It was great to meet several of you at our Spring Farm Tour last Saturday. It’s nice to put faces to our CSA members, and you always seem to have the most interesting, engaged children! We seem to have entered our summer weather pattern with fog in the mornings burning off to some sun later in the day. This type of weather is actually what makes our home farm and the Redman ranch so perfect for growing so many crops – including lettuces, greens, and strawberries–that do not do well with summer heat.

You are invited to our Spring Farm Tour on Saturday, April 12th, at 10 AM, at our home farm. Come out and see where your food is being grown! We’ll take you around to the blueberry patch, as well as pear and apple orchards and the various row crops growing in the field. Special features on this property include our riparian corridor, native insectary hedgerows, the habitat restoration area, and the four-year UCSC research project on crop rotation that we are participating in.

The CSA is starting up again and it certainly feels like spring at the farm. The pear trees are bursting out in blossom, the blueberry bushes are loaded with green berries, and of course the weeds are going gangbusters. The bees are thick around anything in flower, ducks are flying over in pairs, and the swallows are swooping about overhead catching flying insects. It’s hard to argue with these beautiful sunny days, though we’re still hoping for some more winter rain before the end of March.

Thank you early subscribers! As we gear up for the year, the people who sign up early for the coming season are the backbone of our CSA. We use the early flush of money to pay for the cost of seed, compost, labor, land rent, and insurance that we incur before we can start to harvest the spring crops. We also use the number of early subscribers to gauge how much to plant and to make important decisions about land use and what improvements we can afford to spend some money on.

So long 2013 — it was a decent year for us, though it had its difficulties (and we’re still waiting for some rain!) But the winter vegetables that survived the frost are sweeter than ever, and we’re getting some time to relax with the every other week Winter CSA schedule.

This is the final delivery of our weekly CSA shares for the 2013 season. It is time for us to look back on another year of crop successes and failures—the delicious and bountiful blueberry crop; the fire in the apple orchard; the first tasty little pears; the stressfully late strawberry crop; the beautiful cauliflower, broccoli, beans, and carrots;

We have prepared all the strawberry beds for next year’s crop, and this week we start planting the strawberries themselves. The lack of rain has made this task go perfectly smoothly, but it has thrown a wrench into our cover cropping. We try to conserve water as much as possible, and most years we time the planting of as many of our cover crops as possible to correspond with fall rain storms.

I took some time this week to look into the FDA’s Proposed Regulations under the Food Safety Modernization Act. Food Safety is of vital importance to us, as it is to all farmers, of course. It’s the Modernization part that I’m concerned about. I’ll be making my comments to the FDA this week and I hope you will also comment (see links below).

Thanks to all of you who came out to see us on Saturday at our Harvest Fair and Pumpkin Patch! It was great to see so many CSA members there. (We’ll have some pictures to post next week.)

This time of year the farm is in transition. Those of you who were here Saturday saw that we have many fields coming out of food crops and ready to plant into the winter cover crops.

Our 5^th Annual Harvest Fair and Pumpkin Patch is this Saturday from 10 am to 4 pm. We go all out for this event and we’ll have something for everybody–animals, rides, crafts, facepainting, gourmet food, apple cider pressing, apple tasting, great music, demonstration bee hive, bagpipes, farm tours, and more! Here’s the rundown.

Steve and I have been named as finalists for the 2013 Leopold Conservation Award. (We were finalists in 2012 as well–see Leopold Conservation Award). The $10,000 award is given to one California farmer each year by the Sand County Foundation, California Farm Bureau Federation and a group called Sustainable Conservation, to recognize “extraordinary achievement in voluntary conservation by private landowners.”

We’re experiencing lovely days here on the farm as fall approaches, sunny and beautiful. The pumpkins are coloring up nicely and we’re getting excited for our Fall Pumpkin Patch and Harvest Festival coming up on October 5^th. (Please plan to join us!)

Our 40-acre home farm is divided into two parts. Approximately half of the farm is in an agricultural easement and must be used only for organic farming purposes in perpetuity. The other half, a mix of oak woodlands and hilly grassland that reaches down and into the waters of Harkins Slough, is in a conservation easement. It is forever safe from development and cannot be farmed either.

This summer we have been involved on two levels with the Monterey Bay Aquarium programs in science and conservation. Our youngest daughter went to their Young Women in Science camp, and had a blast kayaking, boogie boarding, and scuba diving, as well as meeting women scientists, monitoring sand crabs, and making toys for the aquarium’s otters.

It was nice to meet a number of you at our blueberry u-picks this year. We thought you might be interested in some history of this part of our farm. This is mostly a reprint of an article we wrote last year, but with some updated text and pictures.

Steve and I took a couple days off this weekend to go up to San Francisco. We rented bikes and toured around some of our old haunts. One of the places we wanted to go was to the Argonne Community Garden. This is the sweet little garden plot in the Richmond district where Steve and I had our first garden together. We didn’t know what to expect, since it’s been 20 years since we were there, but we found that very little had changed in the community garden.

The City of Watsonville is voting (already by mail-in ballot, June 4 actual election day) on Measure T, which would expand the city’s urban limit line. The proposal would pave the way (pun intended) for the development of 95 acres of farmland, with the stated goal of attracting big box stores like Costco. Included in these 95 acres of prime farmland is the ground we currently lease at the Redman House.

We really enjoyed meeting those of you who came out for our farm tour on Saturday—it was a great group of folks with interesting questions (and engaged clever children)! In spite of the uninspiring weather, we enjoyed giving you a taste of how and where we grow your vegetables. It’s good for us to step out of our routines to reflect on what we do here and meet the people who keep us going. So thanks for coming out! Stay tuned for strawberry u-picks during the summer.

The strawberries are playing tricks on us this year. A few weeks ago it looked like they were coming on strong, but after that first burst of fruit we’ve got a bit of a lull before the main crop really comes in. The plants are loaded with flowers, so this is just the calm before the storm and we should have the expected bounty of strawberries before too long. For now, we’ll keep it a mystery. You may instead get some of the first blueberries coming in, the very first summer squash of the season, or those wonderful Shiitake mushrooms from our friends at Far West Fungi.

Tomorrow is the first day of spring, and we’re celebrating by starting up CSA deliveries for the 2013 season. We’re looking forward to a good year of farming on our beautiful central coast farmland. We’ve had a busy few years, getting to know our “new” Lewis Road property and completing the big projects so we can be more productive with what we’ve got.

This week we are delivering our final winter CSA boxes. Thanks to those of you who joined us for winter! We’re busy with planting and tending the spring crops for the first weeks of the regular season starting March 20/21. (Check your account and make your payments now if you haven’t yet so that you take advantage of the lower price—see subscription info below.)

It’s been a busy couple weeks on the farm. About 80 CSA farmers and other people involved with CSAs from around the country in town for the EcoFarm conference came by last week for a tour of our farm. It was great to meet all these folks who are doing some version of what we’re doing and to swap stories about pests, weather, packing boxes, and all things CSA-related. Steve also attended some meetings about organic strawberry growing.

Even though we are harvesting through the winter, the farm still has something of the sleepy winter feel to it. We have cover crops growing in 80% of the fields. Those fields that we are harvesting from now will go into cover crops as these crops finish and we’ll bring them into summer production later.