Theme: summer

News From the Farm | July 15, 2019

Barely any cucumbers make it home because they are so delicious!
(Thank you to CSA member Hallie Chertok for the photo!)  ––  

The story was told a hundred times and always began like this: “It was early July, the beginning of the hot summer, and Mama had fallen in love with a handsome young farmer who lived close by to Grandma and Grandpa. So Mama went out near her home and picked two big beautiful buckets of ripe, juicy blackberries that she found along the river edge. She took those blackberries home and baked them into a golden-crusted pie with the blackberries tucked inside. Later that day she drove out to where she thought that farmer lived and found his house along a long country road. She left that pie on his doorstep with a simple note that said, PLEASE ENJOY THIS PIE MADE WITH LOVE and in small letters at the bottom she wrote her name. Well, pretty soon that young man came home and ate up that pie and pretty soon after that they were married and pretty soon after that they moved to this house where you were born and where we all live now. Now Go to Sleep, Goodnight” [Read more…]

News From the Farm | July 8, 2019

Each season’s weather passes forward its imprint on the following season’s crops. Late spring rains are remembered when there are diseases in the peaches during the summer.  A spike of heat in early June can interrupt the pollination in ears of corn resulting in kernel blanks when the corn is harvested.

Sometimes those predictions come true, but not always.  Our stone fruit trees are looking great, contrary to the worries during all the rain we enjoyed last spring.  On the other hand some of our corn does have blanks in the ears, each missing kernel representing one silk strand that wasn’t successfully pollinated.  High heat is a common explanation for blanking in corn. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | July 1, 2019

July already. The crew just brought in four bins of orchid watermelons hopeful that they would all sell well before the July 4th holiday.  This is the first big watermelon harvest of the season — each summer brings it’s string of ‘firsts’ as we look forward to each crop. 

Walking across farm fields, down furrows and over graveled roads I know that crew members have also walked these furrows over and over, year in and year out. Every square foot of ground has been travelled by many other eyes and grown uncounted seasons of crops. Walking down a field of freshly prepared, unplanted beds I came across a pile of feathers, all that remained of a bird — Probably this was the scene of a fierce struggle the previous night. It was fresh and I think that I was the first to stumble upon it.  [Read more…]

News From the Farm | June 24, 2019

First sip of milk! This calf, named Twinkie was born on June 19th

For many years, we have been fortunate to be part of an inquisitive, forward thinking, creative and passionate community of food entrepreneurs and enthusiasts. Our relationships with our customers have enriched our thinking and have been part of our farm’s evolution. We have many examples of crops that we started growing as the result of  a customer or chef’s suggestion. We have been swept up in the enthusiasm of food pioneers who happened to be our customers.  Alice Waters and her staff at Chez Panisse were early farm supporters. Walter Robb, Mark Squire and Bill Fujimoto are examples of passionate shop keepers who have supported us, and every week, for the past 35 years, farmers market and CSA customers have whispered likes and dislikes into our ears feeding us new ideas about what to grow. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | June 17, 2019

The Full Belly Irrigation crew in the potato field: Jose, Conrado, Manuel and Arturo  — 

This is the thirsty time of year when pumps are running and water is flowing 24/7 all over the farm.  There are more than 300 acres of fruits, flowers and and vegetables that have to be taken care of and at Full Belly, the fields don’t come in easy 50-acre contiguous blocks.  Three acres here and four acres there, all managed differently.  In the late spring, when fields are turning over from winter to summer, pumps have to be put into position, drip tape has to be set up, and systems have to be in tip top order.  You see pipe trailers being pulled all around the farm, and Arturo — the irrigation crew leader — driving around everywhere in his red truck.  When Arturo talks on the radio he sounds as if is running in hyperdrive. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | June 10, 2019

Just as many of us were about to go into weekend mode, on Saturday afternoon, the Sand Fire sent the northern Capay Valley into a controlled panic. The fire started in the hills just behind Rumsey, off of a road that had been washed out and was inaccessible to fire equipment.  The high winds and hot weather threatened to push the fire down the valley towards Guinda.  It loomed above farms and ranches, where people, houses, animals and crops were in harms way.  Around here, the evacuations include animals, so horses, goats, cats and dogs were moved in a very short time, with all the decisions and coordination that entails taking place in short order. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | August 27, 2018

Paul and Ben found a Praying Mantis — see how it is preparing to pray?

Hedgerows –

About 30 years ago, we planted our first line of native shrubs and trees along the boundary of one of the southernmost fields at Full Belly Farm. For awhile, we planted a new hedgerow every couple of years, and maintained them during the year, making sure that the young plants had gotten established and that when something died, we filled in the gaps.  Now we do very little to maintain the hedgerows and we haven’t planted a new one in years.  There are some gaps along the hedges, and some non-native plants have made their way in, but the oaks and elderberry trees in some of the oldest hedgerows are 50-feet tall and the manzanitas and redbuds have filled out nicely. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | August 20, 2018

Photo by Diane Rothery Photography.

We recently received a certified letter from the Central Valley Water Board, an agency striving “To preserve, enhance, and restore the quality of California’s water resources…” The Letter states that Full Belly Farm is in violation of the Confined Animals Regulatory Program!  Since Full Belly has no confined animals, we had to do some investigation and in a hurry too, because the letter was full of legal Directives and allusions to fines.  “Please read this letter carefully” is the first thing it said, and we did!

Our Full Belly Farm egg-laying-hen program is actually something to brag about.  We have 3 to 4 groups of hens at any one time, with about 200 layers in each group.  They stay in paddocks that are about 25,600 square feet in size.  The hens have a movable structure to roost in at night, and every 4 or 5 days, when they’ve eaten the bugs and seeds in their paddock they get to move to a completely new site. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | August 13, 2018

Rest in Peace John Ceteras

This past Saturday, family, friends and neighbors from our Capay Valley and beyond came together to celebrate the life of our friend and neighbor, farmer John Ceteras. John recently passed away after a long, concerted and very private battle with cancer. He was 74 years old and is survived by his wife and artist, farm partner, Gretchen, son Noah and grandson, Jack. With Gretchen, John farmed Blue Heron Farm, a 20-acre certified organic farm in Rumsey. As an elder, his passing leaves a void in our community, but his legacy inspires seasoned and beginning farmers alike. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | August 6, 2018

Wildlife:

Last Friday, someone found a young barn owl dead on the ground in the walnut orchard.  Maybe it was one of the young owls that we had been watching in their first flights from the upstairs porch at Amon and Jenna’s house.  These baby owls hatched out last spring in a cubby above the porch and the family made it their home, creating a litter on the floor of their droppings, to such an extent that it was difficult to walk out and watch them without stepping on their pellets. Standing on the porch, we would look up at them, and they would line up and look down at us. We know that most barn owls die young – 70% in their first year – so the babies and their parents have been a source of great delight as we watched and worried over them.  [Read more…]

News From the Farm | July 30, 2018

Hannah at the California State Fair.

It is Monday morning and the skies here are thick with the smoke and haze from the many fires burning in Northern California. We told our farm crew that if it is difficult to work, we may end the day early. We had shortened days this past week when field temperatures were near 112º. The sobering relationship of too little rain, a parched landscape, high temperatures, heavy fuel loads in areas where homes are being built under tree canopies, make one reflect about resilience, climate uncertainty, and our relationship with our larger landscape and wild lands. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | July 23, 2018

The consistently triple digit temperatures for the last two weeks have been stressful for our crews who know that every day counts in terms of getting fruit out of the field in good shape.  If we miss a day of picking, the quality can go downhill, but a lot of these afternoons are just too hot to pick in.  Some of the fields are not only hot, but also very humid because the lines of plants are close together and the plants are transpiring continuously. 

This is our full-on harvest season, with each day a “big” day, so that almost first thing in the morning, planned and necessary projects are triaged in order to get the orders filled. Tremendous quantities of beautiful fruits and vegetables are picked every day from very hot fields.  Then they are brought into our packing shed, cooled down and boxed up for stores, restaurants, wholesale distributors and of course our CSA members. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | June 11, 2018

We are on the cusp of an explosion — but you, our CSA members, might never know it from the boxes.  The only hints are the summer squash and the arrival of basil.  Every year, right around this time, there is a sense of expectation as the tomatoes flower and start to set fruit, the onion and garlic crops are harvested, and we check the progress of the first melons starting to swell and sweeten on their vines. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | July 31, 2017

At this time of year fruit, flowers and vegetables are brought in from our fields in wave upon wave, 6 days of the week, all day long. Bin trailers unload melons and sunflowers, four bins at a time. Harvest tractors, stacked high with boxes of eggplant are unloaded onto pallets destined for the ice water in the packing shed where they will be sorted, culled, boxed and stored in the cooler. Pick-up trucks pull in to unload cherry tomatoes stack by stack.  The crews come in from picking, their clothes soaked through with sweat. At the end of the day, weary and ready to put their feet up, the crew leaders write down a long list of numbers so that we know how much they will pick and we should try to sell for the next day.  

This week, it’s the melons that are peaking: Hercules, Galia, Goddess, Charantais, Piel de Sapo, Sharlynn, Canary, Honeydew, Honeyloup, Snow Leopard, Haogan, San Juan… That last one, the San Juan, is a large melon with a luscious smooth texture and orange flesh.  The other day, when I went to pick out my morning melon, Rye handed me a heirloom variety of Crenshaw, another large melon with orange flesh.  I generally make my morning melons into smoothies, but this one had such a wonderful texture and delicious flavor that I just had to eat it straight. I wondered to myself how many other people in the whole wide world had experienced the pleasure of such a fabulous melon as that one.  The ancient varieties of melon were large compared to the ones that we sell today.  But now, people don’t want to buy really large melons, even though their flavors are sublime.  Last year we did some trials of melons from Afghanistan (home to the wild ancestors of todays melons) and all of them were large.  Those in the know will tell you that the finest melons of all in modern times still come from Afghanistan and Iran. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | June 12, 2017

We have a wonderful crew of interns, keeping the farm energy young and inquiring. Every year our interns retrace the learning steps from times past. Here they are on their way to our June 9th pizza night.  Next chance for you to come to pizza night is Friday July 14th.  Wood fired pizza, salads and homemade farm fresh ice cream — all in a picnic setting at Full Belly!

[Read more…]

News From the Farm | June 5, 2017

There are times that we look at each other in despair, saying, “there’s just too much going on around here” —!  With everyone going in a lot of different directions life can be pretty overwhelming. Carefully planned days can easily derail into a race chasing down one unexpected loose end after another. Happily, every once in awhile we do get a hint that our efforts may be circling around an internal logic, not actually about to spiral out of control.

One of the biggest themes of the week continued to be to complete the spring transplanting.  Last Monday we transplanted our third planting of tomatoes, this time 60,000 seedlings, all in one day, into a 6-acre field. The field has been growing hay for decades, so the soil is well prepared to grow some delicious fruit.  Later in the week it was flowers, celeriac and direct seeding of dent corn, melons, beans, squash and cucumbers.

Above the crew is transplanting tomatoes  [Read more…]

News From the Farm | August 15, 2016

I hope that a few photos of farm activities will give CSA members a sense of being just a little bit closer to where your fruits and veggies are coming from.  These are nothing too fancy, just simple photo-snaps taken with phone cameras by various Full Bellies as we do our work.

crew lunchSeveral times a year, Jenna and Amon and several other farm chefs put together a “crew lunch” so that we can all have a sit-down time together.  The lunch usually features Full Belly-grown products. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | July 25, 2016

We will start this Beet article with the cooing of the morning doves that at dawn begin their amorous calls to one another in a repetition of cadence and tone – 3 soft notes repeated 3 or 5 times, and then answered by another and another. A day break song welcoming the promise of another morning – softly, thankfully.

They begin the energy of awakening, as each moment of the change from dark to grey to sunrise is marked by another voice in the chorus.  Finches, sparrows, hawks and mockingbirds all add their calls to the day in a progression that is millenniums in the making and shall be so in the coming ages. A song beyond our time, from before our time – a gift given for the appreciation of the listener.  [Read more…]

News From the Farm | June 27, 2016

We know that many of you are wondering where the tomatoes are and why you are “still getting beets and cabbage in your boxes.”  We also note that some of our members are happy to continue getting something green for awhile, like a cabbage…   As one of our members commented, “every single selection is someone’s favorite or someone’s least favorite.”  Even though the CSA boxes sometimes have the same vegetables in them for a few weeks, taken as a whole, the variety of fruits and vegetables in the boxes from season to season results in a remarkably diverse cuisine, providing healthy inspiration to your creativity and ingenuity in the kitchen.

June is always a month when the CSA boxes reflect a transition from cool weather crops to summer crops. You can follow that transition from afar… In June, the summer crops are growing so fast that you can see changes from day to day, but on the other hand, the spring crops are slowing down and starting to be a little peaked. By the end of June, the greens are long gone and the first ripe tomatoes and melons can be found if one goes on a determined search from one end of the row to the other.  By July, the yield of tomatoes is growing exponentially, from one or two cherry tomatoes, to a few boxes that go to farmers markets, to enough that we could literally fill your kitchen with them, multicolored and vibrating with summer heat and energy. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | August 3, 2015

“Here in California

The fruit hangs heavy on the vine

There is no gold

I thought I’d warn you

And the hills turn brown in the summertime”

So wrote Kate Wolf in the early 1980’s.  This song was, and remains, one of my favorite folk songs of all times. Having spent my childhood roaming the green hills of verdant Vermont in the summer, California came as a shock to me upon moving here in my late teens.  It was as if winter was summer and summer was winter, in some strange disorienting fashion.  In fact, thinking of it in these terms has helped to reorient my California seasonality these many years later.  The summer hills here are dry brown, akin to the dead of winter in a January Vermont below-zero season. Things die and are reborn in the spring there; here it is the dry summer that is reborn with the life giving rains in the fall. [Read more…]