Here it is August already. Steve wants to write some articles about specific things happening on the farm right now, but we can’t pull him out of the field long enough to do it. This past week he has been out at the Lewis Road farm quite a bit, planting avocado trees, meeting with designers to set up his hoophouses on the terraces, and getting a load of mustard seed meal to help fight root knot nematodes. The mustard seed meal is proving itself to be a good fertilizer as well as fighting soil diseases and pests.

The farm is in full summer swing now. There are yummy summer vegetables (beans, peppers, cucumbers, and eggplants) growing nicely. The apples (and even some pears this year) are formed on the trees and starting to size up. The blueberries have slowed down, but we’re still able to put a few in the mystery shares each week. The strawberries are plugging along nicely. In this year of learning about our new Lewis Rd. farmland, we decided to not take a chance with the tomatoes. The Thomas Farm has been growing wonderful organic tomatoes for decades, so we asked Josh if he would plant enough to supply our CSA for this summer.

“Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get.”
H. Jackson Brown Jr.

For the past few years, we have been getting flowers for the CSA from Steve’s cousin, Josh, at the Thomas Farm in Corralitos.

It’s hard to believe it’s June already, and the windy, cool days and periodic rainstorms don’t help. Everything seems to be growing slower than expected this year. The first of the blueberries are ripening at last. Of course, the birds found them right away! We’ve had to cover the rows with bird netting to keep them from eating every berry as it turns blue.

One night many years ago, Steve couldn’t sleep and got up to read in the living room. All was quiet in the house; except… what was that humming sound? The sound seemed to be coming from the floor. He put his ear on the floorboards and the humming grew louder. That’s how we first discovered that we had a hive of honey bees living under our floor.

While the Lewis Road ranch has been in production mode since late January, Steve’s just now working up most of the ground at our home farm and the Redman ranch for our next round of planting. The cover crop had grown tall. The ground was dry enough for tractor work. But alas, the disc-harrow was in pieces in the workshop. The disc blades and bearings needed to be replaced and to get to them the entire implement needed to be dismantled. So several weeks ago he had launched into a project to revamp the disc.