Theme: spring

Sometimes we know that our members get way too many emails, and our weekly newsletter is just one more added to the pile.  This week News From the Farm takes the form of photographs that we hope bring you closer to the food we grow for you and the community that keeps the farm healthy and sustainable.  Andrew snapped these photos all around the Farm during his busy week.  

One of the photos is of Full Belly owner Dru and our Harvest Manager Jan planting flowers.  Dru is on the tractor, which spaces the seeds both linearly in three rows along the bed, and at a specified depth under the soil.  Jan is checking the depth and will make fine-tune adjustments as needed. [Read more…]

Spring is a wonderful time in the Capay Valley… if you have time to enjoy it.  Energy rises — from all the orchards with baby fruit hinting of future sweetness… to the baby chicks protected in their nursery… to the flowers in bloom at every turn. Mild weather, blue sky with puffy white clouds, and a farm full of plans, projects and expectations.

We have been transplanting seedlings into the ground on an almost daily basis — crops that our CSA members may see later in their boxes. We have been mowing and cleaning up edges to try and tame the grasses that have already gone to seed everywhere.  We have removed protective covers from several plantings of tomatoes and been astonished at how much the plants have jumped since we put them in the ground and covered them up to protect them from cold. We have said goodbye to the 2018 crop of asparagus and hello to our new potatoes. [Read more…]

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…]

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.