Theme: equipment

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.

[Read more…]

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 | September 16, 2024

September 16, 2024

The fall equinox is this upcoming Sunday and we’ve got a week of cooler, autumnal weather in the forecast. In order to have something to harvest when summer crops slow down, we have to plant in the August and September heat. Hot temperatures stress transplants and many seeds won’t germinate in high temperatures, so cooler temperatures are very welcome. Otherwise, we have to be vigilant with watering, using our sprinklers to keep the soil damp and cool enough for seed germination.

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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…]

Tomato Harvest

July 17, 2017

Paul invented and manufactured this cart for our tomato crews so that they don’t have to carry boxes out of the field 4 at a time — instead they can stack 15 on the cart at once and wheel the tomatoes out of the field.

Weeding on the Farm

May 29, 2017

Organic farmers are always looking for ways to cut down on hand-weeding.  The machine shown in these photos is a finger weeder that we got recently and have been learning to use. The “fingers” allow us to get much closer to the plants than do other tools.  The photo shows us weeding young onions.

News From the Farm | January 9, 2017

January 9, 2017

A note about our ‘Stop Waste’ boxes

Welcome back to Full Belly veggies!  We hope that you had some wonderful meals during our holiday rest.  We are excited to be your fruit and vegetable farmers for 2017.  We appreciate all of you who are continuing members, as well as all of you who are trying out a Full Belly CSA box for the first time.  We have had a lot of rain and some nice cold weather over the last few weeks, so our fields are muddy, slowing down the process of getting your veggies out of the field, to be washed, and packed.  You may notice that the cold weather brings out the sweetness in our greens and carrots.

One of the chores of our winter break every year, is to collect and count our inventory of ‘Stop Waste’ CSA boxes.  For our members who have been with us for awhile, the hard plastic green boxes that we pack your vegetables in, are old friends.  We call them our Stop Waste boxes, because they are an alternative to the ubiquitous waxed cardboard boxes, usually used to pack produce, that go straight to the landfill after use.  But the hard plastic boxes are expensive — we paid $12.25 for each one when we first purchased them in 2013, so we try to encourage all of our members, including those who get home delivered veggies, to make sure that all of the boxes are returned to the farm. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | November 16, 2015

November 16, 2015

Please Return Our Green ‘Stop Waste’ Boxes

Full Belly used to pack your CSA fruits and veggies into waxed cardboard boxes. Now we use the hard plastic, green ‘Stop Waste’ boxes.  We made this change in late 2013 because although we were able to reuse the waxed cardboard boxes a few times, they had to go to the landfill once they started to break down. Because of the wax coating, they were not recyclable and without the wax coating they really didn’t hold up for more than one use. The hard plastic Stop Waste totes that we use now have proven extremely durable — we are not aware of even one box that has broken since they were purchased.  That means that these boxes can be used over and over again. 

Every week, for 48 weeks of the year, 1,100 families get a Full Belly CSA box. That’s a lot of boxes (52,000 — but who’s counting!) We calculate that more than 6 tons of cardboard waste are avoided every year as a result of replacing the waxed cardboard with the permanent hard plastic boxes.  We used an Environmental Protection Agency Greenhouse Gas Emissions calculator and estimate that switching from waxed cardboard boxes to reusable plastic totes has resulted in an annual rate of greenhouse gas emission reductions of 34.1 tons.  So the program is a success in many respects. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | Week of July 15, 2013

July 15, 2013

We hope that you like the new Stop Waste CSA Box that we have put into use this week! The goal of replacing the waxed cardboard boxes that we have been using is to eliminate the waste of sending them to the landfill.

Most produce is shipped from farms in single use containers. The predominant container is a waxed box, the wax being necessary because un-waxed boxes will not hold up stacked on a pallet when they are full of wet and iced produce. Waxed boxes cannot be recycled and are rarely composted. They generally end up in the landfill.

For farmers markets and many restaurants, Full Belly packs our boxes into permanent plastic totes, so why not do that for our CSA members as well? The trick will be that since every Stop Waste CSA Box is worth $12, every CSA member will have to return the box faithfully, but preferably leave it at their pick-up site. [Read more…]