Halloween Fun

a lamb and border collie leave the ranch to celebrate hallow's eve

 

October

red express cabbage

lacinato kale, broccoli

red Russian kale, Lincoln leeks

spinach, beets, Swiss chard

collards, Brussels sprouts, tendersweet cabbage, Napa cabbage (under cover), red romaine lettuce (under cover), tadorna leeks, cassius cauliflower, bolero & napoli carrots

Napa cabbage

red romaine lettuce. you can see how the recent rain has brought forth the weeds!

zucchini and lemon cucumbers still in production

Membership Closed

Thank you everyone who has signed up for the winter CSA this season. Unfortunately, we cannot accept anymore members this year. If you were too late to sign up this year and want a reminder for next year, please feel free to send us your contact info. We will keep you on a list of folks to contact next summer.

The summer months are when we do the bulk of the winter planting and when member financial support is needed most to get to a great harvest starting in December.

Deadline to Sign Up

There are less than two months away until our first winter vegetable harvest! We’ve surveyed what we have planted, and based on our projected harvest, we have to cut off our CSA membership at 30 full shares (60 half shares). With the households who have signed up already, that means we only have 3 full shares (6 half shares) left for taking. And even if those shares are not spoken for by the end of this month, October 31, we will not be taking any more members for this season.

This means we are cutting off the sign-up date earlier than last year. The winter harvest is directly affected by the financial commitment that members give in the summer. While we have enough land and water to grow winter produce for 50 full shares, we did not receive enough member support to grow that much food. We want the members who signed up early on to get the amount and quality of produce they expect. So, if we were to take on more members up until the first harvest or after, the share size for everyone would go down significantly.

Thanks! Adam & Paula USE THIS FORM TO SIGN UP

Michaelmas on the Farm

It is fall! And it finally felt like it today – the morning was brisk, the day was chilly, and the wind howled this evening. Just a couple days ago we were watering crops with overhead sprinklers to keep them cool. Now we start to ponder soil temperatures cooling and plant growth slowing down.

Cabbage & brussels sprouts got a shower in the 100+ degree heat over the weekend.

Broccoli is looking quite happy.

Succession planting is underway with more seedling trays of leeks, lettuce, chard, Asian greens, chicory, broccoli...

Bed shaping is not easy in the north side of the garden where rocks abound. (We did not plant crops here last year.) While transplanting cabbage, I pulled out all these rocks from the bed. Now we just have to move them out of the pathway and make more veg beds.

The south section is fully planted and seeded. The summer crops downhill from the oak tree will get pulled out, and those areas will be cover cropped around November.

Peas are beginning to germinate in between the cabbages.

Field of feed corn, winter squash, and pumpkins.

Amazingly, this irrigation pond above the CSA garden site still has some water. We'll see how much longer it will flow before we have to start pumping out of the lower pond.

Berkshire piggies from Walnut Grove! Adam picked up 7 of these boys yesterday.

The last batch of broiler chickens for this season are pasturing next to the horses and young cows.

Alesander & Beaumont are guarding the broiler chickens. They enjoy raw meat scraps for dinner.

Gobble Gobble!

turkeys being goofy

If you haven’t heard, we’re raising free-range organically-fed turkeys! They will be up to size by Thanksgiving (just two months away!). Put a down a deposit of $35 t0 reserve your bird. They cost $5/pound. Toms are +14 lb, hens are +10 lb.

Turkeys will get processed on November 21 and can be picked up at the farm. Alternatively, you can pick up your turkey at Westside Renaissance Market after that date and at $5 convenience fee.

Impress your guests over the holiday with a tasty home-cooked  sustainably-grown turkey!

Turkey Order Form

Transplants & Crop Rotation

Ziggy scopes out the view from behind the bed of chard.

Sorry these pictures are a bit fuzzy. The vegetables are much prettier when they’re in focus. We’ve finished planting out the first two sections in the south side of the CSA garden. Looking at last year’s field map, we’ve rotated where certain crops are being planted. We basically make sure that we don’t plant crop families in the same spot twice. For example, we planted chenopods (beets, chard, spinach) where we had brassicas (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, turnips, kale, etc.) last year. Leeks – alliums – are growing where we had brassicas. You get the idea.

While we dump lots of yummy compost on all the beds we made, certain nutrients get drained from the soil by certain crops. So, to balance the soil fertility and ensure all the crops get enough food from the soil, we rotate the families of crops.

lacinato kale & broccoli. they've grown so much since this picture was taken!

beets! a bit over-seeded so they will need thinning. but beet greens are delicious, too!

Squash & Corn – Fall Bounty Awaits

Adam standing amongst our open-pollinated Nokomis Gold feed corn.

Waltham butternut squash

red kuri squash

feed corn & wheat. all for the sheep.

watering the squash. unclogging one of the sprinklers.

It has been so much fun watching the winter squash and pumpkins grow. We kept the weeds down really well when they were first transplanted, and since then, they have just thrived. We’ve sown a cover crop over them so that when we are done harvesting, there will be plenty of forage and crop residue for the sheep to graze.

The winter wheat we planted last year has gone to seed again, so although it is a weed amongst the feed corn, it’s still good food for the animals as well. As a biodynamic farm, we strive to produce most of the animal feed on-farm, and this is one way we are working toward that goal. This also improves the soil, and in the future, we will be able to plant vegetables (for humans) in that spot. Vegetables like brassicas and potatoes require a lot of nutrients from the soil, and cover cropping and grazing animals on the land will add much fertility.

Summer Bounty

While the winter season is our main produce season, we are growing a few summer crops for market at the Ukiah Saturday Farmers Market, Bar Agricole, and a tiny bit at Ukiah Natural Foods Co-op.

we have loads & loads of sungold tomatoes! They are so fruity and sweet. Get them at the Saturday Farmers Market for $3/pint or 2 pints for $5.

These are Little Finger eggplant. We also have Black Beauty, Nadia, and Rosa Bianca eggplant. Also at the Farmers Market, $3/pound.

Here is one of our zucchini patches. Our Raven (green) and Sebring (bright yellow) zucchini is so flavorful. Get a deal on them at the Farmers Market - $1/pound. (Winter crops have been transplanted into the section in the background.)

We’re also growing juicy Big Beef and sweet Pink Beauty slicer tomatoes for the Farmers Market and Westside Renaissance Market. Sometime this week, we’ll be slicing and drying some of them in the greenhouse so we can enjoy the summer flavor when they’re out of season. Yummy!

San Marzano, Principe Borghese, & Black Plum tomatoes going to Bar Agricole for canning

Rounding Out the Summer

As we near the end of August, we are sensing the close of Summer. Our ewes are beginning to lamb again, the days are getting noticeably shorter, the grapes are ripening…Autumn is coming! This also means that we are also deep into our winter vegetable farming…

napoli carrot

We have carrots growing. Carrots take a very long time to germinate (2-3 weeks), and in the heat, we have to keep them moist and cool to get the little plants going. That means hand-watering them twice a day. It’s a lot of work, but we love carrots

looking over the south section of the garden

To the left of the oak tree, you can see a brown, cultivated section of the garden. With the walk-behind tractor, Adam roughly shaped the beds. We have started to shovel compost on the beds, shovel up the sides, and rake them flat. Then we laid out the drip tape from last season and started seeding beets and spinach. The next couple days, we’ll be doing that to the rest of that section and transplant our chard and seed more root crops.

flats of kale, cabbage, and cauliflower

In the green section to the left of the oak tree, the cover crop will be cultivated in, and beds made in the same way. We’ll transplant many of the brassicas (picture above) there.

acorn squash

We are very happy with how well the winter squash and pumpkins are producing. At this point, now that the squash plants are in the ground, we just have to irrigate them until harvest. We had to do a couple rounds of cultivation as weed management, but we’ll be under-sowing the plants with cover crop soon.

potatoes

And the potato plants are doing their thing. We don’t do much with them since they’ve been planted. Some weeding and watering in the beginning, but we just wait to harvest them now.

So, we have a lot going on with the winter vegetable farming. It would be great if more people sign up and send deposits soon. We’re putting in a lot of time and energy on the winter crops instead of the summer crops, meaning we’re not selling a lot of summer produce, meaning we’re not making a lot of money from produce right now. It will be a few months before we have lamb to sell, and we are not raising a lot of extra meat chickens outside the poultry CSA because their organic feed is so expensive. Please sign up for the winter CSA today!