Organic Vegetables, Fruit, Flowers & Wool
Happy spring! Last week, we took advantage of the warmth and sun to harvest, weed, plant, and transplant. There was also a lot of mowing (cover crops and finished crops) and prepping bed to plant more.
As promised, this Beet contains the second part of last week’s discussion (which you can find here) of hybrid versus open pollinated seeds.
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Alliums (onions, garlic, leeks, shallots, scallions, and chives) are staples in most cuisines and are found in home kitchens around the world, making it easy to take them for granted. Like all produce though, they too have different varieties, seasons, nuances, and quirks. They have interesting backstories and are grown with love and care on farms, just like peaches, tomatoes, asparagus, kale and other flashier produce. This week, let’s show some love for leeks, the alliums that are in our CSA boxes this week, and are a staple of our winter boxes. [Read more…]
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…]
There is no shortage of ways to tell that it’s spring on a farm, but my favorite is probably when we start harvesting asparagus. It’s delicious, here for a relatively short period of time, is the only perennial vegetable we grow, and is fascinating for more reasons than that, thus worth taking a deep dive. [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…]
Lamb Count: This morning the lambing crew reported that we have 108 lambs born so far, including 17 sets of triplets. This photo shows Dru feeding the “bummers” — lambs whose Moms needed a little helping hand taking care of the babies. —
Our farming cycle is very linked to the annual calendar cycle and it is a thing for us at Full Belly, before a New Year is in full swing, to look back at what has been learned the year before, hoping to inform our activities in the year to come. Part of that thinking is to review the CSA boxes from the previous year, imagining a household that got a box every week: What did our members eat from the farm in a year of 2020 boxes? [Read more…]
Keeping the Faith by Maria Grazia —
The Full Belly Farm Boxes are very much an expression of our farm season — the time of year, the length of the day, the amount of sun or frost, and of course the level of care and attention that we are able to bestow on the crop. We rarely buy products from other farms to put into the boxes and we would be the first to acknowledge that there are some occasions when the boxes are a little bit repetitive from week to week — although we do try to avoid that. It may be true that this summer, when our number of members unexpectedly doubled in March, we hadn’t been able to plan ahead for all of the new interest and excitement around CSA membership, and that may have resulted in less box variation than usual from week to week. [Read more…]
Ellis and Andrew with six bins of sunflowers that they helped to pick —
Viewed close in on a summer’s day, it would be fair to say that Full Belly Farm grows a lot of tomatoes, potatoes, peppers and eggplants — all members of the same large botanical family of plants called Solanacea, also known as Nightshades. On many summer afternoons, a good portion of the crew, including owners can be found in the tomato fields picking, or in the packing shed surrounded on all sides by boxes of tomatoes.
Viewed from a bit farther out, with a different perspective, it turns out that Full Belly actually grows a lot of other things as well — but the preponderance of Nightshades in the summer has been the recent subject of many a comment from our members. [Read more…]
Our two pigs were moved into new green pasture over the weekend, which makes them very happy. This is Winona — she is pregnant, soon to have piglets! —
What you ate last year…
The CSA boxes reflect for our members what it taking place at the farm. Long-time members know the patterns well. Cold weather brings greens and roots. Hot weather brings tomatoes and melons. There are both similarities and changes from one year to the next and from one week to the next. Sometimes we can surprise even our long-time members with something new, but many households have their favorite ways of eating every single item in the box. [Read more…]
Three beds of tulips have all started to bloom at once, the first flowers available for 2019. They will be available at our farmers markets: Berkeley on Tuesday afternoon; San Rafael on Thursday morning and Palo Alto on Saturday morning.
What You Ate Last Year – On our Full Belly web site in our description of our Community Supported Agriculture program, we promise that if you join, you will “eat the freshest, most nutritious fruits and vegetables available.” There are lots of ways to parse that promise, but this week we’re going to take a look at our program using a pretty straightforward metric: What did we deliver to you in your boxes last year? [Read more…]
At the recent Heirloom Expo in Santa Rosa, I was bouncing back and forth between the displays of melons when I was distracted from the many, many different varieties by a woman talking to a group of children, all probably around 7-8 years old. She was holding a melon that looked cantaloupe-esque, heavily netted, with a faint orangey glow, but instead of a round orb this one grew a little bulb on one end, a cantaloupe crossed with a brioche pastry! It was innocently labeled “Sleeping Beauty.”
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