We had a real spring storm over the weekend.  The sky opened and dropped over three inches of rain.  It really slowed down our frantic tilling schedule as the ground was compleletly saturated once again.  Kind of like the eye of the storm, we just couldn’t keep going at the same pace.  The compost we were having delivered couldn’t make it up into the farm area because of the mud…. It seemed like a natural time to tie up other odds and ends.

We finally got our electric fence set up to keep the bears out of the bees.  So now all we have to do is move the hives and and buy bees for three more hives.  Electricity is a scary beast.  Neither Billy or I had the courage to test the fence, so we have to rig something up with jumper cables.  We finished putting out the cool weather transplants.  All the brassicas and lettuce are pretty much in the ground now.  Weeded the strawberries and peas.  We’ll probably have to replace some of our potatoes because I didn’t think about the trenches being pools in this clay, un-drainable soil, so I think some have rotted from the excess water sitting there.  We may do the potatoes differently next year.

We found a Western Pond turtle in the road today.  It’s the only native freshwater turtle in California.  We saved it from an emminent future as road kill and released it into one of the streams bordering the farm.  It felt like a good luck omen.

It’s getting to be that time of year, to transplant onions.  I am going to do it during the later part of October here (zone 8).  I have already started thousands of the little guys in flats (although germination was erratic due to high temps).  I started the first flats around the 15th of August, and plan to give them a couple of months to grow out before transplanting.  The rule is, transplant before they’re the diameter of a pencil or larger.  These transplants will mature to… Read the rest of this article »

Today was just one of those days where I looked at the field and all of the transplants that are strong and healthy, and I thought: “Man, this is awesome.”  Today was the romance version of farming. And how could it not be romantic when you’re doing exactly what you love?  It doesn’t matter that my wage per hour would probably qualify me for a host of government programs (alas, no subsidies for the vegetables I grow - does that make any sense!).  This is the only job I’ve… Read the rest of this article »