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The big story down here in Watsonville last week was a 4-alarm fire at the Apple Growers Ice and Cold Storage Co. warehouse in Watsonville that completely destroyed the building and most of its contents. It started at 3:30 on Wednesday and burned for almost 2 full days. Once they deemed that no one was inside the building, firefighters stayed safely outside and worked mainly to contain the blaze as it burned itself out.
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While the Lewis Road ranch has been in production mode since late January, Steve’s just now working up most of the ground at our home farm and the Redman ranch for our next round of planting. The cover crop had grown tall. The ground was dry enough for tractor work. But alas, the disc-harrow was in pieces in the workshop. The disc blades and bearings needed to be replaced and to get to them the entire implement needed to be dismantled. So several weeks ago he had launched into a project to revamp the disc.
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(Steve is busy this week planting potatoes, and Jeanne’s off to the dentist for a root canal, so we’re rerunning this article on potatoes from 2009.)
Among the hundreds of pests and diseases that make organic farmers regularly consider changing careers, perhaps the worst of the worst is the garden symphylan. These soil dwelling, root-feeding critters are no more than ¼ of an inch long and have the appearance of an albino centipede. What makes them such a vile pest is that the classic practices of good organic soil stewardship—cover-cropping, reducing tillage, and adding compost—create the ideal conditions for them. Symphylans love loose soils, rich in organic matter. They feed on decaying plant matter and the roots of nearly every type of crop we grow.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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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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.
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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.
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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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