If you think farming is mostly a peaceful one-with-nature experience, I can assure you, when it comes to weeds it is a battle. Weeds can’t be eradicated since they are much better at what they do than their domesticated cousins we harvest for food. Here on the farm it takes countless hours to control them. [...]
Sammy, his face stained from picking and eating raspberries, came up to me during last Saturday’s Tomato U-Harvest, offering me to taste a berry from a full basket he just picked. “It is a lot of work to pick these”, he commented. I agreed, as I popped a berry in my mouth. “But worth [...]
Holy compost and manure!!! It’s holy to me and many of my fellow farmers but for many who have lost sight of the vital connection between their daily lives and farming, organic waste is seen as a problem that is dirty and dangerous – not a vital ingredient to build healthy soils and grow nourishing [...]
Our workload has ratcheted up another notch as summer-crops have started maturing. Green beans, peppers, and cherry tomatoes have been added to the weekly harvest list. The increasing number of tasks mimics the abundance in the field and since most of them are manual by nature, work often starts at dawn and sometimes doesn't stop [...]
Native Blackberries; Rubus Ursinus On a farm walk with friends and family this weekend we discovered that many of the native blackberries growing in hedgerows and the understory of our oak woodlands are filled with ripe berries. Unlike the adjacent cultivated field varieties growing in neat domesticated and trellised rows, the native blackberries [...]
Eating with the seasons teaches us patience. Tomatoes may be available whenever I might want at the store, but few things give me greater pleasure than waiting for that special moment in the season when I can harvest and bite into a sun-warmed, vine-ripened, dry-farmed tomato. Although "dry-farming" sounds ordinary, it is actually the culmination [...]
These last two Saturdays we enjoyed an amazing turnout of people eager to pick their own tomatoes. I am not exaggerating when I say that a couple of tons got picked. Tomatoes were carried away in buckets, carts (Radio Flyers), boxes, bags, coolers and wheelbarrows. I would love to have followed the trail from our [...]
At 91 years of age my mother's love for and excitement about growing plants has not diminished, even though her gardening space is now reduced to the sunny side of a small apartment. When I visited my parents last week, she proudly showed me her first tomatoes, picked from her three tomato plants growing in [...]
We are now officially in our last week of Summer. September 21st marks the Autumn Equinox, and the beginning of fall. It is an odd time of seasonal overlap; we are reaching the peak of the Summer season harvest-wise, yet the foliage on plum trees and native poison oak is changing to red, the daily [...]
With October here, our Coastal Summer has arrived... but will it last? Late season heat waves are not uncommon, but for coastal growers like us, spoiled by year-round moderate temperatures -- when yesterday's thermometer hit a blistering 100 degrees it was a scramble to adjust irrigation, planting and harvest schedules to deal with it. Growing [...]
