Farm Pictures

Here are some new pictures of the farm. These are for all of you who have visited in the past. Now, you can see how the farm has changed. All of these were taken from the deck.

Here’s the corn and winter squash patch.

And a view of our ever slow-growing tomatoes on the left. You can see the chickens down below in their pasture pen too. And the shiny (well, not so shiny anymore) new tractor. A new advent on the farm: we are adding 70 broilers to the farm next week! Oh my goodness!

And then a wider view of the garden….

And finally, here is a picture of potatoes and onions and a whole slew of other crops growing in the area we had fire last year. We were calling this the desert zone recently (because we couldn’t get water to it easily and it was drying out), but we have solved that problem and everything is responding now. We have been pulling beautiful Purple Peruvian and Banana Fingerling potatoes and Walla Walla Sweet onions from this section recently.

I’ll get some up close photos soon…I meant to take some pictures of our CSA boxes this week, but I was tired last night and forgot. I promise I’ll do it next.

Smoky

The smoke blew in again today. It makes it so unpleasant to be outside in such terrible air quality. Hopefully, it will blow out again tomorrow.

We’ve got a big week ahead of us–lots of harvesting and marketing. More seeding, planting, weeding and watering too. The Saturday market in Ashland was fun and proved better sales for us on the first market day than ever at Medford. People were really happy to have a market on Saturday in Ashland too. We really enjoyed it.

Josh, Everett and I took most of the day off except for some planning and watering. We had brunch with friends and then spent some time down at the creek floating in an innertube and playing with rocks. It was relaxing.

We also walked the field, which was nice to do because we hadn’t in awhile. We did some good planning for the week and figured out what needed more management and more water. We’ve had no success on two plantings of cucumbers. We are going to try one more planting and we’ll see if we get better germination and growth. We may just be too late this year for cucumbers.

We’ve relocated one fox and need to see if we can trap one more to end this strawberry massacre that is occurring. We ate a few ripe strawberries today. They were so good! We hope we can solve this problem soon. It really brings up an interesting dilemma for us as organic farmers who really want to farm with nature and wildlife, but in instances like this, where a whole strawberry crop is wiped out by foxes, it makes management really hard. There are times I just want to let the foxes eat what is there and forget we ever had strawberries. But, most of the time, I’d like the foxes to find another place to eat and live, so we can pick strawberries for market and keep working at making this farming thing work. It is just another example of finding balance in all this craziness of farming.

Here’s a picture from the first Saturday Ashland market. We had ALOT of head lettuce! My plan is to take a lot of pictures of the farm this Wednesday (which is the day Josh watches Everett and I manage the harvest). Until then….

July

I know, I know. It has been a few weeks since we’ve posted. It’s July. It’s busy.

What’s new at the farm: everything is growing fast and big. I feel like we are finally into the abundance of summer. It took long enough. All the veggies are doing really good. We’ve been up to our ears in cauliflower and broccoli, but that is slowly coming to an end. We are finally transitioning into our summer crops, a little late, but more than welcome at this point. We’ve picked the first of the basil and potatoes, zucchini and beans are just around the corner. The corn is tall and flowering (already?) and the tomatoes are setting fruit (finally!).

Josh, Everett and I went away last weekend to our dear friend’s wedding in Oakland, so we left the farm to Patrick and Katherine for the weekend. They did a great job of keeping everything watered and alive. They started 70 plus trays of the fall crops and even managed to have a little party while we were away!

We’ve also stopped going to the Medford market and will be starting up the Ashland Saturday market this weekend. So, we will see how it goes. It was a hard decision to make, especially because we have been enjoying providing produce to Medford folks, but the sales aren’t high for us in Medford and we need to meet our bottom line this year. Three markets a week would overwhelm us. We hope to go back to Medford this year.

The CSA is is in its tenth week, almost half-way through! We have started selling produce to the McCully House Inn in Jacksonville and continue to provide Chateaulin with produce as well. The Siskiyou CSA is moving along as well.

We’ve had a few challengs with our truck breaking down a couple of times. We’ve thrown a lot of money to it in the last few weeks and it has set us back a bit financially, but it is sort of an important asset. It definitely has us thinking about what to do next year….

So, our strawberries. We haven’t had one good pick this year yet. We have 1,000 plants. I’ve had one strawberry from 1,000 plants. It makes no sense. We’ve had a little critter eating all of the ripe berries. We put out a live trap last night and trapped a fox. Josh was going to release it up in the woods a couple of miles up the road this morning. I’m curious to see how that went. We are going to piecemeal together some fencing to keep any more animals from eating the strawberries. This has been a big loss for us so far this year. Losing a high-value crop over the last few weeks has set us back some, but since the plants are everbearing, we still have some time to do some good picks from the plants if we can control the herbivores or omnivores or whatever they are.

It was such a full bright moon last night and all the animals were out moaning and yelping. It was intense.

Okay, I’m going to post some pictures soon of the farm, if I can just get around and take some photos. Happy weekend.