Mountain Bounty Farm

04/30/2026

Last weekend I was lucky to attend a benefit dinner for the North Columbia Schoolhouse. It was a wildly creative and inspirational evening. I won’t regale you with all the details, but one thing our hosts did really stuck with me. They asked us to write down how we envision the world we want to live in. I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Do we want to live in a town that has historic movie theaters and small farms that grow our fresh vegetables? Well, then we need to show up and support them. Not just stream everything, and select whatever food we want off the grocery store shelves.

Of course getting your food direct from the farm is not as convenient. We hear it all: “I’m too tired to cook when I get home from work...we are really busy right now...it’s hard to keep up with all the veggies...it’s too expensive.” All true, as far as they go, but then what? If we “save” money or time, but then end up in big box store world, have we gained?

I want to live in a world where I can join my funny friends at the movies downtown, attend magical gatherings to support local cultural hubs, and eat fresh food grown nearby. So I have to show up for these things. Everyone has to decide what they value, and crucially, what organizations and local business they don’t want to live without.

We are blessed in this community to have so many people who have chosen to commit to make art, music, dance, food, environmental protection, care for those less fortunate, and many other wonderful things happen here. People who chose to do what wasn’t the easy thing, but what mattered to them. Let’s keep this in mind, and show up.

-John

04/27/2026

UNLIMITED HOLDS are back!

We are pleased to announce that our CSA members will now be able to put their box on hold whenever they need to. We hope this increased flexibility helps everyone love their weekly box even more.

We also hope this will encourage some who find the weekly CSA more of a challenge to give it another try. Feel free to continue to spread the word about our farm and CSA!

For our long time core members, for whom the holds were not an issue, thank you for your steadiness!

The Mountain Bounty team

04/27/2026

We had a great time with the 6th graders at Tahoe Expedition Academy last week discussing farming and plant genetics. Hopefully we convinced some of them to consider becoming future MBF farmers.

04/01/2026

https://yubanet.com/regional/mountain-bounty-farm-seeks-community-support-to-continue-their-food-access-program-as-market-match-funding-ends/

An important food access program helping low-income families in Western Nevada County is facing a funding transition, as a critical grant program comes to an end, with future funding uncertain. Since its founding nearly 30 years ago, Mountain Bounty Farm, an organic farm in Nevada County, has worked...

03/20/2026

Dear Friends,

As many of you know, over the past two years we made a difficult change to our CSA policy by limiting the number of holds members could place on their boxes. At the time, we were experiencing an unsustainable number of paused shares every week, which made it difficult for us to plan harvests and impossible to maintain the steady income that we need to keep running.

We’ve also heard from many of you that flexibility matters. Life happens; travel, busy weeks, and the ability to pause a box can make the difference between staying in the CSA or stepping away. So we’ve been wrestling with the question: how can we bring back more flexibility while still keeping the farm financially viable?

Our answer is a community challenge - The 50 Member Challenge. If you commit to the CSA as one of these new members, we will bring back unlimited holds for everyone. With a few more members, we can then afford to have more boxes on hold each week and offer more flexibility.

The most powerful way to support this effort is simply to spread the word. Tell your friends, neighbors, and coworkers about the CSA. Word of mouth is still the number one way people discover the farm. And remember our referral program, where if a CSA member refers a friend, they receive a free CSA box, with the new member also receiving a $10 credit on their account.

If you’d like to lock in current 2025 pricing, you can purchase a 6-month CSA (or longer) credit before the change takes effect. This helps the farm with early-season cash flow while saving you money.

Another option, if you need to pause your share, you can donate that week’s box to our Community Supported Financial Assistance Program, which helps provide fresh food to needy families in our community.

This CSA has always been a community effort. For 30 years, the farm has survived because members believe that local farms matter. As a source of high quality food, community building, and strengthening our local economy. If we can grow CSA membership by 50 households, we’ll happily bring back the flexibility so many of you have been asking for. Fingers crossed, and stay tuned for updates about how this campaign is going.

Thanks for your support!

www.mountainbountyfarm.com

03/08/2026

So much fun to be had at the North Lake Tahoe Snowfest parade and afterparty at Tahoe Backyard in King's Beach today! We led seed crafting, listened to great music and got to meet the wonderful folks that make up our Lake Tahoe CSA community!

03/06/2026

One of the more common things we hear from CSA members (especially newer ones) is this: “I absolutely love the box…but sometimes I don’t know what to do with everything.”

Busy lives and creative, healthy cooking can sometimes seem to be at odds with each other. Which is why we’re always trying to develop new tools to help our members cook the items from their boxes with ease.

As always, we encourage you to check out the recipes at the bottom of this weekly newsletter, which are carefully curated to utilize almost every item in the veggie box (plus some creative fruit and mushroom ideas). We even have a “Use it Up” section, with a recipe or two helping you easily use up what you might still have in your fridge from the week before.

We also wanted to highlight our relatively new offering - “Cooking the Bounty” in case you may have missed it. This is our video series featuring Anna (who also doubles as fabulous farm admin support), taking contents of the weekly CSA box and turning them into simple, approachable, nourishing meals. No complicated techniques - just food from your box, made doable.

You sometimes even get to see her sweet kitchen helpers in action as well, her sons James and Walton. We encourage you to check out the series on YouTube (and subscribe to receive practical inspiration for your dinner table (like her tasty and simple Winter Kale Frisee Salad last week). And if you try one of Anna’s recipes, let us know. We love hearing how our bounty shows up on your table.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeSp3Nu5HqaWJ_WXaXLXGgDnDQBnax1cj&si=8XKx6h1ThPwNc_us

Getting your weekly CSA is about more than receiving a box of vegetables. It’s about learning, experimenting, and growing in the kitchen alongside the farm. We make it a goal to help you feel excited to cook what’s in season.

Happy cooking!

-Becky

02/20/2026

Winter came back! We hope everyone is staying safe and warm, like our little broccoli seedlings in the greenhouse.

02/20/2026

~Cover cropping Part 2, see the prior post for Part 1, if you missed it~

Farming can be seen as a practical application of soil science and plant biology. In our case the emphasis is wildly on the practical, the empirical, and subtle but deep observations. Our science and biology are basic, but still legit.

We plant a mix of species as cover crops, including varieties of oats, wheat, vetch, peas, and phacelia. The grasses - oats and wheat - sprout and grow quickly, produce a lot of organic matter, and anchor the soil with their strong and extensive root systems.

The legumes – vetch, peas, and sometimes fava beans, have a wonderful ability to grab atmospheric Nitrogen from the air and make it into a form of Nitrogen that is available to plants. I’ve always been amazed that the air we breathe is 78% Nitrogen! Legumes, in symbiotic partnership with bacteria, form nodules on their roots where they can access air in the soil (yes, healthy soil has abundant air spaces). Nitrogen is one of the most important plant nutrients, analogous to protein for us.

The final ingredient, phacelia, is for fun, beauty, and the bees. It’s a vigorous and hardy plant in its own right, but the spiraling fractal flowers turn me to mush. A healthy cover crop stand is a thing of pride. And there’s sadness mixed in for sure as well. Mowing that beautiful cover crop down has a particular bittersweet smell and feel.

Happily, this whole process of cover cropping gets a break as winter is back now, and we’ve got a desired reprieve from too much spring too soon.

-John

02/20/2026

I keep mentioning cover crops in my posts, and I received a request to share more info about cover cropping and what it means. I have written about this before but here you have it, if you missed it.

We generally plant cover crops in the fall to cover and protect the soil over the winter, but they can be planted in spring and summer as well. They are specific crops that we do not intend to harvest. Their purpose is to protect the soil from erosion due to winter rainfall, and to build soil organic matter, nitrogen, and concentrate other micronutrients. We are essentially harnessing the miracle of photosynthesis, where plants take Carbon from the air (in the form of CO2) and make it into their own bodies. I love plant leaves and photosynthesis, and maybe I can get into these things further, another time.

Once all this new Carbon is incorporated back into the soil it becomes part of humus (the dark, organic component of soil) which helps hold water and feed microbes, which then feed back into our crops and our own bodies. Part of the measure of success of our soil stewardship is that we have seen this organic matter percentage in our soils increase over time. When we first started, the fields had soil organic matter averaging around 3.2% (which is actually not bad). Now its about 4.5%. This means we are also sequestering a significant amount of Carbon, about 25 tons of CO2 per acre over the 16 years we’ve been at our current farm site. While we do till the soil, we carefully minimize tillage, because it can damage soil structure and lead to a loss of carbon from the soil back into the atmosphere. So our net Carbon gain is a sign that we are on the right track.

Later I’ll discuss the specific plants and how some of them capture Nitrogen from the air.

-John

[photos of our different fields with their cover crop]