by Amber Sciligo, Guest Contributor

A colleague whose parents are CSA members told me about the blueberry u-pick event at High Ground Organics.

The u-picks have really been a nice opportunity to connect with a lot of you in person. Thank you for coming out! The next strawberry u-pick will be Saturday, July 23^rd. The strawberries continue to come in strong and delicious, but blueberries are pretty much done after this week. If you haven’t yet made it out for a u-pick, this might be the time to plan that summer jam-making party.

There are many environmental and health advantages of farming organically the way we do – fewer toxic chemicals released into the environment or consumed, safer conditions for farm workers not exposed to pesticides, safer food sources for pollinators, more attention to maintaining the diversity of both food crops and native flora and fauna, and a long list of other benefits. One area that is sometimes overlooked is the connection between farming and climate change.

I was listening to the radio recently and heard a brief he-said-she-said “debate” between a supporter of conventional agriculture and a supporter of organic agriculture. The conventional agriculture supporter’s main argument was that organic growers use pesticides too, just organic ones.

It’s a busy time on the farm. Last week we finished planting out a round of tomatoes and basil in the high tunnels as well as new successions of lettuces, radishes, cilantro, beets, green onions and mustard greens outside.

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. The spiders are experts at camouflage, and can turn different colors depending on the color of flower they are on.

One of the perks of farming where we do is that we live in a birder’s paradise. Our home farm is on a hill perched above Harkins Slough, a freshwater wetland that is host to copious waterfowl. We regularly see great blue herons, egrets, terns, ducks, geese, coots, grebes, white pelicans, marsh wrens, kingfishers, and night herons.

This week we make the final winter CSA deliveries on the biweekly schedule. The regular season will start again on March 16 and 17 with weekly deliveries through November 16 and 17. The weather forecasters tell us that El Nino still has some rain in store for us, so we’re using this dry window to get some more ground worked up for spring planting.

The winter session is upon us with nice cold weather to usher it in. Our winter plantings are coming along well, while on the rest of the farm the cover crops are greening up the landscape nicely.

This week we’ll deliver the final boxes of the regular season. Thanksgiving week will be off and then we’ll start the biweekly winter deliveries the following week (December 2 and 3). Sarah has information below about the winter session logistics.

The first batch of reusable crates has arrived! We will try out our new crates this week for the Thursday route. Please bring reusable bags (like the High Ground Organics Bagito bag you got if you made a donation to the crate fund) to the pick-up site. Take your fruits and vegetables out of the crate and leave the open crates in a nested stack. Thanks to all of you who helped make this happen. We look forward to fewer trips to the landfill!

It was too good to be true. The Bagrada Bugs are here at last. The home farm is still free of them, but they moved into the Lewis Road ranch en masse last week. Fortunately some of our young tender greens are already covered with row cover, which works to some extent if you get it on before the bugs arrive.

Well, the wild turkeys seem to have established residency for the time being on our home farm, so I’ve been reading up on them to try to determine whether we should consider them friend or foe.

There were turkeys in the pumpkin patch yesterday — a “gang” of about twenty birds. (Gang or rafter are the appropriate words for a group of turkeys.) We don’t usually have wild turkeys around here, though we’ve seen a couple on nearby properties during the past year.  

We’ve had an excellent response to the WorthWild campaign to fund the reusable crates.  We’re already a third of the way to our goal! We appreciate all your supportive comments as well. I think this is a good direction to go in.

For awhile now we’ve been exploring ways to become more environmentally sound in our packaging. The waxed cardboard boxes we use to deliver CSA produce can be used several times, but the fact is, the boxes are not recyclable because of the wax coating and end up comprising a large portion of our landfill bulk from the farm.

Our restoration volunteer day last Saturday was very productive and fun. Thanks to those of you who came out to help! We got a lot of mulch spread in a short amount of time. Laura Kummerer turned her spotting scope on the osprey nest, so we got a great view of the 2 chicks and their parents, and took a walk through the grassland to identify the different native and invasive species.

Wanted: several willing people to help spread mulch in our habitat restoration area by Harkins Slough. The ospreys and turkey vultures will be supervising this fun work day event from 10 am to 1 pm this Saturday.

It’s hard to believe it’s the middle of July already! We have a couple opportunities for you to come out to the farm this summer. First, we’ll hold Strawberry U-Picks the next three Saturdays – July 18^th, July 25^th, and August 1^st. Picking time is between 10 AM and 2 PM, so please try to arrive on time to finish up your picking by 2. Now’s the time to make that jam or stock up the freezer with berries for smoothies! Berries cost $2 per pound. Bring your own containers if you can.

High Ground Organics’ home farm is protected by two easements, an agricultural easement and a conservation easement. This summer we are lucky to have Brown University student Clare Peabody working as an intern to help our restoration efforts on the half of the property under the conservation easement.

I’ve been getting some questions about tomatoes already so I guess people are getting in the mood for summer vegetables and fruits. It certainly feels like summer with these long days, kids out of school, and the solstice just around the corner. The thing about summer vegetables is that they need those long warm days to grow! Our tomatoes are shaping up to come in earlier than we’ve ever had them before, but they still need a few more weeks.

We’ve been enjoying meeting a lot of you at our u-picks!  One more to come this Saturday, and then stay tuned – we’ll probably do some more in the summer. We should have both strawberries and blueberries for you to pick this weekend.

For at least the past decade, 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. He would arrive every Thursday with an old Ford pick-up truck and load up the CSA vegetables donated by members who were on vacation that week or had even paid to provide a donation share weekly. Since the old truck gave up the ghost, we’ve been delivering the vegetables directly to the food pantry ourselves.