CSA Sign-Up Time!

It's sign-up time for the 2017 CSA! If you'd like to become a member, please click here to fill out the registration form. Spring season starts on April 19th.

Greetings! If you are interested in becoming a member of our farm for the 2017 season, please click here to get on our waiting list. We anticipate opening the registration in March, with previous CSA members getting first dibs. Thank you for your interest in our farm!

A reminder of sunnier days on the farm. Right now it's been raining for weeks, so the field is looking rather soggy.

2016 CSA Sign-Up Time

We still have a few spots left in our 2016 CSA, which will begin on June 1st. Come join us for the most delicious assortment of fresh vegetables Morgan Hill has to offer! Please see the "How the CSA Works" page for more details, and click Here to fill out the registration form. Thanks!

CSA is Full for 2015

Our CSA is now full for 2015. If you are interested in becoming a CSA member in spring/summer 2016, please fill out the wait-list form, and we will be in touch with you as soon as spots are available.

Thank you for supporting our farm!

Summer CSA Sign-Ups!

Our summer season runs from June 24th-October 7th. Sign up today to reserve your spot! Space is limited.

Check out this video preview of our summer harvest:

Spring is Full, but Summer's Just Around the Corner!

The CSA is now full for the spring season. Thank you to all of you who joined this season! If you are interested in joining, we have memberships available for the summer season, which will start June 24th. To join for the summer, please click here to fill out the registration form. Happy spring!

We still have a few CSA shares available for the spring season. To sign-up, click here. Get the freshest, most delicious produce grown in Morgan Hill delivered to your door! Discounts available for pick ups and full-season subscriptions.  The CSA starts April 15th.

It's sign-up time for the spring CSA! If you'd like to enjoy the freshest produce on Earth, grown right here in Morgan Hill, just fill out the registration form, and we'll be in touch soon. Deliveries start April 15, 2015. Thank you!

Greetings! Our CSA is currently on winter break. We will re-start in April 2015. If you would like to be on our waiting list for new members, please fill out the form on our sign-up page. You will be notified by email as soon as a spot is available. Thank you!

Fall/Winter CSA

We're in the midst of our fall/winter CSA season, which runs from October-January. We're starting to harvest lots of greens, especially chard, kale, mustards, parsley, cilantro, and salad mix.

We are sold out for the rest of the year. If you would like to be on our wait list for next spring, please fill out our registration form. The spring CSA starts in April, and we will notify you as soon as a spot becomes available.

Many thanks to our community for supporting the farm!

Summer CSA Shares - Coming Right Up!

We harvested our first pile of cucumbers this weekend, which must mean the summer CSA season is right around the corner. We have room for new members! The season starts June 25th. Please visit our registration page to sign up. 

Spring is Here, and It's CSA Time!

Winter here was incredibly short and dry this year. Here we are in the first week of spring, and our spring crops are already all planted. Today we're preparing a section for summer crops. Over the next month, we expect to start harvesting lettuces, artichokes, kale, mustard greens, peas, beets, carrots, and more! If you live in our area and want the freshest veggies in the world delivered to your door, now is the time to sign up for our CSA. Just click here to go to our new registration form.

Spring seedlings are all planted.

Using straw mulch to keep seeds moist and row covers to keep the bugs off.

The chickens are having a blast eating down the cover crop.

Photo Journal of Fall Farm Goings-On

It's been a long, busy summer here. Here are some of the things that are going on around the farm this fall:

1. We've had an awesome tomato season, harvesting about 20 different varieties, mostly heirlooms. Earlier this month, we had our annual tomato tasting potluck party. As usual, we chose the hottest day of the month (not on purpose) for this event, but about 25 brave souls came out anyway to taste our best tomatoes.

2. We are also having a great year for winter squashes, and we're getting ready to harvest most of them this week. The butternuts look particularly promising.

3. Our fall crops are just about all planted now, and the weeds are going nuts, as usual, but so far I've been able to keep the veggies taller than most of the weeds.

4. I'm preserving food for the harsh California winter. Just kidding. Despite our year-round growing season, it'll be nice to have these ginger plums, plus tomato sauce, blackberry jam, etc. in the cold months.

5. Hubby is bravely clearing blackberry brambles out of the creek bed. The creek is dry right now, but once it starts raining it fills up quickly. Last year it came within inches of overflowing the banks. We're trying to give the water a little deeper channel to flow on out of here this winter.

Threshing and Winnowing Wheat by Hand

Wheat kernels

This is the continuation of the previous post, in which I described our foray into small-scale wheat growing and harvesting. At the end of June, we hosted a threshing bee here on the farm! Several of our friends and farm members came over to share a meal and to help us bring in the grain harvest. Both kids and adults seemed to have a tremendously fun time of it, and we all ended up with quite a bit of wheat by the end (I don't know exactly how much, since everyone got to take home wheat if they wanted). Here is how it went:

1. Threshing

Threshing in a pillowcase

The basic idea of threshing is to knock the wheat kernels off the stalks. We found a few ways to accomplish this, all of which were good fun. One of my favorite ways was to put a sheaf of wheat in a pillowcase, hold the pillowcase closed, and beat it with a stick for about 5 minutes, turning occasionally. Other methods included, smacking the wheat against the sides of a bucket, stomping on the wheat in a sturdy box, and swinging the bag of wheat against a hard surface.

2. Winnowing
If you are using a pillowcase, carefully pour the wheat into a bucket. I like to then shake it back and forth several times. The wheat falls to the bottom, and the chaff (hulls, stems, etc.) rises to the top. Then I scoop off the chaff and discard it. The next step is to pour the wheat (carefully!) from one bucket to another, allowing the chaff to blow away in the wind. If it's not windy, a box fan will speed up the process. You'll have to pour it back and forth about 5-6 times before it's clean.

Winnowing with a fan

3. Storing and Eating
The wheat berries should now be fairly free of chaff and ready to store. I just put mine in an airtight container in the cabinet. They are very dry and hard, so I imagine they'll last a long time. So far, I've been eating them as a whole grain, like rice, rather than grinding them into flour. Wheat berries are totally delicious! Simply put them in a pot with water at a ratio of approximately 3:1 water to wheat. Bring it to a boil for about 5 mins, then lower to a simmer and cook for about an hour, stirring occasionally. Then you can season them as you like and eat them warm or cold. I am particularly fond of mixing them with plain yogurt, salt, zatar (Middle Eastern seasoning mix), and olive oil.

Some of the finished product

Update: I just finished threshing and winnowing the last of the wheat. We ended up with about 10 quarts of wheat berries, which is 20 lbs., out of an area of about 240 square feet.
 

Planting and Harvesting Wheat by Hand

One of the new things we tried on the farm this year was growing a small patch of wheat. Although we're not thinking of becoming wheat farmers, I thought it would be interesting to try to grow a grain since they are such a staple in our diet. I'm sharing our process here because I found very little information available about wheat growing on a garden-scale. My disclaimer is that this is our first time growing wheat, so we are definitely not experts on the subject.

We are in USDA zone 9b, and we planted the wheat in October. It's Hard Red Winter Wheat, one of the most common varieties. We planted an area of about 240 square feet. To plant the wheat, we just made furrows with a hoe, sprinkled the seed in and then used the hoe to cover it with soil. We irrigated it with sprinklers until the winter rains came. It was extremely easy to grow and basically looked like grass throughout the winter and early spring. It started making heads in early May.

Heads filling out in mid-May

Next came the critical step of figuring out when to harvest it. Based on what I've read and an introductory workshop at Pie Ranch, I determined that the wheat should be all brown, and the kernels should not be chewy anymore. However, you don't want to wait so long that the plants drop their seed. We began the harvest on May 31st.

Since this is just a small experimental patch, I didn't want to buy any special tools or equipment for harvesting. We ended up using a serrated knife and pruning shears. I think the knife was probably more efficient. We grabbed each handful of wheat near the base and cut through the stalks with the knife. I found that it's easier to start with small bundles, about 3-4 inches in diameter. While holding the bundle in my left hand, I would use my right hand to tie it together. I found the most efficient thing to do was  use a stalk of the wheat to tie it. I would just bend the stalk about halfway up, wrap it tightly around the bundle (twice if possible) and then tuck the end into the wrapped part to secure it in place. Each of these bundles is called a sheaf.

Using a wheat stalk to bind the sheaf

Harvesting a sheaf

 We collected the sheaves in a big box, and when it was full, we brought the sheaves to an open place in the yard and stacked them together into "shocks." Each shock consisted of about 15 sheaves of wheat leaning together, with the seed heads up, so as to hold each other up. The best way I found to do this was to choose four of the larger sheaves and carefully lean them together to form the base. The key is to gently squeeze the heads together, so they tangle up and hold onto each other. Then I just keep adding additional sheaves in sets of two on opposite sides. Finally, I covered the top of the shock with a piece of row cover/remay (cheesecloth would work too). It's not as pretty with the cover, but it'll keep the birds off.

Bringing in the sheaves!

Now we'll wait until the wheat is completely dry, and then we'll begin the process of threshing and winnowing, which will separate the wheat grains from the chaff. To be continued....

Some of the sheaves shown here are covered and some not

Zucchinis... Coming Right Up!

Thanks to a super-warm spring, our zucchini plants are already quite big, and it looks like we may have our first harvest as early as next week. I'm really happy that they look so good because I nearly lost them after transplanting due to an irrigation mistake.

Around this time of year, I always like to clarify the difference between zucchini, summer squash, and winter squash. The short answer is that there is almost no difference. Summer squash refers to fruits that are harvested before their seeds mature, when their skin is still soft. Zucchini is one kind of summer squash, as is yellow crookneck, pattypan, etc. Winter squash are mature squash fruits with hard skins. Winter squash include butternut, acorn, and spaghetti squash. An immature winter squash is a summer squash, and a way overgrown zucchini becomes like a winter squash. Of course, the varieties we know as summer squash have qualities that make them particularly good for that purpose, and same goes for winter squash. To clarify another common misconception, both are grown in the summer. Winter squash are harvested in the fall, and keep well in storage over the winter, hence the name.

Female squash flower with Golden Zucchini forming underneath.

Male squash flower (no fruit forms beneath it)

Our New Logo

Here it is, our beautiful new logo!


Look for it wherever the freshest, most delicious produce is sold (within Morgan Hill, that is).

The logo was designed by CSA member Marieke Ruys http://mariekeruys.com. Check out her collection of hand-printed, eco-friendly napkins, the perfect accompaniment to all your locavore meals.

First CSA Delivery of the Season!

The first delivery of the spring season will be this Wednesday, April 17th! I'm getting very excited seeing how well our spring produce is doing right now. The first bag will include: beets, carrots, garlic, lettuce, mustard greens, tatsoi, bok choy, mint, mizuna, artichokes, and lemons.



Perfect for a stir-fry, with lots of Asian greens!

High Tunnel is Up! Many Thanks to our Helpers!

We finished putting on the plastic this morning.

The high tunnel is just about finished, and we wanted to say a huge "thank you" to all of you who helped us make this happen! Special thanks to our WWOOF volunteer, Madeline, who put in several 10-hour+ days on this project and our neighbor, Dan, who gave us free reign of his tool shed all week and to Mike from People and Planet who kept us fueled up with a big box of bananas and apples. Also much thanks to Bart, Pieter, Nineveh, Ariella, Jynelle, Kyrod, Tim, Craig, Lynn, and Nina who all gave up part of their weekend and plenty of sweat to get it done.

Hanging the first door.

Lots of drilling into steel on ladders- hard work!

Shoveling gravel under the baseboards - also a good workout!

Putting up purlins.

Ladders moving everywhere.

More drilling on ladders.

Victorious!

It's a Barn Raising!

Saturday and Sunday March 23rd and 24th, from 10am-5pm

This is the first arch. We have 11 more to go!

Gal has been busy with the sledgehammer.

It’s actually a high-tunnel raising, but same concept. A barn raising is when members of a community come together to help assemble and raise the frame of a barn — or in our case, a high-tunnel — which is too big a job for the farmers to do alone. A high-tunnel is a type of greenhouse, basically a big metal frame covered with plastic, which we will plant under. We were awarded a grant from NRCS to purchase this high-tunnel, and we need to finish assembling it in time for our April planting. So the race is on!

The posts that form the foundation are already in place, and it’s time to put up those big metal hoops. This is a big job, and we are humbly requesting the help of our community of friends, neighbors, and CSA members. You do not have to be an experienced construction worker or super-strong to help out. Jobs will include piecing together the metal hoops, helping to hoist them into place, and bolting together the supporting pieces. If you have a drill, please bring it. Also, we are greatly in need of a tall, free-standing (A-frame) ladder, 10 feet or taller. The barn raising is both Saturday and Sunday. We hugely appreciate any help you can provide, whether for an hour or a day. We hope this will be a fun community-building time with a sense of accomplishment at the end. We will provide cold drinks and light refreshments.

All are welcome. Many hands make light work.

900 W. Edmundson Ave., Morgan Hill

Thank You,
Michelle and Gal

The finished product should look something like this.