In part due to the response we received, I am proud to announce that as of today, Tuesday, March 13, 2003, we have closed escrow on a 77 acre parcel just over Putah Creek in Solano County.  The land is primarily open field, with the exception of the 14 acres of pistachio orchard that produced the nuts in today’s and other recent CSA boxes.  It also has a house, which is a good thing, since I sold my house in town to make the downpayment and need somewhere to live.

“A dream come true” might be a good way to describe this event, if it weren’t for the fact that the entire process has been a nightmare of legal wrangling and financial negotiations that has kept us up nights chewing our nails and tearing out our hair — for the nine months it took to make it a reality.
The land, though, is almost perfect.  It is probably the best soil on the planet, deep and fertile yet friable enough for the small seeded crops we grow.  It has federally subsidized surface water from Lake Berryessa, which means that we won’t have to pay PG&E to pump every gallon out of the ground anymore.  And best of all, it is near enough to our home farm that we can make a slow  and orderly transition from one place to another while farming both.  The location also means we (and you) will continue to benefit from the unique microclimate west of Winters that warms up quicker in the spring, cools off more on summer nights, and provides sunny afternoons on winter days when fog covers the rest of the valley.  This weather has given us a distinct advantage as a CSA farm, and we were not looking forward to having to leave it behind.

 From a scenic perspective, the new farm is perhaps not quite as beautiful as the current one — it is pancake-flat, with zero wildlife habitat — but it does afford an unobstructed view of the Coastal Range to the west.  And sad but true, rolling hills don’t make good vegetable fields — they take more water and have problems with drainage and erosion.  The open fields were farmed conventionally through last year, so we will not be able to grow organic crops there until summer of 2005.  Until then, we won’t grow much there at all, save for the asparagus we planted last week that won’t begin producing for two years.  The pistachio orchard, thankfully, had been abandoned for several years, so we were able to have it certified immediately.
 This new farm will be a work in progress that we hope to share with you, our subscribers who made it all possible.  Almost the hardest thing about all the delays and obstacles we ran into during the purchase was not being able to talk about it in the newsletter — all this great subject matter that I needed to keep to myself in case it all didn’t work out.
 The drama might not have kept a movie audience enthralled, but it was more excitement than we needed around here.  Just a few key points:  There was no asking price, so we had to come up with an amount to offer by doing research, examining our finances, and relying on gut instinct.  Then, the financing — if you’re thinking home mortgage, think again.  A farm is at the opposite end of the spectrum of real estate from a single family home.  Far from the “can-do” attitude of your average residence real estate mortgage broker, our lender put it this way — “We assume you are going to go bankrupt and lose the farm.  No one else is going to want it.  All the numbers have to work back from that”.  Woah.  Then there was the joy of dueling attorneys and exhaustive title searches.  I had never really understood what title companies did until we got the letter saying “this property has no legal access to a public road”.  Translation:  you need a helicopter to get to it.  Hours of legal fees later, we discovered that the title company had simply not gone back far enough — to 1934, to be exact — in looking for the road easement that had been granted to this property when the state of California cut it off the original Spanish land grant endowing the University of California and sold it.

 I guess it was silly to expect anything different.  On our farm, even the smallest task can be delayed by unforeseen obstacles.  A flat tire, a short circuit, a broken “U” joint.  Rain, frost, heat.  Supplies you forgot to order, seeds that got eaten by mice.  We are used to it.  But I don’t think we’ll be buying another farm again anytime soon.

IN YOUR BOXES 
 Last week you got the last of our navel oranges, having collectively slurped down roughly 16,000 lbs. over the course of the eight week season.  We hope you enjoyed them.  Not to fear, citrus season has another 6 weeks or so left around here.  Minneola Tangelos are now our “orange” in the boxes.  While we have sent some in previous boxes, it is important to note that they have sweetened up tremendously just in the last week.  Sun and warm temperatures have “cooked” the sugars in the fruit so much that a box of tangelos that weighed 30 lbs. two weeks ago now weighs 40 lbs.  All that extra weight is sugar.

 Still, Minneolas are never going to be as sweet as Navels.  They are tangy, but they are also juicy — producing roughly 3x the juice per pound that navels do —  and easy to peel.  That last aspect reduces their shelf-life considerably.  You should keep them in the fridge until you eat or juice them.
 In addition to the tangelos, we still have a bumper crop of grapefruit.  This week you’ll get the last of the Oroblancos, but starting next week we’ll be harvesting the first of the Ruby Reds.  They’ll continue into April.  You’ll also start to see some Kiwifruit towards the end of this month.  That concludes our fruit report.

 Meanwhile, we augment the rather sparse vegetable department of the box with another bag of roasted, salted pistachios from the new farm.  For the rest of spring, you can expect to get a bag about once a month.  And no fair hiding the newsletter from your spouse/roommate/children so they won’t know you ate all the pistachios on your way home from the drop-off.

                         Thanks, 

                                         Pablito