New Chickens are Laying!

On Sunday we found our first egg from the new chickens. The chickens are just reaching their 5-month birthdays, and when I saw one of them in the nest box looking all uncomfortable I had a feeling today would be the day. This group of chickens are Barred Rocks, and their pretty dark brown eggs will add a nice color to our cartons which already have white, blue/green, and light brown eggs from our older hens (respectively: Andalusian, Arucana, and Naked Neck). The first eggs are tiny, about two-thirds the size of regular eggs, but they should grow to normal size over the course of the next month. It's good timing too, since our older hens have been laying less over the past month, probably due to either the very hot weather we had or to moulting.

Barred Rock hens munching on a row of old chard. We let the chickens graze on areas that are done for the season, which makes them happy, gives them extra nutrients, adds fertilizer, and supposedly reduces insect populations.

Harvesting Dried Hutterite Beans

One thing we've been interested in lately is whether we can grow a larger portion of our calories here on the farm by growing more things like grains and legumes. These also have the added benefit that they last a long time in storage, so we can eat them and give them to our CSA members over the winter when there are less veggies growing. Last year we grew a small plot of Hutterite beans, which are a white soup bean, somewhat like navy beans. They tasted fantastic and were easy to grow, so this year we planted a lot more.

Since we have very dry summers here, we just leave the plants in the ground until the bean pods are dry and rattle when shaken. Then we pull up the plants and begin the process of shelling the beans. This is where things become difficult. We don't have a machine for this, so we've come up with two old-fashioned methods:
1. Shelling (shucking) the beans one by one, splitting the pods open and dropping the beans into a bowl. It takes forever, but the beans come out nice and clean, and we can work on it while watching movies.
2. Threshing and winnowing (don't you just love the old-timey sound of it?)-- We put the bean plants in a box or bag and step on them until the pods open and release the beans (that's threshing). That's the easy part. Then we have to winnow them, which means separate the beans from the chaff, i.e. all the stuff, like dried leaves and broken pods, that is now mixed up with them. We accomplish this by pouring the beans from one box to into another on a windy day, so that the wind blows the chaff away, and the beans fall into the box. Someday we might modernize and buy an electric fan to help us along.

The harvest isn't done yet, but I think we'll end up with about 15 lbs. of beans from our 60 ft. row.

Eggplants of our Dreams

We love eggplants, and this is our first season that we are really having a successful crop of them. The process of getting this to happen has been a long one, but now as the harvest begins, it seems all worth it. The eggplants were seeded indoors on a heat mat back in January and February. Then they grew in the greenhouse until May when we transplanted them outside. We tried to really baby these plants, knowing how susceptible they are to both cold and flea beetle damage. So we planted them in black ground cloth (landscaping fabric), cutting a hole for each plant to grow through. Then we carefully covered the whole row with a sheet of floating row cover and weighed down the edges to keep out pests.

The plants are strong and much bigger than any we've grown before, about 3 ft. tall. Now, 8 months from planting those seeds, we are starting to get a huge amount of eggplants. They are mostly Asian long eggplants, and we also have some Italian-style called Rosa Bianca and some small round ones called Chu.

We started the season off with grilled eggplant and pepper sandwiches with tahini garlic sauce. Yum!

Oriental Fruit Flies

If you live in our area, you may have heard in the news recently about the Oriental Fruit Flies that have been found in Morgan Hill. The Oriental Fruit Fly is an invasive species of insect that destroys many kinds of crops, including tree fruit, tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers. As of today, four of these flies have been found near Monterey Rd. between Dunne and Tennant. This is frightfully close to our farm and could easily affect our farm and our CSA this year, especially if the county calls for a quarantine of produce. 

We want to make sure to share with you (especially our CSA members) what we know about the Oriental Fruit Fly and what our plans are now that it is here. We hope you will read the following Q&A, and contact us if you have additional questions or concerns.

1. Is the Oriental Fruit Fly dangerous to humans? 
No, the fruit fly is not dangerous to humans, just to produce, which its larvae basically destroy from the inside.

2. What is a produce quarantine? If the county calls for a quarantine, it means that none of the host crops can leave local farms unless they have been treated to eradicate the Oriental Fruit Fly. On our farm, this would affect tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers for about 1 month. The purpose of the quarantine is to keep the pests from spreading throughout our area, which could have a devastating effect on agriculture here.

3. Are we under quarantine yet? No, our area is not currently under quarantine, but several Oriental Fruit Flies have been found, and if they find more we will be quarantined.

4. What is being done about the fruit flies? The county is proactively treating for these pests. The treatment involves (excuse the technical language here) shooting gobs of goo high into trees and onto utility poles. The goo contains a pheromone that attracts male fruit flies. They then get stuck in the goo, and a low-level pesticide ensures that they die there. No males = no more fruit flies within one life-cycle.

5. How will you treat for the fruit flies at One Acre Farm?  Fortunately, there is an organic-certified pesticide available for this treatment. It's called Spinosad, and it is derived from naturally-occurring bacteria through fermentation. We did some of our own research into this product, and it appears to be very safe to use.

6. What happens to our CSA if the area is quarantined? That will depend in part on the type of quarantine. Some options would be to have smaller CSA bags for a while (without tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers.... sad, I know). We might be able to supplement more with produce from farms outside the quarantine. We would also offer a refund to those who want one.

Right now, everything is business as usual. Stay tuned, and we'll update you as we learn more. As always, thank you so much for supporting local farms!

Update: As of August 14th, no new fruit flies have been found. This means that we have so far avoided a quarantine. We'll have to keep our fingers crossed for another month though. Meantime, we haven't sprayed the Spinosad because we found out it's quite expensive, about $175/gal. 

Hand-Pollinating Corn

Signs of summer are popping out all over! One of these signs is that the corn is shooting up and making tassels and silks. Tassels are the part at the top of the plant where the pollen comes from (male), and silks are the things that stick out of an ear of corn (female). Corn is fertilized when the pollen falls from the tassel to the silk. Each strand of silk that gets pollinated makes a corn kernel. If only some get pollinated, you get a partly empty ear of corn --how sad--. In big fields of corn there's plenty of pollen to go around, but in a small corn patch like ours (700 square feet), it's not a sure bet.

I tried to help nature a bit today by gathering the pollen from the tassels and sprinkling it on the silks. I thought this would be a major pain, but it was actually quite easy and kind of fun.

Shaking some corn pollen into a paper bag.

Sprinkling corn pollen onto the silks of a new ear.

Cucumbers a Go-Go

Cucumbers (left-right): Wautoma Pickling, Beit Alpha, Baggese's Sicilian, and Armenian.

Crunchy, sweet, beautiful cucumbers are ready! The row covers seem to have worked their magic once again, and we have our best-tasting crop of cukes ever. CSA members will get to try all four of the varieties above, and hopefully we'll have enough to spare for some serious pickling.

Armenian Cucumber, birth to harvest

Green Beans and Cucumber Beetles

Awww....so cute. Baby green beans.

The green beans are growing rapidly now and making lots of flowers where we will soon have lots of green beans. This is always a happy time, since green beans are one of our favorite veggies. I love seeing the tiny beans forming-- they look so cute. Is it possible for vegetables to be cute? Well, I think so.

Spotted Cucumber Beetle, kind of pretty, but super-destructive.

Every year, along with the green beans come the Spotted Cucumber Beetles. I'm not sure why they didn't call them Spotted Green Bean Beetles. They eat many plants, but green beans sure seem to be their favorite. We have tons of these pests, and they arrived the very first time we planted a garden here, as if they had been waiting patiently for decades for someone to grow green beans. The best organic method I've found to get rid of them is the old pick-and-squish. I do this at least once a day for about a month, and it seems to sufficiently reduce their population to where the green beans can still make a decent crop. It is a lot of work, but I've become quite efficient at it. One of the benefits of having only one acre of farm is that manual techniques like this are possible.