The Best Spinach Salad, photo via Tecolote website courtesy of Kristin Schell

Katie Kraemer Pitre of Tecolote Farm in Manor, Texas says she loves this recipe from one of the farm’s CSA basketeers — Kristin Schell — which uses spinach from the farm.

Ingredients

4-6 cups fresh spinach
1⁄4 cup toasted pine nuts
2 tbs fresh lemon juice (appx one lemon)
4 – 5 tbs extra virgin olive oil *
1⁄2 cup grated parmesan cheese
salt & pepper to taste

Directions

Squeeze the lemon into the bottom of a large serving bowl. Add olive oil and wisk until emulsified. Taste and add more lemon or olive oil to taste. Add salt and pepper.

Gently tear spinach and add to the bowl. Top with toasted pine nuts and grated parmesan cheese. Toss and serve.

*The general rule of thumb for making a vinaigrette is a ratio of 3:1. 3 parts oil to 1 part vinegar, in this case lemon juice. I like this dressing lemony, so I use a more equal ratio.

Tecolote Farm Vegetables, Photo © Cecilia Nasti

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a popular way for consumers to buy local, seasonal food directly from a farmer — and you’re finally ready to join one.

I asked Katie Kraemer Pitre of Tecolote Farm in Manor, Texas what questions someone ought to ask when choosing a farm and farmer from which to purchase a CSA subscription. She provided the following:

• How long is the commitment
• How many does a share feed, and
• How am I helping your farm?

When you join a CSA you are going into business with the farmer — usually on a season-by-season basis. The length of the season varies depending on where you live. The spring and summer season at Tecolote Farm, for example, is 18 weeks.

Your fee, often paid in full and in advance, underwrites the cost farmers incur when growing your food. Your share–many feed between two and four people for a week– is then delivered to your home or to a drop off site in your community on a specific day.

The fee you pay in advance allows the farmer to buy seeds and amendments for the season’s crops (as well as other farm expenses), but does not necessarily guarantee you will get a return on your investment. It is vital to keep in mind that when you subscribe to a CSA your are helping the farmer shoulder the risks and the rewards.

Because agriculture is affected by weather, pests, pestilence, and plain old fate, some shares may be sparse while others are abundant. The one thing you can depend on is your farmer’s commitment and dedication to growing you the best food they possibly can.  You’ll always get something in your share, you just never know what or how much.

If you cannot live with that kind of uncertainty, this may not be a program for you.  However, if you’re willing to take a chance on a farmer, you’ll end up with some of the freshest, best tasting food you’ve ever had, and know exactly where it came from, how it was grown, and who made it possible.

Isn’t that worth a little risk?

David, Katie and their children when they were all a little younger

Having grown up on a citrus farm in California, Katie Kraemer Pitre thought farming was a perfectly reasonable way to make a living.

David Pitre, meanwhile, grew up in Texas and studied philosophy in college. It was a deep and abiding respect for the land and “coming from a family that had a near obsessive love of good, clean food” that lead him to become a tiller of the soil.

The couple met in California when David was working on a farm there.

Before farming near Austin, the couple farmed in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley of Alaska with its long summer days and deep glacial soil, and in central coastal California.

Katie said she followed David back to Texas where they looked for land they could farm. They chose the Austin area because of a population that was already showing signs of a love of fresh, organic and local food.

They purchased 12 acres  of Blackland Prairie about 14 miles east of Austin, and named their farm Tecolote, which is the Spanish word for “owl.”

When they moved onto the property owls were in abundance as they are to this day.

Katie and David  raised their three children on the farm: nineteen-year-old Zachary (who was just one year old when the farm took root), fifteen-year-old Julia Claire, and Henry, who is nearly thirteen-years-old.

Blackland Prairie soil is heavy black clay that’s perfect for cotton — a crop cultivated in that area and picked by hand through the 1960s–but more challenging for vegetables. Katie said she was just naive enough to think farming in Texas would be the same as farming in California.

Live and learn.

They were certified organic in 1994 and shortly thereafter started their Community Supported Agriculture program (CSA), whereby eaters helped to pay for the cost of farming via subscription. In exchange for the fee consumers paid, they received baskets of fresh, organic produce on a weekly basis.

Tecolote Farm has the longest continuously running CSA program in Texas.

And for the first ten years of operation, word of mouth advertising provided them with as many subscribers as they could feed. In fact, they had up to a 10 year waiting list for their CSA. At the time they started selling direct to the public via subscription, there were very few urban farms or CSA programs. Today, there are more farms and more places for consumers to find local organic produce, so there’s room on the subscription list again.

David and Katie are gearing up to feed even more people than before, thanks to purchasing more acreage about 12 miles from the farm, along the fertile banks of the Colorado River.  In addition, they’ve started to accept SNAP cards (Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program–formerly called food stamps). And David says they’re also developing a program whereby they’ll get good food into the hands of more people who have a hard time affording it. David said it will be a collaboration between his current subscribers and the farm–making the vegetables available at cost–to the new low-income members.

When asked why he would intentionally break even (if that), David said, “I’m a farmer. I feed people.”

Back when I lived on a road called Hog Eye, eight miles east of Austin, Texas  in a town called Manor (pronounced MAY-nur), I counted among my neighbors, David Pitre and Katie Kraemer Pitre of Tecolote Farm.

Tecolote is a Spanish word for owl; when David and Katie bought the land that would become their farm, owls were (and remain) abundant.

Tecolote Farm’s 12 acres received organic certification in 1994, and the farm supplies the longest continually running Community Supported Agriculture program—or CSA—in the state of Texas. CSAs are a popular way for consumers to buy local, seasonal food directly from a farmer.

Katie says when they got started, they put flyers advertising their CSA on the windshields of cars parked in the Wheatsville Food Co-op parking lot in Austin. They cultivated their first sixteen members with this old school approach (old school was the only school in the early 90s) and that was the last marketing they had to do for the next ten years. Word of mouth kept them in members, and the members were kept in healthy, delicious organically raised produce.

That doesn’t mean they’ve had an easy row to hoe.

Farming is a 24/7 year-round business for this couple. They raised three children while raising a variety of crops, including rare and heirloom vegetables. They’ve had to deal with with the same kinds of issues those of us who grow organic vegetables gardens deal with, but on a much larger scale.

And then there’s the water.

When they purchased their land, the well on the property had never gone dry–even during the worst drought conditions Central Texas had seen to date, which was in the 1950s. But that changed  several years ago when Austin’s growth started pushing east, and demand for water grew. Travis county dug wells to meet the needs, which in the end, dried up Tecolote’s water supply.

But all is not lost. Food writer for the Austin American Statesman, Addie Broyles wrote an article for the paper recently that details the Petri’s water woes, and the solution.

David and Katie plan to grow a variety of healthful organically grown food for the foreseeable future, because at their core they are farmers, and that’s what farmers do.

In the Austin, Texas area find Tecolote Farm  produce at: Downtown Farmers Market | Cedar Park Farms to Market | Sunset Valley Farmers Market | as a CSA subscriber.