We are not afraid to eat our spinach!

This Valentine’s day we decided to make gnocchi as our main entrée along with steamed spinach and sweet potatoes for our sidedish. Is it right for two people to eat a 1/2 pound of fresh spinach for one meal? Perhaps, if one knows the individual who grew the spinach, otherwise maybe it is a bit too risky. Once again a top news story is the recall of spinach that has been shipped all across the country. I wonder if the new food safety rules can eliminate problems with a situation such as this most recent recall of spinach? I’m curious about this mostly because if you read this article you will note that manure is in the air across these central valley farms that supply much of our country with veggies. With the proximity of farms growing our veggies to CAFO’s, I am not sure how they can keep pathogens out of our food if manure is indeed in the air and I also wonder how the farms in this region become “Certified Organic”. USDA Certified Organic food must not come in contact with fresh manure within 120 days of being harvested. The food harvested in California’s Central Valley will have a “manure particles”, that are coming from the air, so manure must be coming in contact with the food as it is being harvested. We make it a practice to spread fresh manure into our fields in the fall of the year prior to that field being planted early spring. Our spinach, grown here on our farm is still healthy, even though critters such as rabbits, deer, cats, dogs, rats and mice might wander across our spinach patch. Not to mention, only perhaps 80 families per week might eat our spinach while it is in season, so if some rat or mouse spread a disease, we would not make most of the country sick because we are not shipping across the country.

Production note to self: Weed strawberries mid December because the weeds are growing much faster earlier in the winter. It took 25 hours to weed all strawberries which was completed 2/11/2013.