Theme: spring

While we work on most holidays, one holiday that Full Belly Farm does observe is April Fools’ Day. More specifically, Andrew and Rye/Becca’s families are very into April Fools’ Day. Sometimes it’s just interpersonal tricks, but the office is often the site of a few pranks (lots of rubber insects last year), and some years the farmers markets and our wider community have gotten dragged in. Instagram followers: you’ve been warned!

I don’t have any April Fools’ Day pranks planned. However, over the past week, I couldn’t help notice a couple very real things that seem like they could be fake, and wanted to share these April Fools’ non-pranks with you!

The flower field is looking amazing, almost fake, but it’s very real and very beautiful. We’re very ready for the April 1 – September 30 CSA flower season to start!

Half the walnut orchard has leafed out, but the other half is bare! That’s a result of different varieties. The southern half are Serr and the back half is a mix of Hartley and Tehama. The Serr trees leaf out first and are ready to harvest first, about 10 days ahead. While this makes harvesting a bit less efficient, it buys us a little bit of insurance against frost damage. We want this resiliency; in a bad frost year, perhaps only half the orchard would be damaged, not all.

This Friday is the first day of spring. Though the forecast for this week isn’t what you’d expect for the last week of winter. It’s looking a little toasty potentially with multiple days over 90 degrees. That kind of heat is standard summer weather (and in the height of summer can even seem cool) but not in mid-March when we’re still growing cool season crops! Too much heat too early can cause chaos for these crops, causing plants to flower too early and inviting pests, like aphids. Our flowers can bloom too early and/or all at once instead of in a slower stream. Our CSA flower season starts on April 1 (more information on signing up below) but given how many flowers we have this week, several of us half-joked that we may need to change that date in future years.

We’re all hoping that we get an actual spring. It’s a beautiful time in the Capay Valley. The hills are lush and green and there are flowers everywhere, wild and not. It even smells great, thanks in part to several clusters of blooming lilacs and recently mowed cover crops. New plants, like in the photo at the top, cover crops, and weeds are seemingly growing taller by the hour and trees are visibly different each day, suddenly going from bare, to having small leaves, to full size leaves. The colors are also stunning, from the stems of the chard bunches that went into CSA boxes last week to the ranunculus that are suddenly ready to harvest, a vibrant sight. It all happens so fast, and then it’s gone, replaced by the heat of summer, which has its own smells and colors.

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:

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:

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.

May is a busy month for us. It’s a crucial time for summer preparation, all while we’re in peak spring harvest, so a blur of activity and change. It’s the time of year where things happen fast; seemingly in the blink of an eye, the hills around us changed from green to golden brown and spring crops are either harvested or bolt in the heat before we can get to them. Fruit, like peaches and plums, are sizing up and starting to take on some color.

Here’re some photos and notes to show some of what we’ve been up to the last couple weeks of May:

The members of the Full Belly bike gang (Waylon and Oakley) wanted to collaborate on the Beet this week, so after a quick planning meeting late morning on Wednesday, we decided that the three of us would head out on a bike ride around the farm, take some photos, and I’d write up what we saw.  [Read more…]

I don’t want to jinx anything, but it seems like it might finally be spring. The calendar said spring started on March 20, but it sure hasn’t felt like it. Last Monday was freezing cold and we had more rain during the week. The forecast is showing warmer days ahead, and no rain, so we’ll finally be able to make some progress on our backlog of mowing, bed prep, planting (transplanting and direct seeding), and weeding. Among all that work, I hope we all have time to enjoy the sights of spring because it’s a beautiful time of year. Too beautiful not to share! Here’re some of the signs of spring from the past few days: [Read more…]