Organic Vegetables, Fruit, Flowers & Wool
Farming can be difficult, in addition to awe-inspiring and rewarding. Last week was pretty tame but we still dealt with fierce north winds, equipment issues, pest pressure, COVID-19, a delivery truck with a flat tire, and internet and email issues, just to name a few things. Worry about the short-term and long-term implications of the drought and climate change are never far off. [Read more…]
In addition to lambing season, and growing and harvesting what’s in the fields, this is a time of year when we’re making a lot of decisions about what to grow the rest of the year, along with ordering and receiving a lot of seeds. There are so many crops and varieties – how to choose? [Read more…]
As you’ve realized by now, we grow great carrots. Perhaps the greatest carrots. They’ve long been one of my favorite things that we grow, ever since my first Full Belly carrot in my family’s CSA box, and I eagerly await when they’re ready to harvest each year. If you’ve ever wondered the process of growing our amazing carrots, read on! [Read more…]
And we’re back! 2021 is wrapped up and done and hopefully we’re all are rested up from our break and ready to dive in to 2022 full speed. [Read more…]
Carrots!
We’re closing in on the end the year! After this week, we’ve got two more weeks until our winter break, with a teaser this weekend when most of us have Thursday, Friday, and Saturday off –– the exceptions are the Saturday farmers market crew, our hard-working delivery drivers, and the folks who care for our animals, who will be working.
The news from Full Belly Farm is: RAIN. Between Thursday night and Monday morning, we got about 7 inches of rain, with 6 inches coming between Saturday afternoon and Sunday night. That is a lot of rain to receive all at once and is more than we received last winter and spring. Right now (Monday morning) there’s some water in the creek, muddy roads and lots of puddles everywhere, but most of the standing water in the fields and orchards has already started to sink it. Still, it’ll be a while before we can get tractors out into the fields; we don’t want to get them stuck or compact our soil. There was a lot of frenetic work on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday last week to finish the walnut harvest, sow cover crops, transplant onions, flowers and almost 20,000 anemone and ranunculus corms, and everything else that needed to happen before it rained and it seemed like that was time well spent!
Creek, by Anna Brait
This past week was walnut week – marked by the hum of the machinery and the clouds of dust emanating from the orchard and full trailers of nuts. We aren’t completely done with our 2021 walnut harvest, but we’re almost there, having harvested two of our three walnut varieties and most of our 12 acres of trees.
It definitely seemed a little quieter in “downtown Full Belly Farm” this past week. But the slightly lower level of hustle and bustle compared to a month or so ago was deceptive. Plenty of work was still being done, just different work.
Some folks were clearing out summer fields (collecting tomato stakes and winding up drip tape) and others helped out the regular kitchen crew cooking winter squash and making our 2021 batch of hot sauce! The major focus of the week was getting transplants and seeds in the ground. Andrew and others zipped around on tractors with seeders or transplanters on the back. Putting seeds in the ground is a solo act but transplanting (this week, mostly cabbage and lettuce) requires a team of folks to help. Once the tractor work is done, the plants need some help to get going. The irrigators come in next. The transplants need water to keep from drying out and seeds won’t germinate without it; most of our fall and winter crops are irrigated with sprinklers, which can cover 6 rows at a time and then are moved to the next set of rows. [Read more…]
Andrew recently declared September to be the April of the fall. He meant that like April, this month is a crucial time to prepare for the next season. In April, we’re always busy getting ready for the summer. Right now, seeds must be sown, transplants put in the ground, and new plants watered and weeded in order for us to have crops in the fall and winter. All of these are key tasks over the next few weeks while we also continue to harvest our late summer produce. But this week had had accents of April even in the hot (106 on Tuesday and Wednesday) and dusty weariness of September. Why? [Read more…]
We’ve reached that time of the summer: Almost everything and everyone is pretty hot, tired, dusty, and ready for the end of summer, but we aren’t there yet. September is a very busy month that bridges summer and fall. We continue summer harvesting activities and get prepared for the cooler months by clearing old fields and planting new crops. Members of our summer crew who are students have headed back to the classroom, so our workforce has shrunk while the workload still is high. We had a bit of a reprieve from the heat and smoke last week, with blue skies and maximum temperatures in the upper 80s, and days are getting shorter and nights a little cooler, but it’s just a tease of what’s to come; we’re back in the 100s this week and have more summer ahead. [Read more…]
As always, too many options for News from the Farm for this week. Here’re just a few things to note from the past week: [Read more…]
Last week was a big one for harvesting eggplants and melons, just like the week before. It’s been a great year so far for both, in terms of yield and taste, especially the melons, and you’ve probably tasted. If you missed it, here’s the scoop on how we harvest both. And it was a big week for the flower crew too, but it’s always a big week for the flower crew. The everyone in the field is almost exclusively focused on harvesting crops, with some weeding and tractor work mixed in, and the irrigation team has plenty to do, setting up and maintaining drip tape, and moving sprinklers. The winter squash are up and some are starting to set fruit. Before we know it, we’ll be focusing on getting other fall crops in the ground, whether by direct seed or transplant, but we aren’t to that point yet.
The news from the farm from the past week is: eggplants and melons. And more eggplant and more melons. While our tomatoes are growing frustratingly slowly (we hope to have them in the boxes soon) these two crops are thriving right now and thus are worth diving into, accompanied by some photos of our crew at work.
Eggplant:
How do you harvest eggplants? With clippers, and ideally with long sleeves and gloves too since they can have thorns. Each picker has a 5-gallon bucket that they fill up and empty into the macro bins on the back of the tractor, separated by type. Right now, the eggplant plants are small enough for our tall harvest tractor to drive over them, but soon enough, they’ll be too tall to fit under, eventually growing up to four feet. Soon, the tractor will move over to one of the rows of basil we intercrop between every few eggplant rows. The rows of basil leave plenty of clearance for the tractor and attract pollinators because we leave sections to go to flower.
This crew is weeding flowers – they’ve got long sleeves and pants for sun protection and water containers close at hand.
Have you seen the weather forecast for Guinda this week? At the time of writing this (Sunday) the National Weather Service is forecasting 107 Monday, 102 on Tuesday and then “cooling down” after that to 99, 96, and a cool 95 on Friday. Last week we were in the high 80s, so this is quite the jump.
What does this kind of heat mean for us?
First – as always, we follow California laws. The US Department of Labor does not set heat laws for agriculture or any other industry. Absent Federal leadership, several states have created laws addressing heat. California passed the nation’s most stringent heat laws in 2005 after four farmworkers died from heat exposure. California farms must (1) allow time for workers to acclimate to high temperatures (2) provide at least one quart of cool water per hour per worker (3) provide rest and shade whenever temperatures exceed 80°F with mandatory breaks every 2 hours when temperatures exceed 95°F and (4) respond promptly to symptoms of possible heat illness and take immediate action to protect workers, including obtaining emergency medical care. The California regulations also require heat training for all workers and the farm must prepare a Heat Illness Prevention Plan. At Full Belly all supervisors have insulated water dispensers and disposable cups on their trucks and each employee is offered a half gallon personal insulated water container and a reusable water bottle.
It’s really exciting to be able to include some spring fruit in your boxes this week! Who doesn’t like fruit?
There’s a fair amount of work that has to happen before we get to harvesting the fruit, as with most of our crops. Strawberry transplants go in the ground in the beginning of September and then must be weeded and tended until they start bearing a crop the next spring. So they take up valuable real estate in the field long before they start paying “rent”. Strawberry plants bear fruit for multiple years but their productivity drops dramatically after the first year, so for us, they’re a one year crop. Note: strawberry jam is back and is available on the web store! [Read more…]
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