Posts by: Jeanne Byrne
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When we first started doing the Sunday farmer’s market in Mountain View, Jeanne was pregnant with our daughter Amelia who will be 19 in three weeks.
The heat wave has passed and now we have our old comfortable friend the fog back again – drizzly mornings that keep temperatures in the cool 50s and 60s — the type of weather that makes this such a good climate for growing lettuces, greens, and strawberries. 
The blueberry bushes are kicking into gear! Each year we go back and forth on one of our perennial farm questions – to net or not to net. This year the ayes have it and the crew spent a couple days this week covering the blueberry patch with bird netting. That means there should be more fruit for you, so we’ve put blueberry flats on the webstore and set some dates for Blueberry U-Picks.
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I’ve always liked sweet alyssum flowers. We planted them back in our San Francisco community garden plot before we moved out of the city to start farming, and they made a lovely delicate ground cover that attracted the most beautiful little crab spiders. 
From about February on, the greenhouse is always filled with colorful starts. Seeds of lettuces, greens (chard, kale, mustard, collards, escarole), brassicas (cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, romanesco), and herbs are planted on regular schedules into the greenhouse to be planted out for the many successions we will harvest during the year.
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It’s about as busy as it can get around here. The ground finally dried out enough to get into most areas of the farm and we’ve been planting like crazy. You’ll notice we are depending a lot on our friends at other local farms these past few weeks. The heavy prolonged rains definitely put us quite a bit behind schedule.
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Our new crates have arrived and this week all pick-up sites will receive their vegetables in crates!
The barn swallows are back, which means spring is right around the corner! The greenhouse has a new roof and is filling with starts. There is still some rain in the forecast, but with enough days like today the ground will be dried out enough to get the tractors in soon (using the new 72 inch spacing), so these little lettuces and other greens can get out there in the real world.
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It’s hard to believe another CSA season has come to an end. This week we’ll deliver the final boxes for the regular season. Next week we’ll celebrate Thanksgiving and then we’ll take some time to visit with friends and family.
I always enjoy walking through the greenhouse during the busy season. There’s something about seeing all the colorful baby plants that makes me feel hopeful about the future! We now have two greenhouses where we plant the seeds that we’ll later transplant out into the field. 
For the past 20 years, we have been both farming and raising children. I’ve come to the conclusion that these two endeavors have a lot in common. Here are some of my basic tenets of farm-rearing. 
You’re not going to eat them, so why bother to buy organic when it comes to flowers? Three good reasons are worker safety, your safety, and environmental health.If you google High Ground Organics on your phone, your entire phone screen will fill with links to a website full of colorful pictures of vegetables and fruits, feel-good farm fresh organic language, and prominent sign up buttons. The problem? You’ll be signing up for Farm Fresh to You, a massive CSA-like creature that is gobbling its way to tens of thousands of customers’ doors per week.
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This morning there are Stanford researchers wandering around the farm with bug nets. They have been out several times this summer collecting data for a pollinator and pest study, to find out more about species interactions in agricultural landscapes. I’m looking forward to seeing the results.
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For the past fifteen years or so, we (and CSA members) have been donating vegetables and fruit each week to a local food pantry called Pajaro Valley Loaves and Fishes. For years, Loaves and Fishes volunteer Bob Montague was the face of the food pantry program for us.
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As farmers we have to notice the little things—especially little things with voracious appetites like aphids, rust flies, and mites.When Steve comes in with a discolored leaf and gets out the magnifying glass, there’s always a little bit of dread while I wait for him to decide what tiny, tiny critter is wreaking havoc with the crop this time.
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Things are hopping on the farm now. We’re doing a lot of planting every week, and getting into the swing of harvesting more each week. 
We are saying goodbye to Molly this week, which is a sad thing for us because she has done just an amazing job as our CSA administrator. 
The USDA has proposed imposing an Organic Check-off Program in which all organic producers would pay a percentage of their income to a federal program that would fund research and marketing for the industry as a whole. Think “Got Milk” or “The Incredible Edible Egg.” 
This first day of spring is being ushered in with yet more rain, making for a wet harvest day. Steve was on the tractor dawn to dusk through the weekend getting ground worked up and compost spread in advance of the storm. He wasn’t the only one. Some nearby farms have had tractors working through the night.
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I hope you have all weathered the storms in your homes or are at least getting the relief you need at this point with a little sunny weather. It was a frosty morning here, maybe the coldest night of the year so far. We are seeing dry-ish weather in the near-term forecast and are jumping on the chance to knock down some of the cover crops at our Lewis Road property to prepare more ground to plant into.
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Well, I have to eat crow on my eagle post from last time. It has been pointed out to me that the young eagle has the white chest coloring of a 2nd year juvenile. We wanted it to be a new chick from this year, and we hadn’t seen last year’s juveniles in a long time, and it was flying with both adults, so we just assumed it was a new fledgling. But you know what happens when one assumes…
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In my last eagle report I noted that one of the bald eagles that had been nesting here on Harkins Slough since 2014 died, and that the remaining adult appeared to have found a new mate this spring. Our eagle-eyed daughter saw an adult flying with an immature just before Thanksgiving.
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When the gang of wild turkeys arrived on the farm last year they didn’t cause much trouble. They hung around the pumpkin patch and scratched around in the grassy edges. However, they have now become a major farm pest for us. 
For the past five years Sarah Brewer has been our CSA administrator (a job she meant to take over only “temporarily” when her mother Chrissi moved out of the area). Sarah has done this job so well that I don’t ever have to worry about the running of this end of the farming venture.
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One of the advantages of being a CSA farm is the flexibility that we have in putting together the boxes each week. When a farm is geared towards wholesale markets, it needs to meet the expectations of providing a consistent product throughout the growing season. For instance if you want to be the carrot supplier for a wholesale outlet, you want to be able to harvest a consistent quantity and size of carrots every week throughout the season.
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