7/5/19 - Week 3 - The Star Crossed Garlic

Of all the magical crops we grow here at Green Valley Community Farm, perhaps no other is as tough as garlic.

The beautiful bulbs curing in the barn right now are a testament to this toughness. This year's garlic crop had everything but the kitchen sink thrown at it.

Pictured above is the smoky November day last year that this year's garlic crop was planted. The smoke in the air, from the Camp Fire, an omen of the road ahead for those little cloves...

After a smoky but sweet garlic planting party with CSA members, we like many farmers, tucked our garlic in for the winter under a nice thick layer of straw mulch. Then we left. We closed the gates. The Sun went south. The Winter constellations turned overhead. And after a month or so, green spears of a vigorous young garlic cadets shot up through the mulch in neat little rows. "Huzzah!" said we.

Then came the wild turkeys.

We began to notice large flocks of our resident wild turkeys waddling through the garlic patch on their morning and evening farm meal walks. "Probably eating pill bugs and seeds," thought we, and let them be. But on a crop walk one chilly morn, we realized their methodical scratching was raking and heaping up mounds of straw upon our baby garlic spears, snapping and contorting them this way and that and blanching them asunder. We uncovered the unlucky ones and returned home, concerned. Lo and behold, every morning and every evening the turkeys returned, their peaceful mealtime a slow moving rampage on our young garlic crop. We yelled at them, we chased them, we threw things at them... to no avail, for pill bugs and seeds, they returned. Defeated, Kayta and I removed the mulch from the garlic beds into the pathways. The garlic straightened out, greened up, and stretched toward the waxing sunlight.

Then came the rain.

We need not tell tale of the squalls that were unleashed upon the garlic this winter -- of the constant wet, of the 25 year storm that flooded Guerneville -- for they were unleashed upon you too. Indeed, for much of the winter our garlic, who like relatively dry feet just like the rest of us, looked like they were growing in a rice paddy. And yet they persisted, growing and growing taller and stronger... in a muddy swamp.

Then came the heat.

Spring did finally come, but just for a few days before a nice 90 degree bake-off in May. But the garlic, especially the Creole garlic, said it didn't mind the heat-whiplash, "It reminds me of Spain," it said, and grew faster.

Then came the rain (again) and the fungus.

Who ever heard of 5 inches of rain in late May? This garlic has. The dank conditions created by the freak deluge in late May this year caused a minor outbreak of an allium fungal rust mostly reserved for Pacific Northwestern garlic patches. While potentially crop threatening when garlic is young, our mighty garlic crop, nearly fully grown by then, brushed off the rust as it filled out its cloves.

Then came the cement.

With bulbs formed and harvest time come, your farmers looked anxiously toward getting this star-crossed garlic out of the ground and into the safety of the barn. But the fair soil where we lay our scene, the very soil our garlic called home, void of mulch thanks to the turkeys, super-saturated thanks to the squalls of winter, then baked, then saturated again, then baked again, had hardened into a formidable substrate more akin to cement than soil. The mere thought of manually extracting 3,600 bulbs of garlic out of this substrate sent anticipatory shivers down your farmers spines.

Then came Jack...

We reached out to our kind neighbor Jack Tindle, who is a fancy old car mechanic and has a way with metal. Out of lesser parts from lesser needed tractor implements. Jack welded us a garlic lifter in approximately 3 hours on Wednesday morning. The rest is history.

On Thursday, we easily pulled the cloves, nudged out of the Earth by the lifter, and held them in our hands; vulnerable; dusty white; like pale moons. And smiling like nothing ever happened...

May this year's garlic bring you strength and health in all that life throws at you.

See you in the fields,

David & Kayta

Safe and sound at last!

6/28/19 - Week 2 - Crop Planning at GVCFarm

We had a busy week in fields this week. We got a lot of weeding done (with a big assist from the maiden voyage of our electric cultivation (weeding) tractor aka Marty McFly. It was amazing.) Kayta did a big greenhouse sowing (almost 7,000 beet seeds!); we transplanted Jack-O-Lanterns, leeks, our final sweet peppers, chard, and our 4th of 13 lettuce plantings; and we direct seeded our bi-weekly salad greens and the 3rd of five carrots plantings.

Sometimes people ask, "How do you know what to plant when?"

Gotta keep it interesting!

Crop planning, as we call it, looks slightly different on every farm, but the core answer to the above question is the same: We work backwards from harvest. From there, it is a matter of art, science, experience, and record keeping... and spreadsheets!

In the Winter of 2016-2017, our first year, Kayta and I sketched examples of the harvest shares we wanted to have for people in the Spring, Summer, and Fall. (Gotta have alliums each week; gotta have a snack crops; gotta have roots and fresh greens always; what flowers are possible in early June? What is a solid posse of Winter Squash, etc.) From these envisioned harvests, Kayta, who had many years of experience planning diverse vegetable, herb and flowers harvests in Forestville, worked backwards, considering each crop and variety, its "days to maturity", heat and frost sensitivities, yield expectations etc. In other words, the science. With Kayta's background and the cold hard numbers, we could then take a guess on when to sow and how much.

Then we planted. Paper met reality and the experience and record keeping aspects of crop planning took center stage. Each and every region, each and every valley, each and every soil, each and every harvest pick-up, and each and every year treat each and every crop and variety differently. With a healthy dose of humility and good record keeping, crop planning here has now become a process of amassing a memory of successes and failures (and harvest logs!) so that each Winter, we can develop a planting plan ever more custom tailored to this soil and micro-climate and what people are taking home and enjoying.

The "art" and the heart of crop planning, for us, is in taking all of this and planning for harvests that harmonize with the seasons, surprise, delight, and make CSA members fall in love with food and flowers every week. Over the next couple months, for example, if everything goes to plan, you should be met by a range of fresh alliums in in the harvest barn; fresh garlic and scapes, scallions, chippolini onions, red spring onions, Walla Walla sweet onions, and torpedos. Alliums (the onion family) are so darn magical, especially fresh in the summer, so our Spring and Summer allium crop plan, is a love sonnet to the allium that we hope you enjoy.

They say, "If you want to make God laugh, make a plan." But, with some elbow grease and a little bit of luck, I'd say we're well on track to mostly pull off Kayta's 400 row, 60 column Excel spreadsheet 2019 Crop Plan. Thanks to a little help from our friends...

See you in the fields,

David and Kayta

6/21/19 - Week 1 - Welcome! Humility and Humus

How auspicious to be beginning our harvest season on the Summer Solstice! A little later than usual because of that mighty winter, wasn't it?

We hope you and your loved ones all stayed safe and relatively dry.

Your farmers had a wonderful winter resting, spending quality time with friends and family, and prepping and plotting this very harvest season.

Three big milestones occurred this winter 1.) Kayta transitioned out of her other full-time job and is now farming here full time! Huge is an understatement. 2.) Because of the amazing support from our community (you!) we're also able to run this year "full CSA", meaning we will not be going to farmers markets or selling wholesale. This was always our intent, we didn't think it would happen so fast. And last but not least... 3) Kayta and I got married in early March on the farm, surrounded by family and friends.

As for the farm and the land itself...

It had an eminently soggy winter. Much needed in the streams and lakes and aquifers and soils and life of this parched land... but also humbling for the farmers of Sonoma County. But that's one reason why we love what we do.

Here at Green Valley Community Farm the incessant saturation offered us a good learning experience in how the land, soil, and the plant communities here handle a dousing Sonoma County winter. There were those that loved the swimming pool! (Check out the Vietnamese coriander!) And there were those who toughed it out, like this year's garlic, who powered through what looked like a rice paddy much of the winter, to bulb up for what looks like a great crop. And there were those that succumbed: We lost a handful of the more dry land loving perennial herbs in the garden (thyme, tarragon, culinary sage) who are now re-established in wine barrels or moved to drier spots. After that cold storm in late May, we had to ditch our first plantings of broccoli and cabbage for lack of dry ground to plant them in, and watch as our first (of many) melon and cucumber crops and our single eggplant crop (almost) died in the field.

Humbling indeed.

For the harvest shares this summer, this will mean slightly later flowers and herbs, broccoli, cabbage, and cucumbers and a leaner eggplant year. Aye, it's the first time in our farm's young history (but surely not the last) that a weather event will leave a handprint on our harvest in the form of NOT having something.

But it is here that we think the true heart and power of this CSA model, for both farmer and member, is revealed.

The Gnome Home and Fairy Bower in the garden this evening. It's going to be a good garden year!

The word "humble" comes from the same root of the word "humus". To be humbled means to be close to the Earth. For most of us in Sonoma County, living in this time and this way, we rarely, if ever are humbled when it comes to food. The experience of being humbled by a storm is not available to us in the aisles of Whole Foods. But it is an essential human experience. It can teach us so many things. It can make us so grateful for what we have. And perhaps chief among these things: It can bring us together.

The CSA model allows a group of people to be humbled together. To be close to one piece of land, its moods, its storms... together. This also allows us to celebrate together, to celebrate the abundances as a community. While other Sonoma County farmers were toughing out a financially scary spring relatively alone, without the support of the people that eat their food because they had none to sell, we had your support. Your support to wait, to not push the soil, to build ghome homes in the garden, to hold on and wait out the rain.

Thank you for joining us for this harvest season! We're honored to be farming for you!

See you in the fields,

David and Kayta