Farm News

News from the Farm | March 11, 2024

As Dru wrote last week, we’ve had a lot of grey, cold, and wet days over the past couple weeks and months. The rain has been perfectly (or rather, unfortunately) timed to come right as things just start to dry out, which gets in the way of planting and weeding that will be crucial for abundant harvests in a late spring. Plus too many grey days in a row can start to feel a bit gloomy and monotonous. Six months from now we’ll be eagerly awaiting a cloudy, rainy day but when they’re abundant, they don’t feel special. 

We have had some bursts of sun and signs of spring (robins, flowering and budding fruit trees, sun). During these bursts of sunshine last week and the week before, there were some share-worthy happenings cataloged below! Though don’t let these photos fool you – these sunny days have been the exception.

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News from the Farm | March 4, 2024

It feels like it has been a long winter! And this coming from a gal who spent the first many years of her life in Vermont where there are snow days into April! Even though last year we had more rain in inches than this year, it seems like there have been many more cloudy, cold days. Maybe my bones are just getting older – after all I have been writing this “Flower Time Letter” for over 30 years and my bones ARE getting up there in age.  Even as I write, the blizzards in the Sierras are blowing  with gale forces confirming my instinct of a longish winter.

As the saying goes (and will go on for forever I hope) in California “March showers bring April flowers.”  This means flowers a month earlier than most places in the country, so we should all count our blessings! Here at Full Belly Farm I am constantly amazed at the resilience of our flower fields. Despite months of rain, clouds, and frost, the beds of larkspur, Bells of Ireland, calendula, godetia and snapdragons are roaring to life, getting ready to belt out their annual chorus of color. It is such a comfort to know that nature will do her magic – sometimes in spite of all the human meddling. We are eagerly awaiting that color riot in just a few short weeks.

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News from the Farm | February 26, 2024

When reporting on any farm news, it almost always seems like we need to start with the weather. Because it does have a big impact on what we do!

Last week, we started off with more wet, grey weather and by the weekend it was sunny and in the high 60s. February 23 and 24 looked quite different from this time last year when we had snow! By Saturday, it had started to dry up enough to start weeding. We’ve got a lot of weeding and planting to catch up on before it rains again, so we’re closely monitoring soil moisture.

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News from the Farm | February 19, 2024

“My mom and I speak to each other through the flowers we grow. The joys and triumphs of our flower fields and bouquets are etched into the smile lines around our eyes and each late frost that hit our spring flowers or gophers that found our tulips has added a wrinkle to our furrowed brows. We gawk over seed catalogs together, wondering whether new flower varieties would fare well in our growing zone. We harvest together early in the morning. We dream the same dreams of snapdragon fields, mixed bouquets and fragrant wreaths.”

-An excerpt from my new book Designing with Dried Flowers 

My childhood was spent in sync with seasonal flowers. I slept in harvest boxes as my mom picked calendula for orders, I rode alongside buckets of sweet peas in hand pulled carts headed back to the packing shed, and I created elaborate fairy mansions in the many roses, and irises under the shade of the fig tree in my mother’s garden. I grew up at Full Belly Farm, the youngest child of Dru Rivers and Paul Muller, and now a second generation farmer at Full Belly Farm. Sometimes it feels like I had no choice, not in moving back to the farm – that I did freely and without any pressure from family – but in choosing flowers as my life work and passion. It was ingrained in me, the flowers whispering to me through osmosis, calling my name “Hannah Rose” over and over again until I felt ready to listen in my early 20’s. I started designing flower arrangements for weddings and events ten years ago (using Full Belly Farm flowers, naturally) and worked alongside the Full Belly flower crew harvesting flowers, packing out orders and readying flowers for market and CSA. 

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News from the Farm | February 12, 2024

Today’s Farm News covers two small ways you can get involved to help combat food insecurity. It’s a huge, complicated problem, but that means that any measures to chip away at it are important.

First, our CSA donation program. We’ve gotten a few inquiries recently, thus wanted to explain how it currently works! On a week that you don’t want a box, you have the option to donate or skip. Skipping means we move the box to the end of your schedule, or to a date you’ve specified. When you donate your box, the value of the box (or flowers, or whatever you’ve donated) goes into our Good Food Community Fund. When it comes time to set up donation boxes, we pull from the Fund. We don’t make the box and then donate it, thus why we need as much advance notice for skips and donations. We also have a few particularly generous CSA members who make separate donation payments just to the fund.

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News from the Farm | February 5, 2024

This time of year, late January and early February, usually ends up involving a lot of watching, waiting, and then suddenly springing into action on several fronts.

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News from the Farm | January 29, 2024

For the past 44 years Dru and I, Andrew, Judith, and others from the farm have been attending the EcoFarm Conference, a gathering of farmers, activists and researchers probing the potentials of organic and biologically-driven food and farming systems. Our participation started with a first gathering of farmers in the shade of a large walnut tree in Winters in 1981. At that time organic farming was an idea, seen by many as farming heresy. We were probing the possibilities of eliminating synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides from our food and farming ecosystems. Experts dismissed organic agriculture as an irresponsible path to world starvation.  [Read more…]

News from the Farm | January 22, 2024

Alliums (onions, garlic, leeks, shallots, scallions, and chives) are staples in most cuisines and are found in home kitchens around the world, making it easy to take them for granted. Like all produce though, they too have different varieties, seasons, nuances, and quirks. They have interesting backstories and are grown with love and care on farms, just like peaches, tomatoes,   asparagus, kale and other flashier produce. This week, let’s show some love for leeks, the alliums that are in our CSA boxes this week, and are a staple of our winter boxes. [Read more…]

News from the Farm | January 15, 2024

It’s amazing what some rain can do. In the fall, a bit of rain washes off the layer of dirt and dust and rejuvenates everything. That kind of rain isn’t enough to refill our streams or turn the hills green – that’s what the winter rains are for. At this point, the hills around us are green again, a welcome site after months of brown. Most fields are also green – the cover crops have germinated and are chugging along, despite the cold and wet days, and relatively little sunlight.

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News from the Farm | January 8, 2024

Dear CSA friends, 

We are back and rested after a much-needed end-of-year break. After a good deal of greeting, handshaking and backslapping this morning at 8am our crew is in the fields, evaluating how we did in leaving our crops to rest over the past few weeks. As of now, things look good- lots of carrots, broccoli, greens, cabbage, potatoes, and roots to fill your boxes in the coming weeks. Oranges had a chance to ripen and sweeten as the milder December and early January largely avoided frost or freeze damage to the crops. So we are off to another annual race to a full year of farming.

All of our hopes for the coming year and past successes stem from being blessed by residing on this gracious and generous earth beneath our feet. Its abundance has been feeding us and our extended family of eaters for more than 40 years. A benign winter without damage from a deep cold spell or too much rain allows us to harvest and begin this new year with a continuation of a harvest suspended last December. We are happy to be your farm again as we start this new year and this morning we are excited to begin that work again. [Read more…]

News from the Farm | December 4, 2023

It has been one of our customs to try to condense our year in review into a final, last gasp News from the Farm for the year, recalling the past 12 months now fading in our rear-view mirror.

Every morning the partners and managers roll in about 10 minutes before the official start of the day to ask and answer “what do you have on your list today?” Tensions rise a bit as hastily penned lists whipped from pockets reveal eight opinions about where the fires are burning hottest and what needs to happen— in each opinion, now!!! There are always too many priorities across our several lists: pickingweedingwateringplantingflowersfixingbrokenstufftractorworkpartsneeded….. With but mere minutes for asserting one’s own territory and the horse trading begins. Multiple opinions, priorities, projects, personal predilections, and pluckiness collide at our office most every morning. [Read more…]

News from the Farm | November 27, 2023

We are rapidly approaching the end of the calendar year, and the end of the Full Belly Farm year (December 9) is even closer. 

These approaching milestones usually lead me to reflect upon the past year and plan for the upcoming year. Something that’s been on my mind more than usual recently has been the “C” in CSA, community. Who is in our community? How do we support our community and how does our community support us? [Read more…]

News from the Farm | November 20, 2023

The storm clouds that had been flirting with us for a week dropping a few drizzles became serious Friday evening. The field activities, cover crop planting and terminating tomato and pepper fields, stopped. We parked tractors and seeders inside and reveled in the feisty winds and the melody of rainfall.

The heavy clouds were generous, releasing 1.5 inches of rain. We’ve been sowing fields with a cover crop mix of pea, vetch, oat, tillage radish, clover, and wheat. Those seeds were thoroughly soaked and settled into finished summer. Earlier in the week we planted onions and the rain also settled the transplanted onion sets into their winter beds. Fields of lettuce, cabbage, greens, potatoes, and leeks were wetted with the clear nourishing rainwater. The farm breathed out a palpable sigh of welcome – opening the pores of the earth, releasing and exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide. As the Earth sighed in gratitude, we, this land’s caretakers, did the same. [Read more…]

News from the Farm | November 13, 2023

It’s another flower update! Flowers are a big part of what we do, so we want everyone to be in the know.

As described last week (which you can read here), this time of year is when we plant most of our spring flowers. On Thursday and Friday, the flower team aided by some interns and Alfonso’s group planted about 2/3 of our bulbs (tulips and iris) and corms (anemones and ranunculus). In total we planted 10,000 tulip bulbs, 7,000 Dutch iris bulbs, 11,000 anemone corms, and 7,000 ranunculus corms. There’ll be a bit more planting once we receive the rest of our underground roots! [Read more…]

News from the Farm | November 6, 2023

April showers bring May flowers, but when do you plant those flowers? It varies between years but Full Belly Farm, spring flowers went in the ground on Tuesday and Thursday of last week. 

Dru and Jan direct seeded 20 beds of flowers on Tuesday and Jan, the flower team, and Alfredo and his crew transplanted 24 beds of flowers on Thursday. Direct seeded flowers included larkspur, nigella, calendula, bells of Ireland, scabiosa and the transplants included snapdragons, godetia, delphinium, feverfew, Sweet William. Plus lots more! [Read more…]

News from the Farm | October 30, 2023

This past week was a good reminder that the weather is in charge, not us. As mentioned last week, we got about an inch of rain on Sunday the 22nd, much more than was forecast. The rain washed off the thick coat of dust blanketing everything, making people and plants alike feel a little refreshed and brighter. However the rain dictated what happened during the rest of of the week and slowed us down in making progress on our long list of time-sensitive tasks. [Read more…]

News from the Farm | October 23, 2023

Farmers are always talking about the weather but this Sunday’s rain was definitely worth talking about. We got between 0.85 and 1 inch of rain, depending on which rain gauge you look at! We’ve been continuing to ease our way into fall as the days cooled down, except for a few mid-90s days last week, but this rain seems like a more concrete transition away from summer to autumn. 

Beyond the weather though, what’s been happening the last week or so? [Read more…]

News from the Farm | October 16, 2023

 

The week before Hoes Down, in addition to all the general prep, we also harvested our walnuts!

We grow 12 acres of walnuts. These are large, beautiful old trees that were on the property when the farm was purchased in the 1980s. As a result, they don’t include newer varieties (like Chandler, which currently makes up about a third of all walnuts grown in CA) and the trees are more spaced out, and larger than more recently planted, high-density orchards. Most of our trees are Serr with some Tehama and Hartley.

How do you harvest walnuts? The short answer is, we shake them off the tree. The entire process is a bit longer though: [Read more…]

News from the Farm | October 9, 2023

Well folks, we did it. The 32nd Annual Hoes Down Harvest Festival has come and gone and the farm is almost back to normal. We transformed a working farm into a weekend festival for over 2000 people, we fed, taught, and entertained them, and then we cleaned up and turned it back into a working farm so that we could resume our normal Monday farm activities. That “we” is a big group. SO many people and SO much work goes into this really special event, even if it was Hoes Down in a “slowed down” format.

So we have many many thanks you’s to all of those who made is possible. This week we want to take a moment to express our sincere, deep gratitude for all of those who helped make the Hoes Down Festival the success that it was.  [Read more…]

News from the Farm | October 2, 2023

Our warm and cool seasons in the Capay Valley are very different seasons, marked by different crops and different weather. We find ourselves in a period of transition when the cool and warm seasons are briefly overlapping. The tomatoes and melons and other summer crops are winding down, the winter squash are reaching maturity and many varieties have been cut and cured, and we’ve started harvesting the leafy greens and roots that are signature crops of colder periods of the year. The weather also is overlapping. It was in the mid-60s on Saturday and even briefly rained, and next weekend it’s forecast to be in the 90s. Most of the days last week were beautiful days in the 80s with cool, crisp mornings.

The spectrum of things we’re currently harvesting is pretty amazing – fruits, nuts, greens, roots, solanaceous crops (eggplants, peppers, tomatoes), cucurbits (squash and cucumbers), and of course, flowers. We’re a diversified farm and always are harvesting an impressive number of things, but right now, that list of options is even more abundant. In our CSA boxes and on our farmers market tables, we’ve got a spectrum of crops spanning both seasons, though you’re less and less likely to see summer crops in CSA boxes; with each passing day, it’s slower and more difficult to pick some of those crops.  [Read more…]