Theme: CSA

News From the Farm | February 22, 2021

February 22, 2021

The first day of Spring is officially not until March 20, but there’s a feeling in the air that Spring is right around the corner.  In a worrisome note, this has been one of the driest winters we’ve seen.

It’s Community Supported Agriculture Week!

Technically, it’s CSA Week at Full Belly Farm for all but four weeks of the year, but this is the week that many farms and farm support organizations across the country will be promoting CSAs and encouraging people to join. For CSAs that don’t operate year-round, this time of year is a popular time to sign up new members in advance of starting in the spring. We’re in a different situation – we do our CSA year-round and we bring on new members on a rolling basis (instead of requiring members to join for a whole year/season). We also currently are doing just fine on membership and have a waiting list for the first time since starting the CSA in 1992, but we still think CSAs are worth celebrating and talking about. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | February 8, 2021

February 8, 2021

Lamb  Count:  This morning the lambing crew reported that we have 108 lambs born so far, including 17 sets of  triplets.  This photo shows Dru feeding the “bummers” — lambs whose Moms needed a little helping hand taking care of the babies.  —  

Our farming cycle is very linked to the annual calendar cycle and it is a thing for us at Full Belly, before a New Year is in full swing, to look back at what has been learned the year before, hoping to inform our activities in the year to come.  Part of that thinking is to review the CSA boxes from the previous year, imagining a household that got a box every week: What did our members eat from the farm in a year of 2020 boxes? [Read more…]

News From the Farm | January 18, 2021

January 18, 2021

As 2021 starts finding its way, I look forward to another year here on the Full Belly patch of land. I love the cool season when bunched greens, beets, carrots and broccoli are on the harvest list, crops that have a less urgent, a less demanding nature than summer’s heavy hitters like tomatoes and melons (I love those too, in their time!) Cooler weather, with its calmer harvest schedule, opens up time for projects, like expanding and rebuilding the flower cooler in the packing shed, something that has been on the list for some years now. This, and other investments in the future of the farm provide a reminder that we have much to be grateful for. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | May 25, 2020

May 25, 2020

Cooking Out of the Box

One of the common reasons that people become members of a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program is because they want to have access to healthy, fresh, organic produce.  I’ve always loved the beginning paragraph from the 1964 edition of the Joy of Cooking because it links good food and good health so well: [Read more…]

News From the Farm | March 2, 2020

March 2, 2020

Our two pigs were moved into new green pasture over the weekend, which makes them very happy.  This is Winona — she is pregnant, soon to have piglets!  —  

What you ate last year…

The CSA  boxes reflect for our members what it taking place at the farm.  Long-time members know the patterns well.  Cold weather brings greens and roots.  Hot weather brings tomatoes and melons.  There are both similarities and changes from one year to the next and from one week to the next.  Sometimes we can surprise even our long-time members with something new, but many households have their favorite ways of eating every single item in the box.   [Read more…]

News From the Farm | November 18, 2019

November 18, 2019

Hello Fellow CSA Members,

As the year draws to an end, it is once again time for a report from the Charlotte Maxwell Clinic (CMC) which provides free integrative health services to low-income women who are living with a diagnosis of cancer. The produce boxes donated each week by Full Belly Farm and its CSA members who donate a skipped vacation box or add a box when they renew are visible manifestation of support and kindness, and they are received with joy. 

Earlier this year CMC moved into a beautiful, welcoming new space. The rooms are light, airy, and bright with color. During each shift, when they arrive for their acupuncture, bodywork, herbal healing, or other services, CMC clients can pick up fresh FBF produce to take home for themselves and their families.  [Read more…]

News From the Farm | April 1, 2019

April 1, 2019

Prom Corsage? (Thank you Margaret Dollbaum, for this photo!) 

The weather prediction is that early April will bring more late rain and coolish weather to our already soaked and saturated soils.  These late spring rains have made it impossible to prepare our fields for planting, let alone get crops started for spring. In some years, our Mediterranean climate provides windows during the winter and early spring that allow us to prepare ground, plant seeds and keep a lineup of a few crops coming, but in other years, like this one, there are no openings, and we can’t work our fields because they are wet.  So we are slowly harvesting our way through each and every field of crops planted before the rain started, with one eye on the weather reports and the other on the calendar. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | March 11, 2019

March 11, 2019

Shhhh… don’t let anyone know but I love my job. I love our farm, I love all the people I work with, I love going to the farmers markets, I feel blessed to be able to help each day to make this farm productive and beautiful. I feel good about what I do everyday. I believe in my life and work each morning when I awake and even more so when I fall asleep. Strange, I know, but true. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | February 11, 2019

February 11, 2019

Stop Plastic Bags!

One advantage of being a CSA member that you may not have thought about is the very significant amount of waste that is removed from the landfill by a CSA program compared to the grocery store alternative.  We have done a little bit of analysis, comparing the packaging for the first 4 CSA boxes of the year to the packaging that we would have used if we had sold the same produce to stores, restaurants and wholesalers instead. If we had sold to stores, we would have packed the produce into 1,095 waxed cardboard boxes, 319 non-waxed cardboard boxes and 61 plastic 25-lb bags! The plastic bags and waxed cardboard boxes generally end up in the landfill so the CSA results in a pretty significant reduction in the waste stream.   [Read more…]

News From the Farm | February 4, 2019

February 4, 2019

Three  beds of tulips have all started to bloom at once, the first flowers available for 2019. They will be available at our farmers markets: Berkeley on Tuesday afternoon; San Rafael on Thursday morning and Palo Alto on Saturday morning. 

What You Ate Last Year  – On our Full Belly web site in our description of our Community Supported Agriculture program, we promise that if you join, you will “eat the freshest, most nutritious fruits and vegetables available.”  There are lots of ways to parse that promise, but this week we’re going to take a look at our program using a pretty straightforward metric:  What did we deliver to you in your boxes last year? [Read more…]

News From the Farm | December 3, 2018

December 3, 2018

This is your last box of 2018!

Full Belly’s CSA project was started in 1992 and since then has been one of the mechanisms for connecting us with a community beyond the farm.  The fruits, flowers and vegetables in the CSA boxes deliver healthy and fresh nutrition to families within a hundred mile radius.  But sometimes I think of the boxes as something much more than that  — a subtle kind of inoculation perhaps…  At first, a member may think that it is just some healthy organic food that they signed up for.  Before long, if they stick with the relationship, they may find that there is a whole lot more to unpack from the green plastic boxes. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | October 8, 2018

October 8, 2018

Getting your produce directly from a local farmer is a radically different way to shop than going to a grocery store.  You are trusting the farmer to choose your produce for you, you are investing in the farm in advance (thus venturing into a long-term relationship… gulp), you are cooking much more fresh and unprocessed food, and you are eating seasonally.  That seasonal element may mean that even though in the course of a year you will taste a very high diversity of fruits and vegetables, the experience from week-to-week can bring some repetition.  [Read more…]

News From the Farm | March 26, 2018

March 26, 2018

Open Farm Day

Saturday 3/24 was Open Farm Day at Full Belly Farm.  We all had a lot of fun.  Delicious pizza, fresh orange juice made on the spot, kite-flying, playing in the brook and listening to the frogs, tours of the fields, lamb petting, and playing and picnicking on the grass.  It was a warm, beautiful spring day.  CSA members received a jar of marmalade made from our Full Belly oranges. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | March 5, 2018

March 5, 2018

Open Farm Day Saturday March 24

Full Belly Farm Open Farm Day is coming up soon on Saturday March 24th.  It is likely to be a beautiful Spring day, perfect for an outing to the country.  It is your opportunity to enjoy the lovely flowers growing in our farm fields, visit our lambs, take a tour of the farm, and picnic on pizza from our wood-fired oven.

A visit to your local family farm is a way to get back in touch with where your food is coming from. Maybe you will figure out something more about the people who are growing the cabbage, potatoes and collards that you get every week in your CSA box. Or maybe you will enjoy the opportunity to smell a handful of the soil at Full Belly — soil that has been managed organically since 1985. Maybe you will just want to bring a friend and picnic on the green lawn in the Spring sun, a time to get away from city sounds. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | February 5, 2018

February 5, 2018

What did the CSA member have to eat for dinner?

No, this is not the first line of a joke — “What did the CSA member have to eat for dinner… I don’t know, what? Cabbage, Squash and Arugula of course…”  No, this is our annual report on how we fed our members last year, and it shows that members had a healthy dose of variety and nutrition!

Here are the top ten items that were in the 2017 Full Belly CSA Box:

Greens (Chard, Kale, Asian Greens, Collards, Arugula)

Fruit (Oranges, Grapes, Pomegranates, Peaches, Pears, Plums, Apricots, Figs and Strawberries)

Carrots

Potatoes

Winter Squash (Butternut, Delicata, Kabocha, Red Kuri, Acorn, Honeynut, Spahghetti, Sweet Dumpling)

Salad Mix and Lettuce

Melons

Beets

Tomatoes and Cherry Tomatoes

Cabbage (green, Napa, red and Savoy) [Read more…]

News From the Farm | January 15, 2018

January 15, 2018

The first week back from the Full Belly break brought more than it’s share of CSA mix-ups, culminating when one of our drivers delivered CSA boxes to the wrong site!  By the time our office staff found out, the driver (who was filling in for the regular staff) was long gone and members were wondering where their veggies were.  Luckily, one of our kind and generous members volunteered to ferry the boxes back to their correct location, while in the background the host (who was out of town) offered support and encouragement. So we got it all straightened out, but the adventure really brought home to us the way that this CSA program relies on the contributions of so many people — the wonderful hosts who allow our members to pick up veggies at their homes or businesses, and our members who have patience learning how it works and who cooperate and collaborate to make it a success.

Thank you to all of you, and a special thank you to the heroes of our first week in 2018, member Jenny Postich who drove our CSA boxes to their correct location, and Danville Host Kerri Heusler who was able to provide up-to-date intelligence using her porch camera, from her remote site out of town. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | November 13, 2017

November 13, 2017

Getting Dinner on the Table

Years ago at a Farmers Market, one of our CSA members opened his CSA box and said to me, sounding a bit exasperated, “I just need to get dinner on the table after work so the kids can go to bed on time.”   I don’t remember what it was about the box that he was responding to, but his comment worried me.  We hear similar expressions of frustration whenever we put too many pomegranates in the box — “So much time, so little return” –– or when there is 1/2 pound of spinach and the cook needs a whole pound to complete a chosen recipe.  

I have come to realize that we are in our own private produce reality at Full Belly, cracking open watermelons in the heat of the summer and devouring them whole, or crunching our way through an entire bunch of carrots from our ‘quality control’ CSA box before the rest of the vegetables have even been noticed.  You can find snacking-bowls full of pomegranate seeds in most of the kitchens around the farm these days, and huge oversized cabbages greeted with comments like, “I LOVE cabbage!” Full Belly interns often arrive at the farm with very little experience of beets, chard, rutabaga or daikon — but each of them is assigned to cook lunch for several dozen farm hands once a week.  Of course the results are varied, but I do think that those that arrive saying they can’t cook and don’t want to, leave the farm with more kitchen-confidence. [Read more…]

Looks Delicious!

July 31, 2017

July 31, 2017

Sarah from one of our Sacramento CSA sites shared this photo with us. She said it’s Full belly pie crust, eggplant and basil!!

Letters

July 31, 2017

I have been a contented Fully Belly Farm CSA subscriber for many years.  I also have a blog which often features produce from the Full Belly CSA veggie box, and I like to link to Full Belly through my recipes.  My blog is called recipemuse.wordpress.com, and I’ll include a link to my latest entry, “Carrot Salad with Lavender and Thyme.”  It uses the fabulously beautiful carrots from my box last week.    

Just wanted to let you see how I’m using the bounty of my veggie boxes.  Thank you!

Yours, Penny  –  Cornell Ave, Albany site

News From the Farm | July 17, 2017

July 17, 2017

This past spring I had the honor of taking a UC Berkeley design thinking class called Eat.Think.Design! To a degree I’d never imagined, it was intimate, hands-on, edgily interdisciplinary, upended established ways of thinking, an intentional community, out to better the world through food.  I got my first choice project team – Fair Labor Produce: working through empathy, interviews, research, prototyping, and play to increase transparency around labor conditions for farm workers in the Salinas region.  Judith was a great resource.

A few weeks before the big Innovation Feast, where we presented our projects to a diverse audience, came the best class of all. Homework: Bring a food to share with the class that is meaningful to you, and come tell what it means.  This most basic of human experience – sharing who we are, through food.  A crockpot, a toaster oven, chaat made of fish parts, mangos five ways, stories about falling in love, stories about finding out who we are, stories about food aboard a submarine, stories about a home far away.  The community that we had become grew twice as deep that night. [Read more…]

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