Theme: farm update

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 | June 16, 2025

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

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

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

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 21, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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 10, 2025

February 10, 2025

We got over five inches of rain last week with about 2.75 inches just on Tuesday. See Andrew’s rain gauge above. (Dry) January is over! We were all glad to get some rain, though it meant some cold, grey, damp days, even with rain coats, pants, and boots. On rainy days, the goal is to pick and pack what we need for CSA boxes, orders, and farmers markets and then head out, no other field work.

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News from the Farm | February 4, 2025

February 4, 2025

Dear CSA members and Full Belly Farm supporters,     

This Monday, February 3, our entire field crew of 60 amazing people did not come to work. They joined a nationwide groundswell “Day Without Immigrants” movement hoping to shed light on the economic and social contributions of our immigrant community to the entire US economy.

Our crew chose to stop work for a day protesting the fear and direct intimidation that has been thrust upon the entire immigrant and in particular the Hispanic community. The dehumanizing and inflammatory rhetoric characterizing all brown-skinned people as suspect criminals is overtly racist and destructive to an entire national community of people who work in our kitchens, clean hotels, care for elderly, milk cows, are ’dreamers’, or pick oranges and vegetables. 

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News from the Farm | January 20, 2025

January 20, 2025

What’s the news of the past week?

Well… like all first weeks back, it was busy: lots of new CSA members, lots of excited customers placing orders, and lots to harvest and weed. And as you can imagine, after taking a few weeks off, it takes us a second to get back up to full speed. Plus there’s always some sort of technology issue to fix (printer problems, email issues, time clock tumult). All things considered, it was a pretty normal week and it was nice to see everyone again.

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News from the Farm | December 9, 2024

December 9, 2024

The whole crew at last week’s end of the year lunch with our new sweatshirts!

The last CSA deliveries of the year! The final markets too! As we head to the 14th of December, 2024, we are looking forward to a break– as maybe you all are also. Maybe just now you are thinking of the freedom to cruise the wide aisles of your Safeway or Whole Foods and be tempted by the December plums or peaches from far off lands- or asparagus, tomatoes or grapes that might break the potato winter squash dark leafy green lettuce cabbage carrot monotony of a Full Belly CSA Share. For us, in the same moment, we will be looking forward to tending a quiet farm, without the tug of crops demanding attention or the chaotic hustle of crews racing to fields to fill orders- picking/bunching/digging for your table… Though you may appreciate the freedom of shopping your favorite produce aisle, (we have to admit that) we will miss you, but appreciate the quiet of this generous land.

Our crew will be out of here hours after we close for our winter break. Most will be heading off to see family. They are ready for extended time off, enduring a year of working 5½ days per week since January.  Almost all have seen an increase in wages here and have benefited from overtime after working a 40 hour week. The new minimum wage and overtime rules for those who labor in our fields has been applied to all farmers, creating better wages and a level playing field across California farms. We remain intent on building a model for equity and security in housing for our crew here.  

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News from the Farm | December 2, 2024

December 2, 2024
a field at sunset

Somehow it’s December and we find ourselves almost at the end of another year. Time flies when you’re having fun. And/or when you’re really busy farming. We’ve got this week, next week, and then a four-week break (until the week of January 13).

The weather and surroundings make it clear that seasons are changing. The sun is noticeably weaker, and it gets dark so early. The trees have been turning colors and losing their leaves. The hills haven’t yet turned green, and the fields of cover crops have yet to germinate, so things are looking a little brown. We know that things will look very different very soon, but it takes time. 

Now that things are drying out, we can do more transplanting (lots of starts in the greenhouse!), planting (plenty of summer crop fields that need cover crop seed!), and taking down summer fields (mowing, pulling drip tape, etc.). There’s plenty to do when it comes to getting the farm ready to take a break, and last week was too short and too wet to get anything done. So it’s a good thing we had a few days off for Thanksgiving to rest up before the final sprint over the finish line.

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News from the Farm | November 25, 2024

November 25, 2024
transplanting tulips on the back of a tractor

A telltale sign that we’re about to get our first big fall rain is every tractor in use and everyone operating at a slightly frenetic, faster than usual pace. 

Last Monday and Tuesday, every tractor on the farm was accounted for: mowing fall crops, turning over beds, spreading compost, planting cover crop seed (until long after dark – that’s why tractors have headlights!), transplanting, and planting tulips. We even squeezed an all-hands-on-deck hand transplanting effort in the rain on Wednesday before the soil got too saturated. Did we get everything done before the rain arrived? No – the list of tasks is too long. But we still got quite a lot done, and then got quite a lot of rain, 8.5 inches between Wednesday morning and Saturday morning. 

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News from the Farm | November 4, 2024

November 4, 2024
Rainbow over a green field

What’d we do last week? Here’s just a few things (a complete list would go on forever) with photos – thanks to Andrew, Becca, Dru, and Mizu for sharing their pictures!

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News from the Farm | September 30, 2024

September 30, 2024

Scenes from the past week:

The transition from fresh flowers to dried. The 2024 CSA flower season has come to an end. Thanks to all those who got a bouquet! There are still some fresh flowers out in the field, but this week, the flower team will need to spend some time with the dried flowers to make sure we have wreaths ready for the Hoes Down on Saturday. After that, we can turn our focus to making wreaths and mixed bouquets for CSA members, farmers markets, and stores!

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News from the Farm | September 23, 2024

September 23, 2024

Now that we’ve passed the autumn equinox, it’s officially fall, but with a few 100+ degree days this week, it’s not quite sweater weather just yet and we haven’t slowed down. There is SO much going on right now; a full list of activities would go on for pages, especially if we included all of the many things, big and small, that go into planning and executing the Hoes Down Harvest Festival, now less than two weeks away.

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