Theme: Elaine Swiedler

News from the Farm | August 28, 2023

August 28, 2023

August is the busiest month on the farm with a never-ending list of things to do. What was keeping us busy last week?

LOTS of harvesting, packing, sorting: 

It’s been nonstop, especially for our biggest crops of the summer: melons, tomatoes, and flowers. Our heirloom tomatoes are starting to slow down, but the heirloom harvesting crew still has been hard at work harvesting, and the work won’t be winding down for a while for the crews that harvest “regular” (Early Girls, Romas, and slicers) and cherry tomatoes.  [Read more…]

News from the Farm | August 21, 2023

August 21, 2023

Among the seemingly endless fields of melons, tomatoes, winter squash, and other warm-weather crops, we currently have several fields of cover crops going strong. Yes – that photo of the lush green above was taken this morning (August 21, 2023) on an unseasonably cool, cloudy, and drizzly day; it’s not a photo from earlier this year. Cover crops aren’t just for the cooler seasons, even though that’s when we tend to talk about them most (like this deep dive into cover crops last November)! The work of feeding and caring for the soil and “growing” healthy soil never ends, so when we have the water and field space to grow summer cover crops, we do. It seems counterintuitive to take land out of production during our peak harvest time to grow a non-sellable crop, but it’s an excellent opportunity to grow a fast-growing, healthy cover crop and invest in our soil and bountiful future harvests. [Read more…]

News from the Farm | July 31, 2023

July 31, 2023

After starting tomato seeds in the greenhouse in winter, transplanting them (late) in April, staking, and tying them, plus other steps in between, it’s undeniably tomato time. Three different harvest teams (one for cherry tomatoes, one for heirlooms, and one for early girls, romas, and slicers) are busy picking, giving the packing team plenty to do. Dru and Andrew could be spotted during the week sorting tomatoes! It’s an almost overwhelming amount of tomatoes, in addition to all the other summer bounty we’re tending to, harvesting, and boxing up, and we’re making good use of all those tomato boxes we’ve made. [Read more…]

News from the Farm | July 17, 2023

July 17, 2023

Last week’s deep dive into our plastic CSA boxes and wax boxes (which you can read, or reread, here) got pretty detailed, but I realized during the rest of the week that we’d barely scratched the surface when it comes to boxes and packaging. The Beet could probably focus on some aspect of packaging and post-harvest handling every week! But that would get boring pretty quickly.  [Read more…]

News from the Farm | July 10, 2023

July 10, 2023

This week marks a CSA milestone: ten years ago, we stopped using waxed cardboard boxes for the CSA and started using the green plastic “Stop Waste” boxes*. We call them our “Stop Waste” boxes because the initial box purchase was aided by a grant from StopWaste. At the time of the switch, Judith wrote “this is a trial run” and since we’re still using them a decade later, it seems that the trial was a success. So this week, it’s a deep dive on boxes, accompanied by a smattering of vintage box photos from the past ten years. [Read more…]

News from the Farm | June 26, 2023

June 26, 2023

With the solstice this past Wednesday, it’s officially summer. But without the calendar reminder, you’d be forgiven for not realizing. We’re due for some classic June Yolo County heat later this week, but so far, it’s been remarkably temperate and cool, only in the 80s, and slightly brisk in the morning, chilly enough to wear a sweatshirt or vest.

But if you look a little closer, the signs are there that we’re in summer mode, or at least gearing up for summer, even if it’s been a slow start. [Read more…]

News from the Farm | June 19, 2023

June 19, 2023

Seeing rolls of twine at the end of a tomato field means someone is about to tie tomatoes, someone is tying tomatoes, or someone just finished tying tomatoes. 

Once we’ve staked the plants (refresher, plus video, on that process here), the next step of the tomato growing process is tying. Tomatoes are large, vine-like plants that need some extra handling so that they aren’t a mess of plants and fruit sprawled on the ground. 

[Read more…]

News from the Farm | June 12, 2023

June 12, 2023

The members of the Full Belly bike gang (Waylon and Oakley) wanted to collaborate on the Beet this week, so after a quick planning meeting late morning on Wednesday, we decided that the three of us would head out on a bike ride around the farm, take some photos, and I’d write up what we saw.  [Read more…]

News from the Farm | June 5, 2023

June 5, 2023

During the course of the year, we include some pretty cute animal photos in the Beet, like Dandelion (above) born late last week, and all the lambs earlier this spring. 

But some of the little plants give the animals a run for their money, especially the big order of transplants that we got this week. Can you guess what they are? [Read more…]

News from the Farm | May 29, 2023

May 29, 2023

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.

[Read more…]

News from the Farm | May 22, 2023

May 22, 2023

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…]

News from the Farm | May 15, 2023

May 15, 2023

What a week! We started off with a grey, drizzly, somewhat cold Monday and on Saturday, our last workday of the week, it was in the mid-90s at the hottest point of the day. And we had some beautiful, temperate spring days in between. 

When it gets hot, that means it’s time to shear the sheep! This year, our sheep-shearer-in-chief, Rye, set up shop in the walnut orchard instead of moving the sheep across the road to the sheep barn. It was a much more pleasant experience for everyone, shearer and the shear-ees. Though there’s no getting around the fact that it’s long, hard work. It takes even an experienced shearer like Rye a few minutes to shear each sheep (4.5 for a compliant sheep without belly wool, but it can take much longer) and there’s 90 of them to shear (just the ewes, not the lambs), plus extra time to clean and lubricate the clippers, change clipper blades (about ever 10 sheep), round up the sheep, plus time to stand up, stretch, and drink some water. So it’s a process split over two days.  [Read more…]

News from the Farm | May 8, 2023

May 8, 2023

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…]

News from the Farm | May 1, 2023

May 1, 2023

As mentioned last week, the major activity recently has been transplanting. We’re still behind schedule, but we’ve gotten a LOT of plants in the ground, including thousands of melons, squash, and cucumbers on Friday. None of that is possible without a lot of behind the scenes work in the greenhouse where we grow those transplants.  [Read more…]

News from the Farm | April 24, 2023

April 24, 2023

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…]

News from the Farm | April 17, 2023

April 17, 2023

This past week, felt more like a normal spring week. After so many non-normal weeks, it took a little adjusting to – the sun and warmth, the faster pace, and even the sounds.

The most noticeable noise was the constant hum of tractors. All functioning machines were in use, preparing beds for planting, spraying compost tea in the orchard, or cultivating (farmer lingo for weeding), and there is a lot more to do after such a long period of time when it was too wet to use tractors.  [Read more…]

News from the Farm | April 3, 2023

April 3, 2023

 

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…]

News from the Farm | March 27, 2023

March 27, 2023

March is Women’s History Month, in addition to being the month when National Ag Week (March 21-27), National Ag Day (March 23), and International Women’s Day (March 8) are observed. Every day is an excellent opportunity to recognize and celebrate the countless women working on farms and ranches to provide food (plus flowers, fuel, fiber, and countless ecosystem services) to our communities.  [Read more…]

News from the Farm | March 20, 2023

March 20, 2023

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…]

News from the Farm | February 27, 2023

February 27, 2023

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…]

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