Edible Shasta Butte: Issue #62 – Fall 2022

Meet Catrina. Gifted to me by dear friends upon my retirement from teaching, she arrived with a note affixed: “In her prime, though teaching has taken its toll.” Three-foot tall, Talavera-style Catrina serves as my household’s harbinger of fall, principally because she stands sentinel at the altar guarding our Dia de los Muertos ofrenda and the bounty we leave there for our departeds.

So, too, is Catrina fabulously dressed and behatted to attend a hoped-for party, if the National Weather Service’s 40% prediction of below normal temperatures from now until the autumnal equinox comes to pass. It would be a welcome change from the early-September heat dome that caused many of us, human, animal, and plant, to feel hot, then parched, then brittle. The Mill Fire, in Weed, and the Mountain Fire, near Gazelle, fed on such parchedness. These followed other devastating fires in Siskiyou County. Few of us in the north state have been spared fires and the smoke they emit, and we feel a sad solidarity as each new population flees fire and breathes smoke.

A Sense of Place in this issue describes the October pumpkin patch Julie and Erik Erickson began anticipating late last fall, as they saved the seeds from last year’s organic heirloom pumpkins. Their story of autumn on Hunter Orchards, also in Siskiyou County, honors the farm’s forty-year-old tradition of providing pumpkins for a community. This year, after a late spring cold dome settled over the north state, Hunter Orchards lost all its stone fruit crops, a loss that makes us all look forward to pumpkins. That late cold spell affected the year’s olive crop as well, so some small producers may not have enough olives to press for juice. The varied thrush in an olive tree, in the artwork on this magazine’s cover, also sits among a meager crop.

This magazine’s homage to fall includes recipes, where acorn squash and pumpkins star in dishes from soup to dessert. We’ve raided some past issues of Edible Shasta-Butte and its neighbor to the south Edible East Bay, to bring you these recipes, refurbished on Catrina’s request.

As fall represents harvest and bounty, another thread in this issue shows how donors share bounty with those who lack it. Chico State’s Organic Vegetable Project and Chico Food Project rely on students and community donors and volunteers to fill local food banks at Chico State and in the wider Chico community. Throughout the north state, such volunteers grow and glean and collect food to share with those who need it.

One of our new writers, Bonnie Pipkin, in her portrait of GRUB CSA Farm’s owners and operation, expresses what fire and smoke, heat and cold domes, lost crops or bountiful ones, full tables or sparse ones remind us: “Franny and Lee understand that ultimately, they are not in control. They can help things along by putting lady bugs in the shade house for aphids to help the cabbage and broccoli starts thrive, for example, and be amazed at how well that worked. They can build up a space and cultivate community and be the change they want to see. But, ultimately, the earth is in charge.”

Readers, we offer you this magazine. May you share the bounty of harvests and give thanks.

Candace Byrne,
Editor Edible Shasta-Butte