While we work on most holidays, one holiday that Full Belly Farm does observe is April Fools’ Day. More specifically, Andrew and Rye/Becca’s families are very into April Fools’ Day. Sometimes it’s just interpersonal tricks, but the office is often the site of a few pranks (lots of rubber insects last year), and some years the farmers markets and our wider community have gotten dragged in. Instagram followers: you’ve been warned!
I don’t have any April Fools’ Day pranks planned. However, over the past week, I couldn’t help notice a couple very real things that seem like they could be fake, and wanted to share these April Fools’ non-pranks with you!
The flower field is looking amazing, almost fake, but it’s very real and very beautiful. We’re very ready for the April 1 – September 30 CSA flower season to start!
Half the walnut orchard has leafed out, but the other half is bare! That’s a result of different varieties. The southern half are Serr and the back half is a mix of Hartley and Tehama. The Serr trees leaf out first and are ready to harvest first, about 10 days ahead. While this makes harvesting a bit less efficient, it buys us a little bit of insurance against frost damage. We want this resiliency; in a bad frost year, perhaps only half the orchard would be damaged, not all.
Check out this giant strawberry that Waylon and Roxy found. Almost as big as his palm! The plants are just starting to produce fruit. We’re hoping 2026 is as good of a strawberry year as last year!
And this crooked looking tractor? Not an optical illusion. It’s crooked on purpose! This Kubota L245 (from the 80s) is an offset tractor, used for cultivating (weeding). The weeding tools are mounted underneath the driver, instead of behind, and the motor is off to one side, allowing the driver to look down on to the crop while they’re weeding instead of having to look behind. Which should reduce the chance of accidental crop damage.
Some history from Paul – we have a couple of these offset tractors, all originally from the South, a relic of the era when federal tobacco subsidies were sufficient for farmers to make it growing 5-10 acres of tobacco. These tractors were efficient and affordable and the right size for small farms. While not fast, powerful machines, they’re precise! They no longer are made in the US and instead, new US tractors use GPS for precision weeding. Other areas of the world still do make tractors and equipment focused on scale-appropriate technology for small growers. For the moment, we’re sticking with our vintage cultivators, mostly manned by Ricardo, who does a great job!
Have you seen how asparagus grows? Not a joke, it just pops up! And the spears grow fast, up to 10 inches per day, requiring daily harvest. Hard to believe! The sight is more dramatic in a field that’s less weedy than the one in this photo. Weeding without disturbing the underground portion of the plant, the crown, is difficult, so over the course of the 10-12 year lifespan of an asparagus field, we can end up with quite a few weeds.
The weather, both the forecast and the recent past, has also been a bit hard to believe, but there’s only so much time we can devote talking about the weather. This list will have to do.
Elaine Swiedler, CSA Manager
