We have a Heat Advisory in effect for Palermo until early next week.  That means we won’t be on ladders working on the field shed this Saturday.  I’m helping my dad move from Colusa (106 degrees.  Why would he want to leave?) to Forbestown, so I can still swing by and fill the water tank on my way back to the Bay Area.

Okay.  A few things:

I love the Bay Area.  I am one of a comparatively small number of people who was actually born in San Francisco and my love for that town is deep.  As Dan and I figure out our second 20 years together the City figures into it.  We may (and probably will) have the farm as our primary residence and keep a studio in the Bay Area.  But for now, one or both of us drive out to Palermo at least once a week to our beloved farm (Me!  Me!  Pick me!).  I love it here, too, and leaving always bums me out, no matter how much we got done.  Not getting to come up here for whatever reason makes me a sad panda.  I also just started a new 40-hour-a-week contract.  I am glad for the work in this (hahaha!) economy that funds my pipes, seeds, and nails.  At the same time, it makes the trips to the farm all the more important.

Our tank came with the place.  Besides the fences, it was the only man-made thing on the property when we bought it.  It holds 200 gallons, which is enough water for one week at an EVo level of .25.  I think we will be hitting .30 or better over the next few days.  I’ve been overcharging the soil a bit and we have a lot of clay, so I think we’ll be okay.  At least the trees should be fine.  The infrastructure project for FY 2010 will be a new, big tank.  I also want to redo some of my irrigation system.  I’ve noticed some design flaws that could cause trouble.  These are places where hard pipes could get stressed and where there are no shut offs at the branches off the main.  So if I get a crack, the tank will empty and we’ll be completely off line until I can fix it.

The test field continues to educate.  We pulled some potatoes out last weekend, which was pretty tricky in the clay.  We got an “okay” harvest in our Zone 9 unamended field.  Our home garden at Zone 15 (cool and costal) has had two years of compost and a cover crop and outperforms the farm field by a large margin.  This leads us to think that maybe we should spend the next 1-3 years building soil and not worrying about vegetables.  We have 16 trees in the ground and will add more in the winter, so we are filling our production pipeline.  I just expected that veggies would be the first ones through, but we obviously have some more work to do.  We will follow Eddie’s lead and hire someone with a tractor to turn our soil so we can cover crop it.  We’ll also have some left over bales from the field shed construction project and will use them to make even more compost.  I would love to be selling at the farmers’ markets next summer, but there is preliminary work to be done if we aren’t going to kill ourselves for a handful of inferior potatoes.  This is a farm, not a hot dog stand, right?

So we listen to what the land wants to do, and it wants to do fruit.  Our first trees might produce in volume in 2010 or 2011.  One option we are thinking of doing is partnering with Planet Organics or local veggie CSAs that don’t do their own fruit.  We are CCOF certified, so that should help.

Now we are direct seeding all sorts of hot weather veggies.  Cucumbers, melons, zucchini, you name it, we are planting it (within the general farm plan, of course).  Ryan and I are working very hard, putting in 12-13 hour days, in addition to harvesting and delivery for the CSA (now 20 members).  We are going to start a farmers’ market this coming saturday. Ryan is feeling the heat.  I am also, but he just jumped into all this work very quickly.  He’s getting… Read the rest of this article »