Theme: Elaine Swiedler

News from the Farm | August 25, 2025

As mentioned last week, this is the time of year to plant our fall crops. So far, we’ve direct seeded beets, carrots, and spinach (more about that process here), and have transplanted broccoli and leeks, with many more to come. These cool weather crops don’t like the heat, but we have to start them now. By the end of September, summer crops will be done or winding down and we need a new supply of produce to harvest for you, so we’ll be planting and transplanting a LOT over the coming two months. 

August is always hot, and September too. So how do we start growing cool-season crops during triple-digit summer days? It’s all about moisture management.

Seeds need a moist and warm (but not too warm) environment to germinate. They also need moisture. Too much water will rot the seeds, but they’ll fry if there’s too little. Water also helps with temperature control. Optimal carrot germination temperature is in the mid-70s, but if it’s over 100 degrees, as it’s been the past few days, the soil is far above that optimal temperature for all but a few hours. We also use floating row cover, the white, lightweight fabric in the photo above. Row cover is most often used in colder months to trap in heat and protect plants from frost, but a lightweight summer version reduces the intensity of the sun, similar to what the shade cloth does for our peppers. The particularly finicky carrots get the row cover, but the other direct seeded crops just get water.

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News from the Farm | August 18, 2025

While keeping incredibly busy harvesting summer produce, we’ve also got fall on our minds and lots of fall prep on our To Do lists!

We’re starting to cut and cure winter squash. The first samples showed up in the office last week. It happens every year around this time, but still feels like a surprise. And it also feels a little early to start cooking with winter squash, but regardless how we feel, they’re here!

Paul started planting potatoes (top left photo), the first brassicas (broccoli) were transplanted last week, along with a field of leeks (top right), and Andrew planted the first carrots on Saturday (lower photo)! The planting and transplanting will continue in earnest over the next few weeks. In addition to finding the time to plant, the trick is keeping these cool weather crops happy in non-cool weather. The carrots especially need a bit more tending to than some crops to germinate and thrive. They’ll get about an hour of water per day to keep the soil moist enough to germinate the seeds and we cover them with row cover to help keep in the moisture.

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News from the Farm | August 11, 2025

It’s estimated that there are 50,000 pepper varieties grown worldwide. We grow only a small portion of that diverse world. What we grow changes every year – I’ve conducted a pepper census and here’s the 2025 list: 

Sweet

  • Corno de Toro
  • Lunchbox
  • Jimmy Nardello
  • Sheepnose pimento
  • Shishito

Hot

  • Cayenne
  • Chilaca
  • Espelette
  • Jalapeño
  • Pepperoncini
  • Poblano
  • Serrano
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News from the Farm | August 4, 2025

Hello from the tomato field! It’s more of a sea of tomatoes, or perhaps a jungle. If we didn’t use a hedge trimmer to keep things tidy, the vines would grow so wild that the rows would be impassable. The air smells like tomatoes, and many happy and industrious spiders have strung webs between the rows. 

The spiders aren’t the only happy ones. The tomatoes are too; they’ve benefited from one of the mildest summers we’ve had in a long time. Tomatoes like some heat but they stop growing when it gets warmer than 95℉ and drop flowers if it gets too hot, especially if nighttime temperatures exceed 72℉. We’ve been much closer to the ideal growing range this year and the plants are vigorous and healthy and the tomatoes taste great. And you’ve been letting us know how much you’re enjoying the tomatoes in your boxes:

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News from the Farm | 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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