Posts by: Steve Pedersen
There are just three more weeks of regular season CSA deliveries and the summer seems to have gone by in a blur. This has been a busy year for us, and one with a lot of new projects and challenges. The two biggest changes we had this year were operating as a single farm CSA after 8 years in our Two Small Farms partnership, and getting our new Lewis Road farm up and running.
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The carrots in your box this week are the result of an experiment. No, they are not genetically modified or altered in any way—Mokum is a sweet, tender, relatively early variety in the Nantes class. They have, however, been grown in a field that was treated with mustard seed meal (the solids that are left after mustard seeds have been pressed for oil).
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Summer at last! After an especially cold and foggy summer, here it is the second half of September and we are enjoying by far the nicest weather of the year. The eggplant, beans, peppers, basil, and squash are all loving it. So, you’ll be seeing more kinds of beans and peppers, basil, summer squash and eggplant soon.
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Nobody will ever accuse me of being the world’s most organized farmer. There was a time, however, when I used to make stakes to mark where each variety of winter squash began and ended in the field at planting time. I can also remember once having made a map of the squash field. This year I did neither.
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Even while we are just getting started on harvesting some of our summer crops, August is a sprint for the finish line production-wise. This week the very last of our successive plantings will go into the greenhouse. And through the middle of next month, we will be making the last plantings of the crops that we seed directly into the field, like carrots, beets, scallions, parsley, cilantro and snap peas. Relative to our spring and early summer plantings, these last plantings will be larger.
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The heat we have received this last week has really pushed things along. Over the next few weeks we have beautiful blocks of celery, broccoli and cauliflower that will be ready for harvest, as well as a new field of summer squashes that is now in bloom. Over the next few days we will go through and “blanch” the cauliflower plants by pulling the outer leaves together over the top of the plant and tying them together with rubber bands.
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“Be careful not to disturb the nest between the blueberry rows–there are 9 duck eggs in there.” I told my berry-picking crew. “No” Gabriel said. “Once! There are eleven.” The clutch of eggs that a mother mallard had laid in the middle of an aisle between rows of blueberry plants has finally hatched. Although we didn’t see it, the mother undoubtedly led her ducklings in single file down to the slough, a few hundred yards away.
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Some of you will be receiving the first blueberries that we have picked this year (don’t worry, there are plenty more to come, and we will rotate packing days to be sure that everybody gets some in the next few weeks). Of the four varieties that we planted, Southmoon is the clear favorite so far.
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We had a good productive week here on the farm. We listed the last twelve or so acres of un-planted ground up into beds. We’ve been laying down drip tape in the blocks that we will be planting our winter squash into later this week. And we have been planting out lots and lots of transplants—lettuces, broccoli, cabbages, fennel, celery, cauliflower, chard, kale, and peppers.
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The lovely little oakleaf lettuces in your boxes this week are two varieties that are new to us this year. We are so pleased with them that we will probably put them in our regular lettuce rotation. Let us know what you think.
This week’s fava beans (part of the mystery) are all from our Redman House field. It has been a while since I last grew favas, and I made the mistake of planting them too close together in the rows. The plants grew beautifully (a little too beautifully) but because they were spaced so closely together, the patch became a jungle-like thicket that is a real challenge to harvest.
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(Steve is busy this week planting potatoes, and Jeanne’s off to the dentist for a root canal, so we’re rerunning this article on potatoes from 2009.)
Among the hundreds of pests and diseases that make organic farmers regularly consider changing careers, perhaps the worst of the worst is the garden symphylan. These soil dwelling, root-feeding critters are no more than ¼ of an inch long and have the appearance of an albino centipede. What makes them such a vile pest is that the classic practices of good organic soil stewardship—cover-cropping, reducing tillage, and adding compost—create the ideal conditions for them. Symphylans love loose soils, rich in organic matter. They feed on decaying plant matter and the roots of nearly every type of crop we grow.
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Still reeling from the effects of last weekend’s drenching, and with three more major storms lined up across the Pacific due to arrive starting tonight, it certainly doesn’t feel like the first week of spring. If you follow weather patterns around here closely you know there is no “normal” when it comes to the rainy season. Even so, this has been a particularly strange year.
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Among the very best improvements we have ever made on our farm is building an enclosed workshop four years ago. By most standards it is quite modest—30×30 feet, with unfinished walls and a bare concrete floor. But it does have workbenches, lots of shelf space, good lighting and enough floor space to work on two trucks or tractors at once if need be. And most importantly, it has a place for everything—(although everything isn’t always in its’ place).
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STEPHEN PEDERSEN and JEANNE BYRNE – In 2011, Two Small Farms will once again be two individual small farms, dividing our CSA program into separate businesses. Don’t worry! We will still offer all the great advantages you are used to getting from the CSA. High Ground Organics will be offering pick-up sites from Palo Alto through the South Bay and Peninsula, as well as Monterey and Santa Cruz counties.
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STEPHEN PEDERSEN and JEANNE BYRNE – It’s hard to believe that it’s been eight years since we started Two Small Farms. We will always be grateful to Julia and Andy for all that this partnership has done for us—all that we’ve learned from them, all the times we were able to depend on Andy to come up with a truly remarkable essay for the newsletter, Julia’s untiring drive to find good recipes among her vast cookbook collection, and the way that together we really were able to come up with something that was more than the sum of its parts.
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Despite the fact that fall is by far our busiest time of year, in some ways it is also my favorite time of year. I tend to get re-invigorated by the prospect of some down time once the winter rains begin. It is our busiest time of year because we are simultaneously harvesting the last of the storage crops like potatoes, winter squash, and carrots, while at the same time planting overwintering crops like garlic, fava beans, and of course strawberries. It is also the time of year that we take many of our fields out of production and plant overwintering cover crops.
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One of the truest things my Uncle Jerry ever said was shortly after we bought our home farm back in May of 2000. “The one thing about living on a farm is that you are always surrounded by your work”, he said. So in the late stages of a long, hard season it is sometimes nice to have a quasi-legitimate excuse to get off the farm—if even just for one day. So when the notice for a fairly promising auction to be held in the west side San Joaquin Valley last Friday came in the mail, I was ready to go.
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We sell our organic strawberries at our farm stand and in farmer’s markets for what I consider a very reasonable price, but we occasionally have people who ask why they are so expensive relative to the $.99 pints they can find in their grocery store.
I could tell them that they usually get what they pay for—in my opinion those $.99 berries are worth just about that. Large scale growers choose varieties that are hard enough to withstand shipping long distances and pick them when they are only half ripe. Additionally, the high analysis synthetic fertilizers they use result in higher yields but sacrifice flavor even further.
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Like all California strawberry growers, we grow out our berry plants each year from strawberry crowns that we plant in the fall. These crowns are runners trimmed from mother plants grown at high-elevation nurseries. We place our orders for the varieties we want early in the year and the plants typically arrive the first week in November—dry root and neatly packed, 1000 per box. Until recently, the most frustrating part of being an organic strawberry grower was that, no matter how sustainable my fertility and pest control practices were, I still had no other option than to use crowns from conventionally produced plants, along with everyone else.
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