Last week was another very busy spring week:  Planting and transplanting – over the past few weeks we’ve planted basil and the first melons, basil, tomatoes, and eggplants Preparing other beds for planting, including mowing cover crops with tractors and sheep It got pretty warm, and we got a long enough break in the rain that we’ve needed to start irrigating Lots of weeding and harvesting and more!  We also took some time away from our normal work to have our annual CSA Open Farm Day on Saturday! It was so nice to have CSA members here to take tours, talk and ask questions, pet so ..read more

Today’s News from the Farm is an interview with an awesome member of our team, one of our interns, Saeko! She is part of the 2023-2024 Japanese Agricultural Training Program cohort. She came last September and will be with us until the beginning of October when she’ll head to UC Davis for a few months of classes before heading back to Japan at the end of the year.  Here’s our conversation, only very lightly edited version. Thank you Saeko for sharing! – Elaine Swiedler, CSA Manager Where did you grow up? I grew up in Fuchu, in western Tokyo, in the city. Were you around farming as a chil ..read more

It’s the first week of April, and it’s spring! Which means a few things: We’re experiencing dramatic weather shifts between days, or even within the same day, going from rainy and grey to sunny and warm, or the other direction, and we can still get some low temperatures at night and will have some colder days later this week.  As you can see, the hills of the Capay Valley are lush and green! Transplants and small direct-seeded crops are growing at a speedy clip and trees are budding. Grapes and figs pictured above. The start of the flower CSA season! We’re excited and we know t ..read more

Happy spring! Last week, we took advantage of the warmth and sun to harvest, weed, plant, and transplant. There was also a lot of mowing (cover crops and finished crops) and prepping bed to plant more. As promised, this Beet contains the second part of last week’s discussion (which you can find here) of hybrid versus open pollinated seeds.  For a very quick refresher: we plant hybrid and open pollinated (OP) varieties. Hybrids show more uniformity with appearance and timing (which can be important when growing on a farm-scale), but the seeds are more expensive and can’t be saved. OP vari ..read more

I’m feeling like Goldilocks. After griping about the wet and grey weather, we had several sunny and warmer days but those were accompanied by complaint-worthy howling winds, which were unpleasant conditions to work in and prevented us from transplanting. One thing that none of us are complaining about is all the great cauliflower and romanesco we’ve harvested over the past few weeks. From a grower’s perspective, the timing was perfect – they were ready to harvest at a time that otherwise could’ve been a bit lean for CSA box contents and they were ready before the warmer weather that will undou ..read more

As Dru wrote last week, we’ve had a lot of grey, cold, and wet days over the past couple weeks and months. The rain has been perfectly (or rather, unfortunately) timed to come right as things just start to dry out, which gets in the way of planting and weeding that will be crucial for abundant harvests in a late spring. Plus too many grey days in a row can start to feel a bit gloomy and monotonous. Six months from now we’ll be eagerly awaiting a cloudy, rainy day but when they’re abundant, they don’t feel special.  We have had some bursts of sun and signs of spring (robins, flowering and ..read more

It feels like it has been a long winter! And this coming from a gal who spent the first many years of her life in Vermont where there are snow days into April! Even though last year we had more rain in inches than this year, it seems like there have been many more cloudy, cold days. Maybe my bones are just getting older – after all I have been writing this “Flower Time Letter” for over 30 years and my bones ARE getting up there in age.  Even as I write, the blizzards in the Sierras are blowing  with gale forces confirming my instinct of a longish winter. As the saying goes ..read more

Today’s Farm News covers two small ways you can get involved to help combat food insecurity. It’s a huge, complicated problem, but that means that any measures to chip away at it are important. First, our CSA donation program. We’ve gotten a few inquiries recently, thus wanted to explain how it currently works! On a week that you don’t want a box, you have the option to donate or skip. Skipping means we move the box to the end of your schedule, or to a date you’ve specified. When you donate your box, the value of the box (or flowers, or whatever you’ve donated) goes into our Good Food Communi ..read more

This time of year, late January and early February usually ends up involving a lot of watching, waiting, and then suddenly springing into action on several fronts. Sheep: This time of year is lambing season. Our first lambs were born last week, a set of twins followed by a set of triplets and as of Monday morning (February 5) we’re now up to at least 50 cute, fuzzy lambs. The hope is that each birth goes smoothly but that’s not always the case. Either way, we make several trips a day up to our sheep to check on them, and assist if necessary.   Flowers: Then there are the tulips and th ..read more

For the past 44 years Dru and I, Andrew, Judith, and others from the farm have been attending the EcoFarm Conference, a gathering of farmers, activists and researchers probing the potentials of organic and biologically-driven food and farming systems. Our participation started with a first gathering of farmers in the shade of a large walnut tree in Winters in 1981. At that time organic farming was an idea, seen by many as farming heresy. We were probing the possibilities of eliminating synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides from our food and farming ecosystems. Experts dismissed or ..read more