What’s Growing This Week:
BUNCHED Spinach
cilantro
SNOW PEAS
FAVA BEANS
SPRING ONIONS
asparagus
Strawberries
artichokes

 Onions, garlic, and leeks — otherwise known as alliums — are a very basic part of the life of our farm, and as you know,  a basic part of your weekly boxes and thus, your diet (we hope).  There isn’t a month of the year when we don’t have at least one of these plants growing.  For a good part of the year, they are all growing simultaneously, in various stages of development.  With the exception of the hard storage onions that we harvest at the end of the summer — which are in the ground for just five months —  alliums take most of a year from planting until harvest.

 Leeks and Storage onions are seeded into “nursery” beds in early spring — whenever the ground is dry enough.  They both emerge slowly, and are prone to the alternating spells of rain and wind that compact the surface of the soil.  Both plants have astonishingly fragile seedlings, although leeks win the weakling award.  They have just a single leaf that unfolds as it grows, almost as thin as a hair.  Not surprisingly, they don’t compete well with weeds, and Unlike other plants we grow, leeks and onions onions are too fragile to cultivate with the tractor until a month or more after they germinate.  For this reason, we have to judiciously hand-weed the beds before the weeds grow up and cover the seedlings.  Two to three months later, the seedlings look like small scallions, and are ready to be transplanted into a new field — onions first, in June, then leeks in July.  In the new fields, the seedlings are planted much farther apart, giving them room to grow to their full size.  One “nursery” bed plants about a third of an acre.  We dig the plants by hand, trim the tops, and box them.  They are then fed into transplanters manned by our planting crew.

 At this point, the heat-loving onions grow like weeds and are ready for harvest in early August.  The leeks, which prefer cool weather, struggle along all summer, developing deep, massive roots.  They don’t grow much above the surface until cool weather arrives in the fall.  Then we harvest them through the winter and into the early spring.

  The onions and garlic currently in your boxes were planted in the fall — the onion seeds in September into nursery beds and the garlic in October, whole cloves dropped into the soil.  These plants are also slow to establish themselves, and prone to competition to the fast growing weeds of fall.  They grow very slowly in the winter, and then begin to take off when the days start to lengthen in February or early March. You have seen their growth process yourselves in your boxes.  In a few more weeks, the bottoms of the plants will have expanded to their full bulb size, and the tops will start to die.  At this point, we will stop watering them and let them dry.

 When the tops are half-dried, we will pull the plants and windrow them in the fields, where they will cure under the shade of their leaves.  By the first week of June, we will probably start to clean the bulbs and cut off the tops, and you have have “normal” looking onions and garlic in your boxes.

 Many people have asked me why organic garlic and onions are so much more expensive then conventional.  With onions, garlic, and leeks, there is an enor mous difference between the cost of growing conventionally and organically.  Conventional growers make extensive use of herbicides to control weeds in their allium fields, while organic growers must use hand– and tractor cultivation.  In order to hoe and tractor cultivate, you need to leave space between the plants, which means a lower density of plants per acre.  Conventional growers, on the other hand, can grow wall-to-wall garlic and onions in their fields because they simply spray herbicides onto their fields — and onto the onions and garlic.  (When you eat a conventionally grown onion, there may literally be a layer of herbicide residue on each layer of onion.)  This difference in growing practices means a five to ten times larger yield at harvest, not to mention lower costs per acre and thus exponentially lower growing costs per ton of yield.  That is why coventional onion growers can sell their crop for five to ten cents a pound and  still make a living.
 

Recycling Strawberry Baskets  Several subscribers have asked us if we’d like to get the little green baskets from the strawberries back.  The answer is yes, we’d love to, but….only if we can do it in a way that doesn’t make a huge mess at your drop-off location.  So, if you can work it off with your drop-off host to leave an intact waxed cardboard box in place in which you can all toss your now-empty berry baskets, we will gratefully take them back to the farm and re-use them.  Otherwise, please don’t leave random baskets at your drop-off where they may annoy and irritate the drop-off host and their neighbors.

 

But What are they better Than?  A subscriber or two has told us that our artichokes aren’t as tasty as the “regular” ones from the coast, but the pro-choke votes are running two to one.  Since these are the only artichokes we can grow here, we are assuming they are better than none, and we are planning to plant more for next year — June first we’ll be sowing the first seeds.

 

Recipes 

Vacations & Billing Inquiries
We need seven days notice before a vacation hold or other change of service.
Contact Valerie through voicemail at (530) 756-2800, or e-mail Goldenbell@aol.com

MAILING ADDRESS:
Terra Firma Farm
P.O. Box 836
Winters, CA 95694
(530) 756-2800
www.terrafirmafarm.com
Goldenbell@aol.com em

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