We ran into a little glitch on Wednesday when we tried to irrigate a new planting of lettuce—the sprinklers never came up to pressure. The well at our home farm is very shallow and very old and we’ve known for the past year or so that it was failing. We are on the waiting list to have a deeper well dug, but with the high demand for wells right now, we’ve got another 6-7 months before that happens.

This week we got the netting over the blueberry patch–just in time, as the fruit is ripening fast. If we left the patch uncovered the birds would get more berries than we would. We picked the first ripening berries this week, so a few of you will find blueberries as your mystery item.

The unusually warm spring has produced favorable conditions for us to get our cover crops mowed down and lots of transplanting already done here at our home farmland. This is the first year we are not farming the land we used to lease around the Redman house, but with our 18 acres at Lewis Road and the similar size here at home we have plenty of good ground available.

The strawberries are giving us a warm welcome this spring, with the earliest crop we’ve ever had! The warm winter has prompted early blooms of plants of all sorts. Our habitat restorationist Laura Kummerer tells me that the annual wildflower count on April 15^th may be too late this year to catch many of the wildflowers—they’ve already bloomed and will be done by that date!

I love winter skies. Even though this “storm” didn’t ever pan out, the stormy-looking sky was a lovely consolation. We’re still hoping to get some rain the end of this week. On my walk around the farm I came across dozens of ladybugs in all stages. This picture shows a pupa on the left, and on the right is a ladybug freshly emerged from its empty pupa case. It’s good to see the ladybugs gearing up for the season!

The weekend rain has been very welcome on the farm. The long dry spell was starting to worry us, but the cover crops in the farm fields and the grasses in the restoration area have all hung on and should now take off again with new growth.  Another storm system coming in the next week or so will help to keep things growing.

Happy New Year to everybody. With 2014 gone, it’s time to look ahead to the 2015 farm season (March 18/19 to November 18/19), even while we harvest for the winter shares. This is a good time for us to be reminded of why Community Supported Agriculture is such a helpful model for small farmers, as well as for those who crave local fresh produce.

Those of you who are long time newsletter readers will recall that we have been involved in the effort to transition organic strawberry growers into using organically grown starts. The problem we are facing now is that virtually no organically grown planting stock is currently available and the standards allow growers to use non-organic plants when their organic counterparts aren’t available. To make a long story short, there was an organic plant nursery (Prather Ranch) that grew beautiful plants for a four year period between 2005-2009.

We hope you all enjoyed your Thanksgiving!

Welcome to the winter season of every other week deliveries. During the last harvest the crew found these three carrots intertwined, which we are taking as a good omen for the season ahead (displayed here by our packing shed manager Aquileo at our harvest party.)

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 trips to visit colleges with our eldest daughter. (This is quite a milestone. We leased our first few acres and started farming the year she was born. The kid and the farm are both growing up!)

The National Weather Service is calling for some substantial rainfall during the early part of next week—which we are delighted to hear about. It’s been just about a perfect fall so far. We’ve had enough rain so that we haven’t had to irrigate much during the last few weeks, and out on the grassland, things are greening up fast. At the same time, the storms so far have been spaced far enough apart to allow us to get in with the tractors and do the things that need doing—cultivating, preparing ground for cover crops and planting a few last vegetable crops.

“Severe Drought, Heavy Rains Hamper Pumpkin Crop,” read the headline in one of the ag papers we get. Steve pointed it out to me, “That about sums up farming right there.” Our pumpkin crop did fine here, though, and the cows and goats are now enjoying what’s left of the jack o’lantern pumpkins. The rain we did have last week was about perfect – a nice soaking to help our cover crops and the pasture grasses along, but not a gulley washer. Now we just need it to continue to rain like that once a week or so through the winter.

This is the time of year when the scheduling details for the CSA get a little confusing, so I’ll try to clarify how the logistics work for deliveries, sign-ups, and payments this fall.

There are four more weeks of regular season deliveries — these continue until the week before Thanksgiving. November 19 and 20th are the final delivery days for the regular weekly season. There will be no deliveries Thanksgiving week.

We are moving into winter planning mode here. We’ll be seeding some fields with cover crops before the expected rain this weekend at our home farm, and utilizing this rain to prepare our Lewis Road soil (which needs a bit more moisture to plant into) for sowing cover crop seeds next week. Our winter cover crop is typically a mixture of bell beans, vetch, oats, and peas. These crops are allowed to grow through the winter before we mow them down and disc them under in the spring.

This is the time of year when we really start to keep an eye on the weather.

The strawberries are going to be hit and miss from now on. The heat did a number on them last week, but they are rebounding surprisingly strongly. With possible rain in the forecast we may lose some of this ripening fruit.

Usually this time of year we are gearing up for our big Harvest Festival, which we’ve done for several years with the help of volunteers from Linscott School in Watsonville. The event has been a great success and fun for everyone.

As we approach the official end of summer, things are really getting dry out on our grassland and the surrounding hills. There’s a sprinkle of rain in the forecast — hopefully much more will come. While the slough we live beside (Harkins Slough) has maintained its water level due to some upwelling groundwater, the other fingers of the Watsonville Slough system are getting noticeably drier every week.

It’s been a mixed year for the pears. After a beautiful early lush bloom in spring, they developed fireblight that nearly killed many of the trees. It hit some varieties much harder than others, though, and the varieties that pulled through are producing a nice crop of fruit. The Hardy Buerres and the Seckels came through almost unscathed, and we’ll be alternating these with strawberries in the boxes as our strawberry production is going into a bit of a slump.

Last week I discussed some of the farm practices we use, relating to soil fertility, seed purchases, and pest control. But one of the biggest differences between growing vegetables organically vs. conventionally is how we deal with weeds. Conventional growers often use chemical weed killers before planting their crops (or even after the crops are planted if the crop is resistant to that weed killer—like the genetically modified “Round-Up Ready” crops.) Organic growers control weeds through only non-chemical methods.

As an organic farm, we’re always looking for natural ways to combat insect pests. In the 15 years or so that we’ve been farming we have rarely resorted to using any of the wide assortment of organically approved pesticides that are available. Rather than spraying a crop with something that will impede or kill a targeted pest, most of our pest control methods are more indirect. We rotate a diverse array of crops in small plantings through the different fields of our farm so that pests don’t get to feast on large blocks of their favorite food over a long period of time in one place.

As a CSA farm, we get a lot of questions about how we grow our vegetables. In this article I’ll address some of those questions at least in a general way.

We are certified organic by CCOF (California Certified Organic Farmers). While in some cases the rules to qualify as certified organic don’t go far enough, they do go a long way towards addressing many of the concerns that consumers have.

June is one of those months where all the different farm tasks come together and everything has to be done right now. The harvest is in full swing, with vegetables and berries ripening quickly and needing to be picked and sold. The weeds are also growing in leaps and bounds, requiring hoeing and tractor cultivating to keep them from overwhelming the crops. Meanwhile seeding and planting has to happen for the fall crops or we’ll miss the window for those. And everything needs to be kept watered and monitored for pest and disease problems.

The summer weather pattern has taken hold here. While those of you who are inland a bit are feeling significant heat, we are enjoying our cool foggy mornings in the 50s with warming into the high 60s or mid 70s mid afternoon. Much of what we grow really loves this weather, we don’t need to water as much, and it’s easier to work outside in the cool weather than hot, so we don’t mind. But be prepared if you come out for the u-pick this Saturday with a sweatshirt and long pants.

Berries, Berries, Berries!

We’ve still got plenty of blueberries coming in and are ready to do some strawberry u-picks as well. We’re making the first three Saturdays in June U-Pick days – June 7, 14, and 21 from 10 am to 4 pm.

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. Starting most of our crops in the greenhouse instead of planting directly into the field has several advantages. For one, germination is never 100%; it typically ranges from 50% to 90%.

Tonight, Steve and I will be going to the Monterey Bay Aquarium to see presentations by local teens on environmental projects they’ve been working on during this school year. The program is called the Student Oceanography Club, and it combines monthly informational meetings, monthly field experiences, and team conservation projects. Our daughter and three of her classmates formed a team this year and have worked hard on a restoration project by the wetlands on the neighboring property. Amelia and her friends have been interested in environmental action for some time, and had already formed their own environmental group they called TREE (Time to Rescue Endangered Earth) with our older daughter.

Our home farm on Harkins Slough was a dairy farm until the mid 1980s. When we arrived here in 2000 there were still quite a few remnants of the old dairy here. A classic old hay barn was in the last stages of collapse, and a 6-stall milking parlor still stood with all the plumbing, railings, and grates attendant to milking 6 cows at a time—sadly, we couldn’t save the hay barn, but we remodeled the milking parlor into a fine and very functional packing shed.

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. The ones on the white alyssum would be white, but those on yellow flowers would be a bright yellow instead. They were welcome predators in the garden plot.