This week’s Beet – a short video showing how the many bunches of beautiful, delicious chard last week got from the field to your CSA boxes. Those of you who didn’t get a box missed out!
Theme: harvesting
News from the Farm | October 16, 2023
October 16, 2023
The week before Hoes Down, in addition to all the general prep, we also harvested our walnuts!
We grow 12 acres of walnuts. These are large, beautiful old trees that were on the property when the farm was purchased in the 1980s. As a result, they don’t include newer varieties (like Chandler, which currently makes up about a third of all walnuts grown in CA) and the trees are more spaced out, and larger than more recently planted, high-density orchards. Most of our trees are Serr with some Tehama and Hartley.
How do you harvest walnuts? The short answer is, we shake them off the tree. The entire process is a bit longer though: [Read more…]
News From the Farm | November 8, 2021
November 8, 2021
This past Thursday was our 2021 olive harvesting day! It was an all hands on deck effort to get our olives off the trees and turned into olive oil. Even some of us in the office chipped in a bit. A small crew stayed in the wash and pack area to take care of CSA boxes and orders, but everyone else grabbed tarps, ladders, hand rakes, and poles and headed out to the olives in three teams. Each team laid down tarps and then proceeded to pull, rake, and whack all the olives off the trees. Many larger olive oil operations use mechanical shakers to get the olives off of the trees, but we do it by hand. The olives on the tarps are emptied into small harvest bins which were dumped into large macro bins which were ferried back to the shop when full to be kept cool until we finished. It was a long day of work, but it was a true team effort and we had great weather.
News From the Farm | October 11, 2021
October 11, 2021
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.
News From the Farm | July 19, 2021
July 19, 2021
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.
News From the Farm | October 29, 2018
October 29, 2018
The big fall harvests are moving along — Almonds, Walnuts, Winter Squash, Sesame and Olives. The walnuts are being cracked out of their shells at a neighbor’s who has the machinery. This involves several members of our crew sitting at the machine every day, and a lot of ferrying nuts back and forth. We have scheduled our olive harvest for Wednesday October 31st. This will require a large crew to be very focussed the entire day. The olives that we harvest on Wednesday will go straight to the mill down the road— the oil is best when it is pressed right away. Our sesame isn’t quite ready to harvest, but since we ran out of last year’s crop, we are shaking the plants and cleaning them by hand a bucket at a time, just to keep the tahini and sesame seeds available for sales… We also have a crew that we are trying to free up to make beautiful dried flower wreaths, but they keep getting called off to other projects! [Read more…]
News From the Farm | April 23, 2018
April 23, 2018
Many of you may have heard about the outbreak of disease related to romaine lettuce that has been traced to processing plants in Arizona. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning people not to eat any form of romaine lettuce grown in the Yuma, Arizona area. Since the origin of greens, especially those that are pre-washed and bagged, is not easily identified, the CDC adds helpfully that you should throw out any romaine lettuce you might have if you don’t know where it came from. [Read more…]
News From the Farm | October 2, 2017
October 2, 2017
The boxes changed quickly this year, from themes on tomatoes, melons, eggplants and peppers to a preponderance of chard, arugula, radishes and winter squash. It’s as if we mark the seasons as much by what we eat as by the weather. Hints of Fall first made themselves known with a change in the quality of the light and sun, both more gentle than before. In a flash, the temperatures might rise again — we can’t say goodbye to hot weather, but the days are shorter and there’s a Fall smell in the air. It’s enough to make one believe that the summer may soon pass on its way as Autumn comes around.
