As a certified organic farm, we get a lot of questions about how we grow our vegetables, what materials we use on our crops, and so on. While most non-farmers know very little about farming, a lot of people know a lot about gardening, and many people have done research about those aspects of farming that might affect their health or the environment. These issues include use of genetically modified seeds (GMOs), pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers; energy use; water use; and water run-off.

The birds think it’s spring, even if it did snow here on Saturday. Steve covered as much of the vegetables in the field as he could to guard against the frost, and he has loads of starts in the greenhouse that he was too nervous to put out during this cold snap. Everything in the field seems to have come through alright; now we just need some warmer days so it can grow!

Every winter around the middle of January we start looking for a dry “window”, that will allow us to get into our fields and do some of our early plantings.

It’s an exciting and busy year for us, as we launch into farming some new ground and growing even more variety of vegetables and fruits. We thought it would be nice to give you an overview of the land we grow on both at our home and our other fields.

 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.

We’re still amazed that it happened ourselves. In a time when family farms are being swallowed up left and right by residential and commercial development, we were able to buy 40 lush acres in Santa Cruz county, complete with a house, lovely views of the mountains and wetlands, and almost 20 acres of prime farmland. At the time we acquired the old Cardoza dairy in 2000, we had been farming on leased land nearby for 4 years. We expected to move to someplace where land was more affordable before we’d be able to buy land ourselves.