We’ve had an excellent response to the WorthWild campaign to fund the reusable crates. We’re already a third of the way to our goal! We appreciate all your supportive comments as well. I think this is a good direction to go in.
We’re excited this weekend to have guest chef Beverlie Terra doing a cooking demonstration at our new farmstand location next to Annieglass in Watsonville. Beverlie has worked as a professional chef for over 32 years, at high end restaurants like Chaminade in Santa Cruz, teaching at Cabrillo College, and currently working at Sweet Earth Foods in Moss Landing. She is a great supporter of local farmers and wants to help promote our farmstand, which provides local fresh organic vegetables to the Watsonville community. Beverlie will be putting together a kale salad with a strawberry “salsa,” using ingredients from the farmstand. Yum! She’ll be at the farmstand from 1 pm to 4 pm Saturday, September 5th.
The water situation here at the home farm is still difficult, since the well that we were using from the neighboring farm is now also failing and is currently offline. We are back to using our home well which barely gives us enough water to keep things alive—nowhere near enough to plant out new crops with. And because we can only irrigate small blocks at a time with it, it requires a lot of micromanagement at the moment. In the greenhouse we have a lot of plants backing up, ready to be planted out. Some of them we can transfer over to our Lewis Road site, but the heavy feeding crops like brassicas and leeks really do much better on the heavy soils of our home ranch.
This isn’t to say that we have been sitting by idly waiting for the situation to resolve itself. At our Lewis Road site, where the well is holding up just fine, we have been steadily planting for our fall and winter harvests. In the high tunnels we have new plantings of Tomatoes, Peppers, Basil, Filet Beans and Cucumbers. Out in the field we’ll soon have Radishes, Arugula, Mei Quin Choi, and Tokyo Market Turnips along with Beets and lots of Carrots. The Winter Squash is maturing nicely and should start to appear in your boxes by the end of the month. It’s also a good year for Pumpkins at the home ranch with the crop nearing maturity and coloring up already!
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
