in Anhui, where his job as a young child was to herd geese. After he emigrated to the U.S. and settled in the Boston area, he always kept a vegetable garden, and she remembers his tomatoes hanging from trellises he had fashioned from bamboo poles.
Like many other during their generation, my Taiwanese grandmother also grew up on a farm, although I regrettably cannot tell you more than that because I haven't asked her. I'd like to give you some high-minded, socially-righteous origin story (like the one I told to the Seattle PI), but truthfully, I gravitated toward "Asian heritage vegetables" as some kind of penance for rejecting my culture from my childhood in suburban St. Louis all the way until my early adulthood, when I moved to New York City. There, at least within the media circles I hovered around, it was generally uncool to crack slanty-eye jokes. I felt newly empowered to express my ethnicity without judgement. In fact, the emergent strain of identity politics at the time (2012 - 2016), actually incentivized me to lean into the heritage I had spent most of my life running away from. And thus began my retrospectively embarrassing overcorrection, which involved moving to Chinatown, affixing my Twitter handle with my Mandarin name (謝章仁), and pretending to not get bored by Taiwan New Wave (though I appreciate most of Hou Hsiao-Hsien and hold that the criminally underrated Three Times (2005) is his best work).
Anyway, crop planning in 2021. Every vegetable we grew that season could defensibly be called "Asian heritage." I think (but have not confirmed) that narrowly-tailoring our offerings helped us land a spot at Ballard Farmers Market, despite having no track record. So in hindsight it was a good business decision. Halfway through the season, we joined Columbia City Farmers Market. As I wrote in an earlier newsletter, at Columbia City we developed a customer base of Chinese seniors that A) rewarded us emotionally and B) affirmed our crop selection.
We loosened on "Asian heritage" a little in 2022, and then totally branched out this season. Through two years of farming, the significance of specifically growing Asian vegetables has receded for me. Don't get me wrong. Connecting with our Asian customers — as well as customers who have an appreciation for Asian cuisine — remains a highlight of this job. But the label "Asian heritage vegetables" has started to feel contrived as a mission or a purpose or a business identity. In farming, rather than addressing old wounds, I got a lot more out of problem-solving pests and irrigation, eating fresh produce for more than half the year, and just generally feeling the rhythms of the season. Tian Tian Farm will always grow "Asian heritage vegetables" to supply an underserved market, but I no longer define us with this phrase.
In 2023, we also started this CSA, and in my opinion, it has been the best decision we have made in our short, ongoing farming careers. Members appreciation day was the highlight of my season. I cannot express the profound joy I felt meeting so many of you, knowing that you've been eating what we grow for the better part of the year. All of the emails, photos, notes have meant so much to us. Sorry if we didn't respond to everything — we definitely received and cherished them.
It was so rewarding that we are considering scaling back on markets to focus on our CSA, though we have not made any final decisions yet. (Note: Please keep that on the DL).
As I said in housekeeping, this won't be the last newsletter this year. But good bye for now. It's been a pleasure.
'Til Next Time,
Steven