Theme: Elaine Swiedler

News from the Farm | July 14, 2025

July 14, 2025

The weekly newsletter is a great opportunity to share who we are, what we’re doing, things that we’re thinking about, and more. Yet it’s impossible to capture everything going on.

Given all that’s happening, each week presents an infinite number of possible topics for our newsletter, an exciting position to be in, albeit a bit daunting when it comes to making a choice. Plus, with the digital tools available, we’ve got words, photos, and videos at our disposal. Over the years, we’ve covered countless topics, written by many people. The newsletter, also posted on our website (13 years of archives to search through if you want!) shows that range over the years, with a definite focus on a few key themes. We’re always open to suggestions for topics, and questions that you have. Just let us know!

It is rare that we have a professionally made video (not one of my amateur efforts) with an interview with Dru and Paul to share. But this week we do! 

We’re featured in a recently released episode of Human Footprint, a PBS show that explores the ways humans are transforming the planet and what those transformations reveal about who we (humans) are. We’re part of Episode 2 of Season 2, titled “The Enemy of My Enemy”, which you can watch online for free until the end of July (here).

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News from the Farm | July 7, 2025

July 7, 2025

Potatoes, much like onions and garlic, seem to be ever present in stores, farmers markets, and even in our CSA boxes. Their ubiquity masks that, like most crops, they have specific growing and harvest seasons.

We grow two potato crops. We plant our spring crop in mid-February and the fall crop in mid-August. The fall crop often is ready starting in early November, only two and a half months. The spring crop will be ready starting in May/June, depending on when we were able to plant and the weather while they’re growing.

The first potatoes we harvest are new potatoes. These potatoes haven’t converted their simple sugars into starch and they have thin, delicate skins, meaning we have to be careful when handling them. We go through the field with an undercutter implement on the tractor, a bar that goes below the plant to loosen the soil and lift the potatoes closer to the surface (see this video for an example) where they can be picked up by our harvest crew. 

The rest of the potatoes aren’t harvested this way. Instead, once the potatoes have reached the right size, we mow the plants, terminating their growth, then we wait one to three weeks for the skins to set. Once the skins have set, we can use a mechanical harvester, a potato digger! It would be too rough on new potatoes.

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News from the Farm | June 30, 2025

June 30, 2025

We are a highly diversified farm, growing countless types of vegetables, fruits, and flowers and even within a single type of vegetable, often many varieties of each. We don’t just grow food for humans though; we’re also growing food for countless soil microorganisms and macroorganisms, including our sheep! 

Our sheep graze on fields of cover crops and vegetable crops (once we’re done harvesting them) but there are times of the year, especially in winter, when this isn’t an option so we feed them hay. For those who, like me, need a reminder, hay is cut green from the entire plant and is used for animal feed. It can be a number of different crops. We’re currently growing alfalfa for hay. Straw is just the dry stalks left behind after a grain crop is harvested and is used for bedding or mulch, not a food source. 

The Beet from two weeks ago (which you can read here) had a picture of the alfalfa crop mid harvest. After letting it dry, we got it out of the field with the help of two machines: a hay baler and a bale wagon. Here’s a video of Rye using both pieces of (very vintage and very loud) equipment:

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News from the Farm | June 23, 2025

June 23, 2025

Any guesses what this is?

It’s safflower! This brilliantly-colored, spiky flower, is a heavy hitter crop at the farm, filling FOUR roles! It’s in bloom right now, making it a perfect time to highlight it.

Safflower is one of the oldest domesticated crops and has also been used as a medicine, dye, and in food and teas. Today, safflower is most commonly grown for oil, and that’s one of the reasons we grow it. It’s a deep rooted, hearty plant that doesn’t require much water. We plant it in February in moist soil and then it’ll maybe need one more irrigation before it’s harvested in July with the combine. We save some seed for the next planting and then press the rest to make oil. The oil is cold pressed with a buttery, earthy flavor, available in 500mL and 250mL bottles. It’s a high-heat oil great for frying and making popcorn, but we like it for non-cooking applications, like salad dressings, too. 

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News from the Farm | June 16, 2025

June 16, 2025

This Friday is the first day of summer and we’re (almost) ready. The gang’s all here (almost). Last week, right on cue, several of the summer classics were ready to start harvesting. Too many to document but it gives a glimpse of what you can find this week at one of our Farmers Markets and hopefully soon, we’ll have enough to put in our CSA boxes!

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News from the Farm | June 2, 2025

June 2, 2025

Farmers love talking about the weather. With good reason – it impacts everything that happens here. In that vein: Friday and Saturday marked the first 100+ degree days, a milestone that often happens this time of year. According to the calendar, it’s still technically spring for a few more weeks and the forecast is showing cooler 90 degree days this upcoming week. After a month or two of real summer weather, even the mid 90s can start feeling cool. But it’ll be a while until it’s anything resembling cold again, usually mid October.

The characteristic Capay Valley summer heat, while unfathomably warm at times, enables such amazing melons, tomatoes, and other fruits of summer. It also helps us quickly dry our flowers to make wreaths later in the year. 

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News from the Farm | May 26, 2025

May 26, 2025

Wow – the end of May already? This notoriously busy month has been quite the whirlwind of activity, and it marks one of our many seasonal shifts. It’s a month that includes plenty of elements of spring, but this is in combination with lots of time-sensitive preparation for summer. The temperatures have risen and the pace of our work has heated up too. Our work (the tasks and the tempo) is as seasonal as the produce and flowers we grow and harvest!

One big event of May is Mother’s Day week. The flower team harvested and bunched an unfathomable number of stunning mixed bouquets and single variety bunches and since then have had more marathon days. 

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News from the Farm | May 5, 2025

May 5, 2025

The transition from April to May brings warmer weather, often ushered in, as is the case this Monday morning by fiercely strong winds. The hills dry out and transition from green to brown. It’s a notoriously busy month for us as we prepare for summer. 

What’s keeping us busy? Definitely a lot of irrigation, like in the photo above of the apricot orchard. That’s just one of many activities. Below is a brief video to capture just some of the activities happening late morning last Thursday, accompanied by a unique soundtrack:

Yes, that cacophony of noise really is what it sounds like when you stand in the sheep pen for a minute and a half!

What’s happening in these little snippets?

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News from the Farm | April 28, 2025

April 28, 2025

We’re regularly asked “so where are you located?” We’re between the towns of Guinda and Rumsey, which often elicits blank stares, as does mentioning that we’re in the Capay Valley. Sometimes mentioning Cache Creek Casino, about 15 minutes away, helps. Not everyone knows where Esparto (25 minutes away), Woodland (40 minutes), or Winters (45 minutes) are so we often mention Sacramento, Davis, or Vacaville. But we’re about an hour away from all three cities, in the most northwestern part of Yolo County. The point is, we’re rural. Not as rural and remote as you can get, but rural enough. 

On a business front, that means we’re far from our customers. We spend a lot of time on the road getting our products to the people that eat them. One of our drivers goes to and from the Bay Area daily from Tuesday through Saturday, every week. I don’t know how he does it! When it comes to getting supplies, we’re very fortunate to be so close to Woodland, a hub for agriculture supply companies and research, making it relatively easy to get whatever we need.

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News from the Farm | April 21, 2025

April 21, 2025

The idiom “like watching grass grow” means that something is dull, boring, or tedious. What about watching snapdragons grow? Or lettuce? Or potatoes? Or basil? Corn? Kale? Turnips? Apricots? Or any of our many other crops growing on the farm currently! We think that’s pretty exciting.

Growing doesn’t feel like the right word. Maybe exploding? It really feels like the plants get noticeably larger during the course of a day.

Some photos and updates to share:

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News from the Farm | April 14, 2025

April 14, 2025

Spring is a really lovely time of year here. By mid-April, everything is green, there are flowers everywhere (in our fields and wildflowers in the hills and borders of the farm), and things are growing so fast. It seems like in the course of a day, you can see noticeable plant growth!

Even faster than the plant growth is the dramatic transition from lush fields of cover crops, to something we can plant into. In fall, we planted a mix of legumes (vetch, peas, bell beans), mustards, radish, and grasses (rye and wheat), each chosen to provide a different benefit to the soil. You can read more about cover crops and why we use them here.

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News from the Farm | April 7, 2025

April 7, 2025

Last week felt like quintessential spring. We had a little bit of all the elements of early April:
spring weather (a wet and rainy day, a windy day, some warm days)
– lots to harvest
– lots of flowers 
– our first events and school groups of the year 
and more!

I challenged myself to capture as much of all the spring-ness between Thursday and Saturday in one minute to share here:

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News from the Farm | March 24, 2025

March 24, 2025

Farmers need to enjoy experimenting, or at least tolerate it, because it’s an inherent part of the job. Conditions are constantly changing; no two years are the same and the need to reevaluate and pivot are constant. We’re very open to experimenting, perhaps more than the average farm, and we have a long history of trying new things, whether it’s working with outside researchers and organizations, or internal tinkering. 

Here’re just a few of the “experiments” we’ve currently got underway:

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News from the Farm | March 17, 2025

March 17, 2025

Thursday of this week is the first day of spring! 12 hours of sunlight, halfway between the shortest and longest days of the year. Everything is very green, and very soon, our spring flower field will be an explosion of color. 

To me, it always feels like a very optimistic and hopeful time of year; lots of future food all around us and a lot of “newness.” Packets of seeds for all types of delicious summer produce keep arriving and soon will be planted in a field or in the greenhouse.

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News from the Farm | February 24, 2025

February 24, 2025

We’re a month out from the first day of spring (March 20), but it’s starting to feel spring-like. The hills and fields of cover crops are looking verdant. There’s noticeably more hours of sunlight. At the end of the workday, the sun hasn’t yet dipped below the hills. Almond, plum, apricot, and peach trees are blooming! We’ve got loads of little lambs and tulips!

But it’s not spring yet. The deciduous trees (fruit, nut, and native trees) still don’t have their leaves, so we’re not as green as we could be, and wildflowers are still sparse in the hills. We’re still six weeks from our last frost date, the average date of the last light freeze in spring. A dramatic dip in temperature could wipe out any of those flowering tree crops (almonds and stone fruit)!

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News from the Farm | February 17, 2025

February 17, 2025

What’s the photo above of? It’s an extreme closeup of purple cauliflower, taken by CSA member and longtime CSA host Dave.

This week is National CSA Week – established in 2021 as a week for celebrating and promoting CSAs. The Full Belly Farm CSA has been operating since 1992, so in many ways, the past 1,600+ weeks have been CSA weeks. That feat alone is worth acknowledging!

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News from the Farm | February 10, 2025

February 10, 2025

We got over five inches of rain last week with about 2.75 inches just on Tuesday. See Andrew’s rain gauge above. (Dry) January is over! We were all glad to get some rain, though it meant some cold, grey, damp days, even with rain coats, pants, and boots. On rainy days, the goal is to pick and pack what we need for CSA boxes, orders, and farmers markets and then head out, no other field work.

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News from the Farm | January 27, 2025

January 27, 2025

Winter is the season for leafy greens, brassicas, and root vegetables. It’s also the time of year for farmer conferences, seminars, meetings, and other opportunities to meet and gather for educational and social purposes.

This was on display last week: 

On Tuesday, Andrew attended the annual meeting for the Irrigated Lands Program, a state-wide, locally administered program to control runoff from farms. While not particularly interesting and inspiring, it’s a requirement, and sometimes there are important updates about program details.

Then midday on Tuesday was the second installment of the Organic Agriculture Seminar Series for Growers, administered by our local UC Cooperative Extension specialists. Winter is when UC Extension, and other ag support organizations, hold classes and trainings, usually targeted at specific sectors. So far I’ve been able to watch the two seminars, covering soil macrofauna (like worms) and pest management, and I’ve really enjoyed them (including the “bioturbation” videos, like this one).

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News from the Farm | January 20, 2025

January 20, 2025

What’s the news of the past week?

Well… like all first weeks back, it was busy: lots of new CSA members, lots of excited customers placing orders, and lots to harvest and weed. And as you can imagine, after taking a few weeks off, it takes us a second to get back up to full speed. Plus there’s always some sort of technology issue to fix (printer problems, email issues, time clock tumult). All things considered, it was a pretty normal week and it was nice to see everyone again.

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News from the Farm | January 13, 2025

January 13, 2025

It’s the first farming week of the year! Welcome back to returning CSA members, and welcome to the many new folks joining our Community! We’re excited for you to get your first boxes.

After four weeks off, we’re ready to start picking, washing, packing, weeding, seeding, and all the other tasks that are needed to get our produce to your tables. The bright, sunny, dry days are quite a change from the rainy, grey, muddy conditions as we started our break. Cover crops have germinated and most fields are covered with some amount of green.

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