Organic Vegetables, Fruit, Flowers & Wool
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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!!
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