The long awaited tomatoes are gradually ripening, and as much as we’d like to encourage them to ripen faster the first harvest typically is a teaser and doesn’t yield enough for everyone’s shares. Get your salt shaker out. Our Early Girl dry-farmed tomatoes are almost ready. A wave of new crops is at [...]
The soils that should be saturated from winter rains right now are drying out instead. I notice that the “itch” I get at the beginning of every season to prepare the soil and start planting seems too early. After rejuvenating rains in December, we haven’t seen any precipitation. January should be the wettest month of [...]
Take a walk with us around the farm to see the changes from the recent three days of rain. The apple trees still have some leaves, though they are yellowing as the days grow shorter. The green band in the middle of the row is a sprouting cover crop. Farmer Juan, on [...]
Let’s start with the “bad bug” news. The prolonged heat wave we experienced last week may have extended the harvest of dry-farmed tomatoes, green beans and peppers for a few more weeks but on the flipside it also attracted a new exotic heat loving insect pest, a stink bug called Bagrada. This African native has [...]
On my field walks I never tire of digging, tasting, smelling, touching, and observing the constant changes taking place on the farm, whether it’s in the fields, orchards, or non-cultivated wild spaces. Right now, as we approach the Summer Solstice, the farm is a continuously changing canvas of activity and fertile growth. I try to [...]
Summer foraging is one of the great pleasures here on the farm, and with the abundance of harvest-able crops right now it doesn’t take much of a field walk to fill a bushel basket and one’s tummy all at the same time. A typical walk for me starts in the apple orchards. August is a [...]
The French called tomatoes “pomme d’amour” or Love Apples, and I agree, what is there not to love about tomatoes - this year’s crop of dry-farmed tomatoes with it’s “alluring” deep red colors are bursting with “seductive” rich flavors. Saturday’s Tomato U-Pick was testimony to how much we love tomatoes. The image that brings a [...]
After a few weeks of relative quiet here on the farm we are excited to resume our weekly delivery of winter shares. My own rhythm has slowed considerably and mimics that of the farm. Plants move nutrients more slowly during winter, which results in often sweeter and more pronounced flavors. Carrots become crisper, and when [...]
On Earth Day like on any other day most of us eat 1-3 meals. Eating a meal, this humble ritual, affects not only our own physical health and well-being but collectively, as a human community, it is arguably the most important activity affecting the health of our planet. Most of us “Eaters” are so removed [...]
"Of all the natural resources, water has become the most precious...In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to the most essential needs for survival, water along with other resources has become the victim of his indifference." Rachel Carson, Silent Spring Overhead sprinklers irrigating a field of carrots. [...]
