Theme: spring

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 | April 16, 2018

April 16, 2018

Mothers’ Day Sunday always presents a plethora of options for families wanting to spoil that amazing mother (or grandmother!) for her special day. Well, we have a secret up here in the Capay Valley – the most perfect experience you could ever give your mom – the Capay Valley Mothers’ Day Garden Tour. Here are the top five reasons why this tour is exactly what that special mother (or gardening fanatic!) deserves for Mothers’ Day:

#1. It is in a spectacular setting. There is nothing more beautiful than this agricultural valley (that we are lucky enough to call home) in the middle of May. The Capay Valley is home to 5 small towns and winds through them all over 20 miles. The gardens are blooming, the temperature is typically ideal (usually in the mid 80’s) and best of all, the first fruit of the season will be starting with peaches, mulberries and strawberries! [Read more…]

News From the Farm | April 9, 2018

April 9, 2018

The Water Information report from our local Water District says that Indian Valley Reservoir received just over 11-inches of rain this year, compared to almost 31 last year.  This includes runoff from last week’s storm, which added a precious 3-inches for the two surface water sources (Clear Lake and Indian Valley Reservoir) that provide irrigation water at Full Belly Farm.  Word is that despite the very low water year overall there will be enough water in Cache Creek for our summer irrigation season.

Spring rain creates a forceful motivator on the farm when there is a long list of projects to complete.  Not only is there a daily deadline when the sun goes down, but the promise of rain on the way means that all field activities will have to stop when the rain arrives.  Last week, tractors were still out in the fields as the first drops fell.  [Read more…]

News From the Farm | March 26, 2018

March 26, 2018

Open Farm Day

Saturday 3/24 was Open Farm Day at Full Belly Farm.  We all had a lot of fun.  Delicious pizza, fresh orange juice made on the spot, kite-flying, playing in the brook and listening to the frogs, tours of the fields, lamb petting, and playing and picnicking on the grass.  It was a warm, beautiful spring day.  CSA members received a jar of marmalade made from our Full Belly oranges. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | March 12, 2018

March 12, 2018

Hannah and Dru today continuing their passion.

“It wasn’t as if the flowers themselves held within them the ability to bring an abstract definition into physical reality. Instead it seemed that…expecting change, and the very belief in the possibility, instigated a transformation.”

The Language of Flowers, by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

My daughter Hannah and I share a passion for cut flowers. Actually passion might be too light of a word – obsession might be more appropriate.  We scour seed catalogs for endless hours in bed, read blogs, follow hundreds of flower growers on social media, and go to flower meetings on Sundays –our one-day off.  We beg for cuttings, attend conferences and belong to the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers (who knew this even existed!) We go to seed swaps, have flower growers to the farm, lead workshops.  We lie in bed at night worrying about rain, frost, drought and wind.  Oh yes… AND we grow 15 acres of cut flowers at Full Belly Farm.  [Read more…]

News From the Farm | March 5, 2018

March 5, 2018

Open Farm Day Saturday March 24

Full Belly Farm Open Farm Day is coming up soon on Saturday March 24th.  It is likely to be a beautiful Spring day, perfect for an outing to the country.  It is your opportunity to enjoy the lovely flowers growing in our farm fields, visit our lambs, take a tour of the farm, and picnic on pizza from our wood-fired oven.

A visit to your local family farm is a way to get back in touch with where your food is coming from. Maybe you will figure out something more about the people who are growing the cabbage, potatoes and collards that you get every week in your CSA box. Or maybe you will enjoy the opportunity to smell a handful of the soil at Full Belly — soil that has been managed organically since 1985. Maybe you will just want to bring a friend and picnic on the green lawn in the Spring sun, a time to get away from city sounds. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | May 22, 2017

May 22, 2017

Spring 2017 has created a tempo on the farm where the beat is compressed, the pace faster, steps quicker and details twirl and thump – making the dance that you all might think a waltz seem more like a frenetic, sweaty flamenco. We have been stepping pretty lively; trying to recover from the months of rain that pushed back spring with wet cold soils and then dropped a month of summer-like weather upon us. 

We have been transplanting tomatoes, melons and peppers. Sweet corn, beans, cucumbers, squash, direct seeded melons and watermelons are in and growing. Now comes the hoeing, watering, cultivation, staking and tying tomatoes along with prepping soil for the successions of each of these crops. We do four to five plantings of tomatoes for a harvest that will go from the middle of June until November. Melons are planted every 10 days starting with transplants and going to direct seeding of some 10 different varieties. Upcoming is the fifth planting, with three more to come.  [Read more…]

News From the Farm | May 8, 2017

May 8, 2017

Full Belly is busy! Crews are mowing down cover crops, bedding up fields, spreading compost, burying drip tape and transplanting seedlings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Despite all the hustle and bustle, Amon and Jenna made time to start a kids garden. In the photo above are several bins containing soil and compost. The kids planted a few melon and tomato seedlings, as well as seeds of cucumbers, eggplants, okra and other summer vegetables. In a few days, the bins will be moved to Guinda, just outside of the Corner Store. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | April 3, 2017

April 3, 2017

Every spring there is a Full Belly scramble to get spring and summer crops planted and growing in our fields.  Frosty weather, wet weather and windy weather can all interrupt our human-oriented timeline. During the last month we have been waiting hopefully, through one rainstorm after another, until our fields were dry enough for us to get to work.  Our greenhouses are full of young plants waiting to go out into the fields: spring lettuce, onions, and flowers, and the first of summer basil, melons, peppers and tomatoes.  If we don’t get the plants out of the greenhouse as soon as possible, they will get leggy and hungry in their little plugs of soil.  Besides the fact that the plants want to be outside, we feel the pressure of our CSA members, thinking about their next big veggie-feast! 

Unlike farms that go through the winter with bare ground, Full Belly fields grow cover crops all winter long.  With this winter’s wonderful rainy winter, the biomass in our fields right now is really impressive, representing captured solar energy and nutrients that need to get turned into the soil to be digested. We have several approaches to getting these fields ready for planting – sometimes our herd of sheep grazes the cover crop and it is returned to the soil in supercharged form, other times we use tractor power, chopping up the cover crop and then incorporating it.

[Read more…]

News From the Farm | May 30, 2016

May 30, 2016

What’s happening at Full Belly Farm, as June and the official beginning of Summer approach? A morning’s walk around the farm reveal a patchwork of activities, just like the patchwork of fields — all getting sewn together to form the season’s quilt.  Young tomatoes, corn and melons in clean fields, as yet untouched by the onslaught of daily harvests. A crew pounding stakes into the ground, preparing to trellis the growing tomatoes.  Netted fence that has been put up around the orchards to protect the ripening fruit from hungry deer. Onions in burlap bags sitting in the beds, curing. Trucks, forklifts, backhoes and tractors, all at work on various projects.  We’re expecting some hot weather in the next few weeks, so the pace is likely to kick into even higher gear very soon.

GarlicHarvest

Yesenia Gaxiola Vega, Wendy Arita Paz, and Maria Machado Castro harvesting garlic. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | June 1, 2015

June 1, 2015

Vegetable seasons are sometimes blurry at their beginnings and ends and June is often a month that really makes that point. It can be an awkward month, between spring and summer.  The asparagus is all gone but the melons are a ways off. We call it the ‘June doldrums’ when the farmers market table is piled high with a lot of food staples, and we keep telling the customers how ‘sweet’ the onions are, and how ‘creamy’ the potatoes taste when really all they want to eat are nectarines and tomatoes.

The calendar says that Summer season begins on the Solstice, June 21st, and until then the heat of the day will drain the tenderness from spring greens like chard and collards. Finally the heat will build up enough, and we will have to abandon the spring crops and make way for the explosion of summer.  At this time of year chefs ask us to add a box of cherry tomatoes to their order, because they know that the cherry tomatoes are around the corner, and they keep hoping that they can scoop all the other chefs by ordering ahead. [Read more…]

News from the Farm | May 19, 2014

May 19, 2014

May Madness

I woke up this morning with a bee in my bonnet.  What I mean is, I have a lot of ‘must do today items’ on my brain.  It is that time of year, when I spend my dream sleep thinking about loose ends.  This begins to describe the tempo of May, as I pen this note on a torn page of loose leaf paper while simultaneously trying to coordinate more than a couple dozen concurrent activities.  As I write, the farm moves, or should I say swirls, about me, moving in divergent directions at a pace that demands one to ‘walk fast and look nervous.‘   It is not out of fear that we appear frantic or nervous but out of demand.  Nature has set the pace.  

The most wondrous part of farming for me is that at certain times of the year the farm takes on a life entirely of its own.  It is in those times when it is no longer one’s creation but a teeming, feeding, breeding organism that lives independent of its stewards, at times leaving them in its wake.  At this time we merely try to keep it afloat and within bounds.   Or maybe we are just hanging on and enjoying the ride.  This week feels like a little bit of both.   [Read more…]

News from the Farm | May 12, 2014

May 12, 2014

A Flower Explosion! 

Last week was our biggest flower sales week in the history of our farm! Our team of flower harvesters and bunchers made well over 3,500 bouquets of flowers last week – each one unique and beautiful and sent off to brighten someones day. We grow a little under 15 acres of fresh flowers on our farm, all of them are varieties that we love. Right now, we are in the thick of larkspur, godetia, and sunflower harvest. In the next few months, zinnias will begin to pop up everywhere on our farm. 

IMG_9076

[Read more…]

News from the Farm | April 21, 2014

April 21, 2014

Springtime at the Farm

Full Belly Farm is bustling with spring activities.  We’ve had plenty of warm weather and within a few days after the last rain, the ground was drying out and the fields were busy.  This is the time of year when the cottonwood trees along the creek start cottoning – so billows of the white fluff, full of cottonwood seeds, blow in the air and settle in every corner.

[Read more…]

News from the Farm | April 14, 2014

April 14, 2014

The Third Graders Are Coming!

Spring has always been my favorite time here on the farm. Most people enjoy the beautiful flowers popping up, the green rolling hills, and the birth of the myriad baby animals. Don’t get me wrong, I love all of the aforementioned changes that happen during this time of year, but it’s the arrival of the third graders here at our farm that brings me the most joy. Springtime for me means school group season, and it is my job to teach groups of rambunctious Waldorf third graders about farming.

I began working at Full Belly eight summers ago, when I was asked to be a camp counselor for the farm’s summer camp program. During the first summer I was simply a camp counselor. I loved being a camp counselor so much that the next summer I found myself back at the farm. Over the years I began to pick up more leadership roles during summer camp. I began teaching lessons, which meant others depended on my knowledge of the farm. Eventually, I could not be torn away from the farm. I would arrive weeks before camp started and would remain weeks after camp had ended working in the fields or the shop, helping with anything that needed doing. Half way through college, I decided that I wanted to return to Full Belly Farm after graduation. [Read more…]

News from the Farm | February 24, 2014

February 24, 2014

Signs of Spring!

Everywhere we look, Spring seems to be popping up!

photo 1We had the most beautiful baby pigs born at the farm last thursday. Our sow, Candy, was bred with a wild boar so the piglets were born with a wide array of colors and markings. They are as fast as can be, and some have almost doubled in weight since their birth!  [Read more…]

News From the Farm | May 13, 2013

May 13, 2013

Our crops are all a bit ahead of usual for early May. Here you can see that our first planting of sweet corn is already knee-high and growing fast.

corn

[Read more…]

News From the Farm | April 22, 2013

April 22, 2013

It might be time for a spring report on the activities that occupy our Full Belly days. The early year has been marked by both a lack of precipitation and warm weather that has had some significant impacts. We can attribute our abundant fruit set to the fact that with so little rain, there was less disease pressure on the fruit bloom. Peaches, plums, apricots, almonds and even early figs have passed the period of frost danger and we appear to be headed for a good fruit season.  Early tomatoes, corn and summer crops are on a timeline to come by mid-June and fill out our normal June doldrums when we usually finish our spring greens and await the summer crop push. 

The first spring potatoes will appear next week. Planted on our Valentines Day target date, beautiful lush potato growth has been accelerated by the mild days. In a couple of months we should have fresh potatoes. We are working to keep up with weeding, cultivating and the pest management that warm springs bring.  Aphids are difficult to control and it appears to be a banner year. We apologize if you found aphids in your produce and we are working to get the little buggers under control. Many of the fields have lines of flowering alyssum planted with the crops. Its white flowers attract beneficial insects that offer a counter army to go after the aphids. Lacewings, big eyed bugs, ladybugs and their offspring – aphid lions – offer some help, but are slower to build their numbers. The alyssum flowers offer these insect friends the pollen and nectar they need to settle in and start a family. We are working to get the timing right on our plantings and develop strategies to get the beneficials into the field sooner.

[Read more…]

News From the Farm | March 18, 2013

March 18, 2013

Saturday March 16 was a banner day at Full Belly Farm: one of the earliest days in recent years that we were able to plant our first tomatoes. A crew of 8 carefully transplanted the tomatoes from their warm safe spot in the greenhouse out into open fields. ‘Open fields’ except for the fact that the beds that the tomatoes went into were carefully covered with black plastic to warm up the soil, and also, were covered with a special cloth to protect them from cold night temperatures.

The wonderful warm, dry weather that we have been enjoying is a mixed blessing when it comes this early in the spring. The dry spell started back in the winter when it should have been raining and because it hasn’t rained in so long, we have been able to get a lot of work done very efficiently – planting, weeding, and mowing the orchards!  But we’ve also got the irrigation going already, trying to get water out to all the thirsty greens and cool-weather crops.

[Read more…]

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