What’d we do last week? Here’s just a few things (a complete list would go on forever) with photos – thanks to Andrew, Becca, Dru, and Mizu for sharing their pictures!
Monday: It’s time to plant spring flowers! On Monday, the team transplanted 12 beds of spring flowers: godetia, feverfew, rudbeckia, Canterbury bells, and Sweet William. All are transplanted by hand. Three rows of flowers per bed, each plant about a foot apart. That’s 1,500 plants per bed, so 18,000 transplants that made it in the ground. You can get more details, and a video of last year’s planting here. These plants join the 21 rows of direct seeded flowers that were planted the prior week (all in one day!). And we got some rain, leading to some dramatic skies!
Tuesday: The plan had been to do more transplanting, but it had to be pushed off to another day because of the wind. That’s farming; the weather is actually in charge! However, it was perfectly fine weather to keep cutting down tomato ties and removing stakes, and other fall activities in addition to our normal harvest, wash, and packing activities.
Wednesday: SUCH a busy day. The main activity was our first olive harvest, an (almost) all-hands-on-deck effort. Those olives were milled into oil that night. We’ve got a few more olive harvest days to get the rest of the olives off the trees. In the morning, the rest of the flower transplanting happened: nine beds of snapdragons, about 13,500 plants. This team was so speedy that they finished in time to also harvest olives! Next up will be all the bulbs, corms, and tubers.
Off the farm, Paul, Stephanie (our HR manager), and I attended the CalCAN (California Climate and Agriculture Network) Summit where Paul spoke on a panel about strategies for affordable and climate-resilient farmworker housing (read more about the Casas Capay Valley project here). We attended a number of other interesting sessions and caught up with some Full Belly “alumni” and friends of the Farm, plus a few CSA members, who were there!
Thursday: A beautiful, sunny Halloween day. While there aren’t official Halloween activities during the day, Rye and Becca’s family did dress up (a storm trooper, a king, a princess, and a Dalmatian, chaperoned by a headless mechanic and the Boogie Man) to do some evening trick or treating at the farm and a few neighboring houses.
Friday: Strawberries! We plant the crowns (just the stem and roots) now in plastic mulch, and they’ll form leaves and fruit in spring. And at night we got some rain, about 0.3 inches.
Saturday: We usually work a half day on Saturday but this week, we took the week off. Well, most people, not all. Animals still needed to be tended to, a few of us were in the office, and the Palo Alto market team of course was hard at work at the market like usual. This week Hannah joined to sign books and brought some extra wreaths and dried bouquets. She’ll probably be popping up at our other market locations so keep an eye out for announcements of those dates in the Beet.
What’ll this week bring?
Elaine Swiedler, CSA Manager
