Fall is here...

It's Fall now. This past Summer we had to deal with drought conditions. Crop failures, from lack of irrigation water. Low fruit yields. Not much fun. We had only a few WWOOFers, since there wasn't much to process. Even so we had a good crop of calves and dairy production was smooth. This Fall and Winter though, California is expecting a very wet season, which we hope will fill all the aquifers, ponds, lakes and irrigation water reservoirs. We are planning a Fall/Winter garden now, and on planting more fruit trees during the dormant period of Winter. We get ready for a booming Spring now. There will be a lot to work on this Season.

The farm stand was a success, in spite of the drought, we were able to supply locally produced fruits and veggies all Summer, even, if not in the copious quantities usually available, we had heirloom tomatoes, squashes, grapes, Asian and regular pears, apples, nuts, salads, greens, local breads, eggs, the locally produced Apollo Olive Oil, all kinds of local cheeses (goat, cow, and even water buffalo) pies, cobblers, home made hummus, home cured olives, dried fruit and mushrooms, our own honey, canned jams, and preserves and all kinds of misc. goodies. This year we got a grain grinder and now can offer fresh ground organic grains, non GMO corn meal, organic wheat, and spelt. We are wanting to add sprouts and fresh mushrooms from our own mushroom grow house to the mix.

Around mid October, we are starting the next phase of the indoor private membership market, which is exciting. Having a separate area for all the packaging and processing of products will be great. It has been tough to do packaging and processing in our home kitchen, working around ordinary domestic meal chores. We look forward to the new developments which will appear once the area is finished. Later~Rebecca

This year's farm stand

summer market 2014 

The weather has been so warm and sunny, we have been thinking about opening the Thursday farm stand early this year.

Beginning in April, the sun set time is 7:30pm , if we are open 4:30 to 6:30 pm, it allows us an hour of sun light to break the stand down, and pack up our remaining goods.

Local foodies shop locally for the freshest produce

By April there will (hopefully) be enough produce to have a tasty selection for the market. There will be a lot of leafy greens, tender baby salad, turnips, beets, early onions, leeks, asparagus, nuts, oranges, lemons, dried fruit from last fall. Charlie's North Yuba Bakery Bread, jams & jellys, perhaps our new potatoes, honey, pickles, eggs, humus, beet salad and more. In addition we hope to have veggie seedlings for sale to go in YOUR garden.We'll announce the exact dates later. Hope to see you there.

Spring Prep

emergence

 Spring is just around the corner, the farm is waking up from it's long winter's nap. We have a lot of projects coming up. Participating, WWOOFers can get working experience dealing with spring farm jobs. Now is the time we do our spring shovel dance. We get our gardens ready for spring planting, that means moving compost onto our existing beds, working up the soil and laying out irrigation. We will also be building some experiential, new "no-dig" beds, a promising project. We are sorting our seeds, picking out the appropriate ones and seeding out heat loving varieties for summer,they need heating mats, and babying along of those tender sprouts. We will finish pruning those orchard trees, apples and pears, that are threatening to break dormancy.  Then, our goats will begin kidding soon, there will be bottle babies to feed, goat milking and goat's milk cheese making. We plan on fencing and crossing fencing a small underutilized pasture area for the goat's, allowing us to use it's lush ,spring, stand of grass, for rotational grazing. Lots of interesting, challenges ahead...

spreading compost

 If you are interested to explore farming at Oak Meadow, now is a good time to apply. We are especially interested in working with those who aspire to start their own farm in the future. We appreciate volunteers who just want to exchange a few days of their help, for a better understanding about how food is grown, that is a  noble cause. However, because our, resources, space and energy is limited, preference is given to those wishing to become future farmers. It is you; who have a strong desire, a "calling", so to speak, a longing to farm, for whom we wait. It is you who have a will, to acquire the skills, understanding and steadfast endurance, it takes to overcome the obstacles beginning farmers face; for whom we wait. We are dedicated to the task at hand. Together, responsible farmers change the world, one season at a time. 

Spring!

Valentines day question..."Is it winter or spring?"

Plums in bloom

Even though it is still officially winter, the weather has been so mild, many of our fruit trees are in bloom. It is a bit disconcerting, if we have a hard frost before fruit set we will have a poor crop. Here our plums are putting on quite a show around our market area.

The past week I find my self reading all the latest seed catalogs, getting dirt under my nails planting seeds in trays, potting up cuttings or walking around, clip board in hand, planning garden layouts. These unusually warm days we have been having inspire me to do so. 

I really like these trays that have the high top covers for starting seeds and cuttings, they keep the soil warm and moist and keep the birds and bugs out. I've lost so many seedlings to the little birds that winter-over here, they have a voracious appetite for sweet emerging seedlings, and will peck out every one if they are not excluded. The trays are great for growing fodder also. You can find them for a good price at www.greenhousemegastore.com.

A pleasant walk around the zone one garden reveals the tail ends of last falls crops, carrots, and beets, some Swiss chard and Red kale.

The garlic I planted in fall is doing well and this year's rhubarb is already pushing new growth.

Rhubarb

Yesterday I planted a short row of asparagus in one of the beds, hoping it will do well there... a yummy perennial veggie we really enjoy.

Beautiful afternoon light.

Chris and I bought some bare root fruit trees, an apple, two more plums, and some grape vines and a couple of blueberries. The apple is in the ground, we will be planting the rest tomorrow.

New Braburn apple

Our calves are doing well. Lindy is getting big, and looks to be a good milker, with her sweet disposition.  She is a real cutey, follows Chris around like a pup. 

Lindy

We are going to have openings for a couple of WWOOFers in March, after the 15th, now is the time to apply.

It is going to be a lush spring, (we hope), goat babies will come soon, and calves, there is loads of green grass which will make for lots of super creamy milk, so good for making cheese; new little piggies will be born,  there will be seedlings to tend, gardens to dig and so forth, great! What a life!

Happy Valentine's day!

summer's end

We made it through summer! and what a summer it was... we had to struggle with the drought conditions, but made it without too much damage.

This fall has already seen the birth of two new calves, a girl and a boy, with one still to come in the next day or two.

At the moment we are in that interval between seasons, where summer production in the garden slows down, and the fall crops are not yet come on. Our new raised garden beds worked wonderfully, production from them was heavy at the peak, and is still happening at a slower pace, with the shortened days after the equinox, and the cool nights. The green beans vines are still blooming galore, their little new beans swing in the air like little green earnings. They taste wonderfully fresh, when I pick them and put them straight in the pot.

Our big apple produced another crazy huge crop, we finally got it all picked, for which we are thankful...please no more apple sauce to can...(just kidding) apple sauce is yummy come mid winter. The pantry overflows with food put up this summer.

While we haven't finished it yet, the pizza oven has a good start, and the indoor market area is much closer to completion, thanks to the help of friends and some wonderful WWOOFers. So much can be done when people work together.

 Fall is a wonderful season, pumpkins, apples, pies, and lots of cheese making with the freshening of three new cows. 

This season we will be making beer, mead, and bread, as well as perfecting our own brand of Tomme style cheese, and some other hard cheeses. The weather is perfect for aging all three things, as well as fermenting  kombucha. 

Hopefully we will have a wetter fall/winter than last, we really missed the wild mushrooms last fall/winter which failed to appear in the unseasonable dry. By November we will know if we will be "shroomin".

We are hoping to find a WWOOFer (s) to help us out starting mid October, who would be willing to stay through mid November and who is into learning how to milk cows and feed calves, among other things. Chris is going back to see his folks in Va. for a week in Oct. We thought we had the bases covered, with two helpx kids, who suddenly up and left three weeks early, fresh from the city, naive about the realities of farm living. Too bad, but oh well. They were our first two helpX selections and apparently into farm living as long as it didn't require actually living on a farm, critters, hay, dirt, calf slobber, manure, spiders ...controlled chaos...you know... the whole catastrophe. 

Some more Farm projects planned for this summer...

Rosie is a Belgian work horse

One of the projects we want to work on this summer is getting our draft mare trained to pull our carriage. We already started her harness training last year, but didn't work her all winter because of the bad weather. The time is ripe for the next phase of her training. She is very sweet and trainable. She is quiet and responsive to positive reinforcements, strong and willing. Her name is Rosie. We also have two young colts, a three and a four year old, who are ready to start, they are Arabians.

Another project we plan for this summer is building a cob pizza oven. We love pizza, and our cheese specialty is mozzarella...a big wood fired pizza oven just makes sense doesn't it? To that end we have already got a big pile of clay, sand, and a piece of expanded diamond lath steel to sift the soil with and a bunch of rice straw, tarps etc., the project is all ready to go, we hope for lots of volunteers who want to help, we already have a few. We've never built anything substancial with cob, but have avidly researched the project and are ready to jump in and get muddy with both feet, on this project. My mouth waters at the thought of wood fired pizza, made with our own cheeses and sausages, organic home grown tomatoes, mushrooms and herbs, garlic, basil, oregano, savory and the like. Here is a link to the prototype we would like to build, with our own variations. We are thinking sometime mid June for getting it started.

yum, pizza!

Then there is the indoor market we are hoping to open around July 4th. We have contracted with a carpenter friend to build the next phase of this. We already have a big metal building/shop. Half of it is to become our future market, "God willing and the creek don't rise". It would be nice to get the pizza oven ready about the same time as we finish the market. We have to build a wall, install french doors and lay a laminate floor, before we can open. It's going to be nice. Out side of the market we will have an awning that will provide shade to the front.

The metal building for the market

Farm Projects Spring 2014...Zone ONE

Summer squashes, just poking their heads up.

Spring is all about planting! This year we are further defining our permaculture zones, and improving them, starting with zone one.

Zone one is the zone a person visits most, where we will be planting crops which must be picked often, in fact this area will have something needing to be harvested everyday.


Those crops will be salads, leafy greens, summer squashes, beans, peas, broccoli, herbs, tomatoes, peppers, okra, egg plant, flowers, and more. The area we have chosen is directly behind our house.

We have already started refining the area. A few years ago we brought in a "bob

green house frame awaiting it's covering.

cat" skip loader, leveled and flattened an area for a green house. Last fall we got the basic structure for the green house up and standing, bought the green house plastic and acquired a big shade cloth to cover it all. We hope to get it covered this spring to house our tomato crop and create a space for starting seedlings and rooting cuttings.

Late last summer, we moved a lot of compost, with the help of a good WWOOf crew and created some large beds, where we grew a late tomato crop and wintered over collards for the table. This spring we have been upgrading those beds to be raised ones with some redwood boards reclaimed from an old

One bed we started last year is now 1.5 feet deep.

deck, a carpenter friend was hired to rebuild. In addition we made some new raised beds, but still have the space and materials to put in some more, which we are eager to do, so we can plant out all the rest of our seedlings. After we finish that we will install a drip tape irrigation system to utilize our water efficiently. A thick mulch of rice straw will cap it all off.

The big apple a few years ago, now it is twice the size.

In this same zone one area we have several fruit trees, mostly apples, which, having past their April bloom, need to have their fruit thinned, so we don't have broken branches, and our apples will be nice and plump. Our largest apple, grown from a seed, has given us around 400#'s of beautiful fruit for the past 4 years, the apples on this tree are delicious, and keep really well. Thinning the fruit is quite a job, apples flower in clusters along the branches, many of the flowers will turn into fruit this year, the trees were so vigorously pollinated by our, oh so, active bees. We thin out the baby apples to one per cluster, and feed them to our goats, who think green apples are a super treat. We get as much as two five gallon buckets of tiny apples the fruit set is so great. Later in the summer, when the apples are getting plump but are still green, we usually have to thin again, up to three more five gallon buckets,

Green apple thinnings, are good for pies!

we use those apples for all sorts of things, pies, making farm pectin to mix with other fruits to make them jell, we dry them which concentrates the sugars in them, Nature's sweet tarts! We have eight apples, and two pears trees, and have already been busy, all, but the big one, have been thinned.

To thin the apples we use a tall orchard ladder, it is fun to climb up into the tree, one feels like a bird up there surveying the surroundings from an airy perch. The little apples pinch off easily, but it is tricky too, not to damage the fruit buds while doing the job. It feels good when the job is done, I'm always relieved, knowing the tree branches won't break under the weight of too many apples.

We are looking to get help on these projects. As mentioned before, to thin the apples we will climb ladders up into the trees, and bit by bit pinch off the extra fruit. 

To build the beds, we will have to do a little light construction, measure and lay out, cut the boards with a saw, assemble the sides, pre-dig the beds and then fill them up with wheel barrels of soil and compost. Then we will lay out the irrigation lines and hook them up to the water, after all that, we will tuck our seedlings in and mulch them. Latter we will be thankful, for tomatoes, and peppers, egg plant and onions. Do I see lasagna & egg plant Parmesan in the future? I hope so...yum! Come and help us eat it!

Tomatoes from last year's garden.

Home made lasagna, its great! 

Tomato sauce made from our own Roma tomatoes!

Egg plant Parmesan, nice and cheesy, like we like it!

We have many projects other happening this spring, but these are the main zone one, activities. There are many seedlings already started for this area, that require daily attention,until they are planted, along with some rooted cuttings of currants we want to also plant out  in our zone one area, and there are lots of potted herb plants too, for one bed we plan to turn into an herb garden nice and close to the kitchen. Every morning and evening they need water, especially now, since the weather has become so warm.

lettuce and other seedlings

veggies and flowers

There are always so many interesting things to do and experiment with on a farm. It is never dull. At the end of the day you feel good, it is nice to take a quiet evening moment, sit on the blue bench and contemplate on how lucky we are to live on this big benevolent Earth, our only home in the vast universe. We feel privileged to be able to live on our little plot and to have the skills and the will to care for it in as responsible a way as we are able. Join us there sometime...

The blue bench