Certified Organic Vegetables, Fruit, Flowers & Wool Since 1985
Remember those tomatoes we transplanted a month ago? The work isn’t done once they’ve been transplanted; tomatoes also need to be staked and tied, and we’ve just finished staking both fields of tomatoes. We’ve planted a third field of tomatoes, but those aren’t tall enough yet to stake.
It’s new potato time! We’ve just started harvesting our spring 2023 potato crop, and if you aren’t excited yet, hopefully you will be by the time your finish this week’s News from the Farm. [Read more…]
For this week’s News from the Farm, a few notes about the greenhouses that didn’t make it into last week’s dive into the greenhouse. If you missed, or skipped, last week’s News from the Farm, you can read it here.
First: seeding. Each planting flat holds a lot of seeds. Most of our trays have 200 cells and each cell needs to be filled, and with just one seed. This can be done by hand, and for many years, we did all of our seeding by hand. But roughly 15 years ago, we got a vacuum seeder and we now use that for as much planting as we can. [Read more…]
It’s supposed to get pretty toasty later this week! Forecasts change, and can be wrong, but as of Monday morning, the prediction is that it will be above 90 degrees later this week. Good thing we planted more heat-loving summer crops last week (onions, basil, summer squash, and a whole field of heirloom tomatoes) that can take advantage of that heat. We’re behind schedule (we usually plant them two to four weeks earlier) but better late than never. [Read more…]
I don’t want to jinx anything, but it seems like it might finally be spring. The calendar said spring started on March 20, but it sure hasn’t felt like it. Last Monday was freezing cold and we had more rain during the week. The forecast is showing warmer days ahead, and no rain, so we’ll finally be able to make some progress on our backlog of mowing, bed prep, planting (transplanting and direct seeding), and weeding. Among all that work, I hope we all have time to enjoy the sights of spring because it’s a beautiful time of year. Too beautiful not to share! Here’re some of the signs of spring from the past few days: [Read more…]
Today (Monday) is the first day of Spring. As Carly wrote last week, so far, 2023 has been a year of more cold days, grey skies, freezing nights, wind, hail, snow, and, of course, lots of rain. Just in the last two weeks we’ve had at least seven inches of rain, and we got 1.5 inches between late Monday night and early afternoon Tuesday. Water levels in Cache Creek rose dramatically, a combination of runoff and a water release from the Clear Lake Reservoir, and there was a lot of standing water around the farm, especially on roads and in the furrows between rows (where we drive tractors and walk when weeding/harvesting), really highlighting how differently compacted and uncompacted soils handle water. Within 24 hours, the creek levels had gone down and almost all of the standing water had been absorbed. It was quite a dramatic change! [Read more…]
We’re very used to seeing fluffy white almond blossoms at the end of February, but fluffy white snow is an anomaly. Snow in the Capay Valley is rare, but does happen on occasion, and it’s not uncommon to see snow high in the hills to the west. We can’t remember all the dates, and our Beet archives don’t provide a complete record but we definitely had snow in January 2002, January 2008, and January 2011, and other years too. In fact, the only time we’ve ever cancelled CSA deliveries (over 20 years ago) was due to snow – do any long-time CSA members remember when that was? And now we can add February 23rd and 24th, 2023 to that list! Snow started falling late Thursday night and on Friday morning, we woke up to snow on the ground. We didn’t need to cancel the CSA this time; we were able to get all the CSA boxes, tulips, and non-CSA orders harvested on Friday and then most folks went home early. [Read more…]
While it’s tempting to have an update solely comprised of adorable lamb photos, we’ve recently gotten questions about a few things that I wanted to address first! [Read more…]
On Thursday, I went for a bike ride with the Full Belly bike gang to see what was happening around the farm. What did we see? A lot of pruning happening. [Read more…]
Last week we found ourself facing a classic winter scenario; there was rain in the forecast, though the forecasts kept shifting, and lots of transplanting to do. In addition to lots of weeding. But – we had horribly strong winds early in the week with very cold morning temperatures forecast for later in the week. Wind and cold temperatures aren’t good for vulnerable young transplants. So it meant lots of weeding in the wind early in the week and then an (almost) all hands on deck effort to transplant on Wednesday and Thursday after temperatures warmed up enough. [Read more…]
We appreciate everyone checking in to see how we’re doing. We’ve gotten a lot of water, 16 inches since January 1, and some strong winds, but we’re doing fine. Our crew was able to get to and from work without incident and we finished up early each day to get everyone home where they could take off their rain gear and boots and dry out and warm up. Shorter days does mean less pay, but that’s better than no work, as was the case at some other farms. The delivery drivers were able to safely navigate the roads and drop off produce and CSA orders, and our three farmers market teams had safe, successful, though not dry, days. There are some very soggy areas of the farm, and little rivers and waterfalls all around the Capay Valley that normally aren’t there, but no damage here. There were many flooded roads in Yolo County and some temporary closures on Highway 16, and plenty of people taking advantage of the sandbag supplies at the local fire stations. [Read more…]
It seems like just yesterday we were wrapping up the 2022 season. Yet almost a month has passed and here we are, back from our winter break. Everyone took some time off, an opportunity to shake up our normal routines and get off the farm. Hopefully we’re all well-rested and ready to dive into another year of farming and all the other tasks required to make the “magic” happen. [Read more…]
I’m never going to claim that our fall colors are anything like the Northeast, Colorado, or some of the other famous fall foliage areas, but we do have some nice colors this time of year. The peach trees have turned a yellow/orange color that seems to glow near sunset, the pomegranate trees have turned yellow, and there are some stunning red Chinese pistache trees around the farm. I didn’t get a good picture but you can view photos here or here. [Read more…]
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