Pablito~
AND WE NOW RETURN TO OUR PREVIOUSLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING…
I’m sure last week’s newsletter will not be the last one I write about food safety, unfortunately.  But this is a CSA farm newsletter, and while events in the outside world have been occurring, we’ve been busy farming.  After all, it is spring.  Or at least, it was until yesterday, when we had our first day when the temperature outside was higher than the temperature inside.  Uh, inside my body, that is.

OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE NEW
Spring is a time of destruction and rebirth on our farm.  Acres and acres of plants are destroyed to make way for new ones.  Many of these were winter vegetables that had finished producing, such as kale, chard, broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower.  Although harvesting these vegetables involves cutting off some or all of the plant, much of it remains behind and must be shredded and plowed under before we can plant another crop.  Then there was the 80 acres of so of cover crop, legumes and grasses that we grow to protect the soil from winter rain and wind.  These crops are all turned back into the soil, where they are broken down by microbes and worms for use by food crops later.

 We also destroyed a perennial crop this spring:  our last remaining asparagus field, which was infected with a soil born pathogen that rendered it unproductive and unprofitable for us.  The sadness of this necessity was balanced out by another project:  the expansion of our peach and fig orchards.  The trees were planted in February and early March, and are already leafing out nicely.

SPEAKING OF DESTRUCTION
In our fruit orchards right now, as I write this, thousands of immature fruits are falling to the ground.  But don’t worry, it’s not due to rain, hail, heat or disease.  In fact, we are painstakingly removing over 2/3 of the fruit on apricot, peach, nectarine, Asian pear, and apple trees.  This year’s combination of cold winter and pleasant weather during bloom caused the trees to set far more fruit than the branches could actually hold and trees ripen.  As always, farming is an inexact science, and Mother Nature rarely allows perfection.  It is a huge job to “thin” fruit when the trees set a huge crop, but we still prefer it over the other extreme.

GRASS POWER
For years, we have been using diesel powered tractors to mow the grass and clover in our vineyard and orchards.  This year, we ran the mowers on grass.  After last year’s successful experiment with grazing sheep on our fields after harvest, we arranged to bring the sheep into the grapes and pistachio orchards in early spring.  In the grapes, the sheep ate not only the weeds between the rows — where the mower runs — but also directly under the vines, which we normally have to cultivate with the tractor afterwards.  And because sheep eat the vegetation right down to the ground — unlike a mower which leaves lots of residue — they also helped us avoid plowing the pistachios, which not only uses lots of diesel fuel but also damages the soil.  Last but not least, the sheep also spread fertilizer while they eat — their manure.  This doesn’t just save the fuel used spreading compost by tractor, but also to truck it onto the farm from 25 miles away where it is produced.  And while we don’t normally use uncomposted manure on our fields, the sheep were out of the grape and pistachio orchards six months before they will be harvested.  This will give the soil microbes plenty of time to digest the manure and any pathogens in it.

OFF TO A SLOW START
Repeat after me:  2009 is not 2008… Last year summer got off to a very early start, and we ended up with our earliest ever harvest of tomatoes, green beans, sweet corn, and melons.  This year, the late rains in early March pushed our first planting of summer crops back over two weeks.  But it’s been a month since we started planting, and the crops just aren’t growing very quickly.  The culprit is soil temperature, which has stayed much colder than last year.

The April rains threw another wrench in our spring planting, essentially shutting us down for an entire week.  On the plus side, the rain we received allowed us to skip one entire irrigation of the farm, saving tens of thousands of gallons of water just on our farm in this water-short year.

 Nonetheless, in the last month we’ve managed to put in two plantings each of tomatoes and summer squash, three of sweet corn, four of green beans, and even our first melons and watermelons.  The storm of two weeks ago already seems a distant memory, and we’re running all our pumps around the clock to keep everything wet.   Winter’s over.

IN YOUR BOXES
The good news is that the cold soil doesn’t appear to have bothered the berries, which are ripening almost exactly the same time as they did last year.  The hot weather has kicked them into gear, and you’re getting a basket in each CSA box.  If the heat wave continues, you can expect two baskets next week.  Either way, look for a regular dose of berries from now until the arrival of our real summer sometime in June or July.

 The first berries of spring are usually funny-looking and odd-shaped.  This so-called “catfacing” results from cold nights when the fruits were forming back in late February and early March.  It normally lasts for a week or two, after which the berries that formed when the nights warmed up start to take their normal shape.

 If you don’t like Fava Beans, then this is your year.  The Fava plants were big and happy until about a month ago, when they were invaded by black aphids.  Some years a combination of weather and ladybugs keeps the aphids under control, but not this year.  As we speak, the plants have dropped all their flowers (which means no beans) and are collapsing under the aphid attack.  We had hoped the second planting might escape, but as I write this the aphids are moving into that field as well.  At this point, we anticipate a complete crop loss.

 The Spring Onions in your boxes are displaying the amazing ability of plants to transform themselves with just a few weeks of the right conditions.  A month ago, the onions had almost no bulbs whatsoever; now you will start to see two– and three-inch diameter onions as the nights get shorter and the days warmer.  At this point in their growth, you can still eat not just the bulb but most of the stem.  As usual, the leaves are fairly tough and quite strong tasting, and most people will want to remove and discard them.

Thanks,
     Pablito