Theme: summer

News From the Farm | July 25, 2016

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

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

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…]

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 11, 2015

May 11, 2015

Basil

The way some of the crops work on the farm is that once they arrive, you may see them fairly regularly, until all of a sudden you don’t see them again until the following year. That is the case with basil.  Last year, during the 18 weeks of our warm season, from June to October, we put it in your CSA boxes 8 times. In 2013, as is the case this year, the basil started in May and was in the CSA boxes 9 times from May through September.  We mention this, because it helps to provide a perspective on the feast of basil about to arrive: It is transient. If you have time, you can make some pesto and put it in the freezer for winter pasta dishes, as a way to stretch the season. [Read more…]

News from the Farm | July 21, 2014

July 21, 2014

July Photo Round Up! 

photo 2

We woke up this morning to cloudy skies, cool weather, and a few drops of precious rain. It wasn’t enough to do any damage to our summer crops, but enough to remind us of what it smells like after a rain and keep the dust down for a few hours. These tomatoes are just flowering. Can you even believe how many there are?! [Read more…]

News from the Farm | July 7, 2014

July 7, 2014

We Love Our Customers! 

Summer has officially started at Full Belly Farm – as evidence by the truck loads of melons, tomatoes, beans, eggplant, and dark circles under the eyes of every farmer. Exhaustion is a common side effect of the summer months, which can, on occasion, lead to a grumpy farmer or two. Luckily, glee outweighed grumpiness last weekend as we had a surprise calf born on the farm. A handsome and dark red fellow, he was born late into the night on Independence Day, perhaps forced into the world a day early by the sound of firecrackers or a Piccolo Pete. 

Receiving feedback from our customers has never been easier than now, with the invention of social media. Just a few hours after the new calf was born, we posted a picture of him on both Instagram and Facebook, asking for name suggestions. The below photo and caption elicited the following responses: 

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Baby boy calf born late into the night on Independence Day. We are thinking of calling him Firecracker. Any other suggestions? [Read more…]

News from the Farm | June 2, 2014

June 2, 2014

Summer Transitions

There are periods of the season when we get caught between the ending of one crop cycle and the beginning of another. The end of May and beginning of June is perennially one of these times. We are in the middle of transitioning from spring to summer as we find interesting crops with which to fill your boxes. 

Bound by weather and temperature, the slowly disappearing hard C crops –kalecollardscabbagecarrotschard – make their exit from your boxes along with lettuce, other greens and leafy veggies. These will return next October. I think that most of us are about ready to not be missing these veggies and are looking forward to tomatoes, melons and fruits – the full expression of summer.  [Read more…]

News From the Farm | August 19, 2013

August 19, 2013

In past columns, I have written about old timers that come to visit Full Belly Farm to see how things are going. One of the visitors used to be Richard Gladney who ostensibly came to visit his barn, now and forever called “Richard’s Barn” which, when we moved here, was full of vintage cars and tractor implements, not to mention tins of chemicals and junk.  Over the years, we moved Richard’s stuff, the accumulation of years of farming, out of the barn, but his visits still linger in our memories, and continued for many years despite his lacking the excuse that he was checking up on his things. 

Another time, in May of last year, it was an imaginary old timer who visited, the possible driver of an old Allis Chalmers behemoth tractor that has been sitting idle under a Full Belly walnut tree since I moved to the farm 25-years ago (and for who knows how long before that.) The visitor met up with one of the farm kids and had a tour of the farm, with news of how things had changed since he parked the tractor after its last big job. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | Week of July 29, 2013

July 29, 2013

It is quieter walking around the farm on a Sunday because only a few crew members are around. Antonio is usually here the earliest, come to take care of the animals. Chickens, pigs, goats and cows – they see Antonio every day. Eddy comes a little bit later to load truck for the Monday morning run, sorting the boxes, checking lists, palletizing orders, organizing the load. Even later still, the next crop of campers arrive with their families who visit the creek, check-in with the camp counselors and leave their kids behind knowing that they are in good hands. 

Our cherry tomato crew has been picking more than 200 boxes of cherry tomatoes on a daily basis for several weeks (each box has 12 baskets in it).  We have a lot of varieties this year: sweet 100, sun gold, cherry roma, black cherry, green grape, blush and juliette for example.  The crew is picking from several different fields and trying all the time to project for the sales team how many boxes they will be able to get out of the fields in the hot summer days to come.  Although the work is intense, they are happier if our sales keep up with production.  None of them want to try and sort through fruit on the vines that is overripe. One of our prettiest cherry tomato packs is the Mixed Medleys, a mixture of red, black, pink yellow and green varieties.  On our walk we saw the cherry tomato sorting table where the crew sorts the tomatoes in the shade of the walnuts. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | Week of July 22, 2013

July 22, 2013

This has been a very hot summer so far. Our thermometers are regularly showing the high 90’s and not uncommonly several digits above 100°. We tell guests that we’re lucky to have Cache Creek to cool down in, but with the heat comes an intense farming season and there have been few sightings of farmers in the creek.

There are several months of each year when crop production in each of the fields is so prodigious that even our veteran crews will be overwhelmed trying to keep up. We run out of picking boxes, we have too little cooler space, there is no time to pick the specialty crops that we grow in small quantities, and we do not have enough trays for the fruit that we dry in the sun. 

Standing in any particular place on the farm, no matter where it is, and catching ones breath while looking around, this farmers is struck first by a sense of amazement at the loveliness of some of our fields, and second with a checklist of all the things, from that specific vantage point, that should have gotten done yesterday: Johnson Grass (a nasty weed) taking over the fields, tomatoes that should have been staked and tied, plants in the hedgerow that have died, flowers that should have been picked to dry for winter projects, and a compost pile that needs to be turned.  [Read more…]

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