Farm Volunteers and Farm Party!

Lulu, age 7, picking blackberries

We have been blessed with our first-ever WWOOFers! WWOOFers are farm volunteers who are members of World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. Our volunteers are a mother-daughter team from Japan, and they have been here on our farm for about a week now. Miki and Lulu have been a huge help around here with all kinds of farming projects like weeding, trellising tomatoes, harvesting and cleaning produce, saving seeds, and so much more! Until recently they had their own organic farm in Japan, growing vegetables and making a few specialized products, including pesto made with ashtaba leaves, a plant commonly used for medicinal purposes in Japan. They left their farm because it was too close to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and now they are traveling in California and searching for their next steps in life, which hopefully will involve finding or starting a new farm. If you're interested in learning more about our visitors, check out this article about them that ran in the Sacramento Bee: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/07/03/3744366/japanese-organic-farmer-picks.html

Better yet, come meet them (and visit us) at our Summer Barbecue Party and Open Farm Day this Sunday, July 24th starting at noon.

Odd Things on the Farm

Amongst all the many things growing at this time of year are a few strange looking plants. I photographed a few of the more interesting ones this morning to share with you. The picture above is a tomatillo plant (the ones you make green salsa out of). They grow papery "lanterns," and the actual fruit slowly forms inside. Right now the lanterns are huge, but the fruits inside have just started to develop. When the fruits start to burst forth from their lantern, we'll know it's time for harvest.

This is a Swiss chard plant going to seed. Vegetable plants often look quite different when they start to bolt and make seed. These chards are about 6 ft. tall now. We're saving as much seed as possible this year from all kinds of plants to help reduce our farm expenses. It's fascinating to see the plants through their entire life cycle and back again.

One more...I thought these were lima beans when they were smaller. But, when they started shooting up stalks of little white flowers, I reconsidered. I remembered having planted a small patch of buckwheat from seeds my friend Jen shared with me.

A Growing Bonanza!

Tomato Acre Farm?

Beans Reaching for the Sky

The farm is booming right now with plenty of spring vegetables still being harvested and summer veggies starting too. It's so satisfying to see it all coming together. This is perhaps the most exciting time of year on the farm. There's still plenty of work, but we are bringing in the fruits of our labor.

Gal attaching one of our new windows

Anyway, besides the farm work, we are taking care of the farmers. At long last we are installing new bedroom windows, ones that open and close whenever we want. Amazing!

And...What's up with brussels sprouts? They have been growing since January, and they are huge and healthy looking, yet no sprouts to be found. I guess we'll try a fall planting and see if they like the weather better.

Brussels, huge with no interest in sprouting

Sunflower Sprouts

 We grew lots of giant sunflowers last year and saved the heads thinking we would roast the seeds. Well, we didn't get too motivated on that front, but I have recently started growing sunflower sprouts, which has been quite satisfying and delicious.

Giant sunflower last summer. They were about 10 ft. tall.

Dried sunflower heads hanging in the shed

We cut off the sunflower heads last fall and dried them in our shed.
I recently collected the seeds from one head, soaked them and rinsed them periodically for 2 days, and then grew them on top of soil. In about a week's time, we had plenty of sprouts for our CSA members (and some for us too).

Sprouts on about day 4. They grow fast!

Garlic Capital of the World!

Well, almost. Gilroy, the town just south of us, is the official garlic capital. Fortunately, the garlic doesn't seem to care for city boundaries. This year was our first try at growing garlic, and it did very well. I harvested our small patch this morning.

On trays and ready to be cured in the shed for the next couple weeks.

Garlic takes a very long time to grow, about nine months, but overall, it's very easy to grow and pests avoid it. After harvest, the garlic has to be "cured" (dried) for at least a couple weeks so it can be stored. Garlic is great to eat at any stage of the process, and we've been enjoying testing a few of the heads over the past month. Next year we're definitely going to grow a lot more garlic!

Garlic in the field. It's ready to harvest when about 40% of the leaves are yellow.

Gently harvesting the garlic with a digging fork.

An Artichoke on a Typical Spring Day

This artichoke plant hosts an entire micro-ecosystem.  Ants have been bringing aphids to feed on its leaves and stem. The ants are like aphid ranchers, bringing the aphids to juicy plants and then feeding on the "honeydew" that the aphids produce. The ladybugs come to eat the aphids. Since there are so many ladybugs there and such good food, the artichoke has also become a popular spot to meet other ladybugs, have a few drinks, and see what happens...

Interestingly, the other artichoke plants in the row have very few aphids or ladybugs on them. I don't know why. I do know that we harvested our first artichokes yesterday, and they were delicious!

We started another round of greenhouse plantings. These are pumpkins (almost ready to transplant) and a variety of herbs.

Stormy Weather

Peas love cool, wet weather. These guys should be ready soon.

Just a couple weeks ago we had temperatures as hot as 90 degrees. The past couple days it has been drizzling and cold, with highs around 60 degrees. For most folks, the crazy weather is a curiosity, something to talk about at the grocery store. For farmers, the weather takes on a much higher level of importance. We watch the weather constantly and try to determine what we can do to help our plants make it through the given conditions. A couple weeks ago we decided to invest in shade cloth to protect our spring veggies from the suddenly hot weather. Spring plants exposed to too much heat can bolt before harvest time, meaning that they flower and try to go to seed early, which results in bitter, unsellable crops. So, now that we have put up shade cloth over all the tender spring plants, the weather has turned gloomy and wet. Hopefully, it's not too cool and wet for our summer plants, which love heat and lots of sun. The good news is that we are a highly-diversified farm, and so some of our plants are bound to like the weather, whatever it may be.

Shade cloth in the rain

 On Saturday I taught a class at the Morgan Hill Community Garden about transplanting and trellising. Below are some examples of tomato trellises that we talked about.

Florida Weave: The tomatoes are sandwiched between the twine

Suspended Trellis: The twine will be spiraled around the tomato as it grows.