. Pics

What’s Growing This Week:  Carrots  Onions Strawberries Squash Snap Peas Cherries—-% Basil Spinach (M, L) English peas (M, L) Green beans (L) Fresh garlic (L)            All items are in all box sizes, unless marked

Pablito .... 
WEEDS
I figured I would follow up last week’s newsletter about bugs and spraying with a newsletter on weeds.  Many people, when they use the term “pests”, don’t consider weeds in that category, but farmers certainly do.  While they don’t have the “ick” factor for most people that bugs do, if you’re growing crops for a living, weeds are just as scary.

 For one thing, there are hundreds of them.  Nature has a big advantage over humans here.  Any time you are walking on soil, you are stepping on millions of weed seeds produced over thousands of years.  Farmers refer to this as the “seed bank”.  While a certain percentage of seeds sprout the year after they are produced, that often depends on the climate, environment, and soil conditions.  In theory, if you sprouted and killed all the seeds in the top few inches of soil in a field and never inverted the soil again, you would never have anymore weeds.  In practice, this doesn’t work.  There are always seeds blowing in the wind, being dropped by birds and animals, etc.  Still, there are farmers who believe they can eliminate all weeds on their farms.

 Weed ecology is pretty similar to the ecology of a rainforest:  different plants occupy different niches and the ones that survive the best are the ones best adapted to their environment.  On a farm, the weeds that succeed are those that fit into the particular crops and growing practices.  In a heavily cultivated conventional tomato field, for example, the predominant weeds are those that are resistant to herbicides and that sprout, grow, and produce seed all during the mid-summer.  Weeds that sprout too early in the spring are controlled before planting, while those that take too long to produce seed are killed during the tomato harvest.

 Rotating crops, especially ones with different growing seasons, is one of the best ways to control weeds.   By  always interrupting the lifecycle of a different weed, you don’t allow one or the other to become dominant.   For example, it is relatively easy for us to control fast growing annual weeds in our tomato fields because we use drip irrigation, which only wets a small portion of the soil.  Unfortunately, because the tomato crop has such a long season, it allows perennial morning glory — a very drought resistant weed — to build up and thrive.  Sweet corn, which grows quickly, is heavily cultivated, and shades out morning glory provides an ideal environment for certain annual weeds.

 Irrigation is one of our primary methods to control weeds, particularly by pre-irrigating our fields to sprout weeds before planting and then killing the weeds mechanically.  Then, we transplant seedlings into these fields, or plant seeds into the moist, cultivated soil where they sprout.  Very few weeds will sprout again until the next irrigation.  Either way, the plants get a nice head start over their faster growing cousins.

 We also use a variety of mechanical means to kill weeds in our fields.  Most  are based on the concept of standardized planting rows which allow most of the soil in the field to be cultivated with the tractor without harming the crops.  All the crops we grow in the field get cultivated with the tractor every two weeks or so to kill any weeds that may have sprouted.  We continue this process until the plants are too big, usually about 6 weeks after planting.  At this point, most healthy vegetable plants are big enough to shade out most weeds — or are close enough to harvest that weeds no longer pose a threat to them.

 One critical step in this process, though, involves an ancient tool that is still wielded by hand — the hoe.  Because weeds that sprout and grow between the plants in the crop row cannot be controlled mechanically.  On conventional farms, they use herbicides prior to planting that stay in the soil for months (and years) to control these weeds.  On our farm, and all organic farms, we still rely on human beings with good hand-to-eye coordination to kill these weeds with a metal blade on the end of a long wooden pole.  This is one of the most significant factors that makes organic produce more expensive than conventional (the other is fertilizer).

IN YOUR BOXES
We’ve been harvesting our bumper crop of garlic for the last week or so, and will finish tomorrow.  And, as predicted in this very space, the first apricots at the farm will start to ripen just a day or two later.  Too late for this week’s boxes, but you can look forward to a bag of ‘cots next week.
Meanwhile, our strawberry field is either staging a comeback or a last hurrah, and we are in the thick of cherry season.  The current varieties we are harvesting are loaded with fruit, so we are able to let the cherries get riper than we did the last two weeks.  You will be getting fruit that is darker, sweeter, and more flavorful.

As is often the case at Terra Firma in June, your CSA boxes for the next several weeks will be heavy on the fruit and a little light in the vegetable department.  This week’s salad greens will be the last you see from us until the fall.  On the other hand, we have decided to extend our carrot season a bit this year, so you can expect to get carrots most weeks until July or until they are no longer sweet and tender (due to the heat).  Medium and Large boxes will also get several more weeks of bunched beets before they disappear for the summer.

The Basil in your boxes today is a harbinger of summer, and summer is going to arrive early this year.  Take a look at the website for pictures of our first planting of tomatoes.  Those pictures were taken last week; the plants are now a whole foot taller and the fruit are sizing up and getting ready to start ripening.  I’m not going to get specific, but I will say that the tomatoes will definitely be ripening earlier than they did last year.
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Thanks,
    Pablito
 

Please make sure to include your account name, the one on the sign off sheet & on the box, in every correspondance to Valerie

Recipes............................

CSA membership fees ~payment due day is first of month.~~ Quarterly discounts are given for any 3 month period only if paid in advance.
They are given as an extra credit when the payment is applied, you won't see your monthly rate change.

For mid-month changes,  Up/downgrades are $5 per week per increment.  Small to large is $10.

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.  Include your account name in full (what's on the sign off sheet).

Account Balance Inquiries The account sheet is hiding under the sign off sheet each week with your account balance on it.  Mid month I've been e-mailing statments, so if you're not getting it send me an e-mail requesting to be added to the list. To be able to read the statements you need to be logged in as an administrator on a PC, and virus programs may corrupt the file. Some Mac operating systems do allow the file to be viewed.  We can't resend them, and it wouldn't work any better the second time anyway.

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

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