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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.
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).
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!
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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.
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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.
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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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This year we will be participating in another strawberry experiment with my friend Joji Muramoto who is a researcher at The Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems. I enjoy working with Joji because not only are his experiments well designed and thorough, but he seeks to answer questions that are of great interest to growers. In the past we’ve helped him with his fertility trials–comparing rates and timing of compost and fertilizer application in organic strawberries.
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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.
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.
Occasionally one of our customers writes us a polite note urging us to be more “green” in our packaging for the CSA. They are bothered by the plastic bags that we use to portion some items and the big liner bag we use in each box.
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The spinach in your boxes this week has had its 15 minutes of fame. Along with a certain gangly farmer in a green shirt it has appeared in dozens of newspapers from coast to coast—including USA Today.
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You’re not going to eat them, so why bother to buy organic when it comes to flowers? Three good reasons are worker safety, your safety, and environmental health.
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From our kitchen window we can see a freshly disced portion of our front fields with a faint green stubble just becoming apparent. In a few months this stubble will become a seven-foot tall sea of brilliant green grass with waves blown across it by the afternoon wind.
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This week we planted a perennial insectary hedgerow alongside our crops, between the farmable portion and the area under conservation easement. The hedgerow consists of two 500-foot rows with more than 300 plants. There are 15 different species of native plants, including elderberry, ceanothus, coyote brush, California sage, wax myrtle, California rose, giant buckwheat, sticky monkey flower, and saltbush. These plants attract beneficial insects by providing habitat, nectar, and pollen.
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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.
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