Last week we had an unusual visitor. Santa Cruz County Supervisor Greg Kaputt spent two days working with us in the fields. He arrived on Thursday at 9:00 AM and didn’t hesitate to jump right in to work side-by side with our field crew. First he worked with Noah and Laura picking Cherry Tomatoes, Peppers, [...]
Our son David just turned 18 in May, is graduating from Mt. Madonna High school this week, and is off to college by the end of summer. I cant deny feeling a bit emotional about it, seeing David all of a sudden as a mature young adult taking flight, leaving the nest. Watching him on [...]
We always love getting pictures of your children and Live Earth Farm's produce to share with everyone in the newsletter. Here's the latest -- from our very own Jessica Ridgeway, director of LEFDP. Her new baby, Current, shares the stage with a truly massive chard leaf, and her older sister, Ophelia.
Last week while accompanying our son to the east coast to start his journey as a college student, we saw large tracks of corn and soybeans severely stunted from this year's record-breaking drought. I am so used to irrigation agriculture that I had to remind myself that the vast majority of this country's farmland is [...]
Overwhelmed with the amount of harvesting going on at the moment it's been tricky to stay on top of propagation and planting schedules. Most of our crops are raised from seed, grown into seedlings and hand transplanted when they are large enough to thrive under the more challenging field conditions. The moment a seed is [...]
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 [...]
