Sometimes we know that our members get way too many emails, and our weekly newsletter is just one more added to the pile. This week News From the Farm takes the form of photographs that we hope bring you closer to the food we grow for you and the community that keeps the farm healthy and sustainable. Andrew snapped these photos all around the Farm during his busy week.
One of the photos is of Full Belly owner Dru and our Harvest Manager Jan planting flowers. Dru is on the tractor, which spaces the seeds both linearly in three rows along the bed, and at a specified depth under the soil. Jan is checking the depth and will make fine-tune adjustments as needed.
Last Saturday, one of our projects was to harvest our beautiful crop of onions. In the first photo, Full Belly owner Paul is driving the tractor that lifts the onions up to the surface of the bed. These onions are the same ones that you have been getting in your boxes for several months, as fresh, juicy and mild Spring onions. Once they mature, we stop irrigating them and prepare them for curing and drying in the field. In the second photo (below), the crew is picking up the onions that were just lifted, and putting them into burlap sacks that will sit in the field for about a week in our hot, dry weather while the onions cure and dry.
We also wanted to show you our eggplant transplanting crew, from the perspective of the tractor driver. The crew logged an impressive accomplishment, planting 10,000 eggplants in 2.5 hours! You can see that this is a big tractor, traveling over 3 beds at once, one line of eggplant per bed. Matthew, Dave and Danny are feeding the transplants into the tractor, which plants them in the soil, and before we know it, if all goes well, we will be harvesting eggplants! Checking progress and walking behind are Leo and Alfredo, making adjustments as needed.
Finally we see Jenna and Amon’s son Arlo sitting next to an enormous stalk of asparagus that he discovered, just like Jack and the beanstalk…
