Brrrrrrrr! It has been especially cold these past few weeks, with lots of wind. It makes it a bit harder to keep at the outdoor tasks, and I find myself working on indoor projects. Our Agritourism group is working on publishing a new map. I am planning our farm events for this coming year. We have some new events planned including an day when other area farmers and ranchers will come display their products. Included will be homegrown beef, lavender, olive oil, fiber and even dairy goats. We will also be hosting our first annual Frontier Day event. Our Heirloom Tomato Tasting was well received, so we will be doing a tasting again as well. We have lots of requests for how to make birdhouses out of natural gourds, so we will be doing two gourd workshops. Time spent in preparation and marketing our events now will hopefully ensure success later in the year.

Mandy has pretty much taken on all the pruning tasks this year. I thought I would post some photos of her work. In the first photo she is pruning a Pink Lady apple tree. The second photo shows her pruning a Santa Rosa plum. She took nearly 5 feet off the top. It is amazing how fast they grow.

Becky is the chicken wire basket expert. The photos show her making wire baskets for the bare roots. The gophers seem to be especially bad this year, so we want to make sure our new trees are protected.

The last photo I took of the front fields this morning. The geese were out for a stroll. They are such characters! They constantly are talking to each other and are extremely curious. You can see the weather is a bit gloomy. The oats and vetch cover crop is just starting to poke through the soil. We have had about 15 inches of rain, however it has been so cold things just aren’t growing. Usually we are quite green by the first of March. We still have a ways to go until the hillsides are green and it is February 19^th.

Another winter project is shelling walnuts. We are fortunate to have several grafted walnut trees on the farm. One magnificent tree in particular is where the bulk of our walnuts come from that we use in our baked goods at our farm store. The walnuts have to be picked up off the ground when they fall from the trees in the late fall. If they still have partial husks on them, the husks must be removed. The whole nuts are then placed on screened trays and allowed to dry. If you were to bag them up before they are dried they would mold right away. Next Uncle Darrell runs them through an antique corn sheller to crack the shells. The next step is to spend many long hours of separating the meat from the shells. The nut meats are then placed in freezer ziplocs, labeled with dates, and frozen for use in our baked goods this coming summer.

Homegrown non-irrigated walnuts taste very different from store bought nuts. They are delicate and tasty. They freeze amazingly well and hold their quality. We thaw the nuts and then gently toast them in the oven before we add them to our fudge, cookies and breads.

We'll talk again soon!

Joy

Wow! Where has the time gone? And to think I was going to try and give a “weekly” update : -).

We have been amazingly busy these past two months. We finished up the final stages of packing up the farm store and covering and securing things which needed to be left outdoors. Things like cream cans, an antique sheller, wagons, display bins, horse collars, lanterns, lassos etc. which we decorate with during the summer months all must be put away to keep them safe from wind and rain damage.

We’ve managed to get all of our fields tilled and cultivated and ready for planting. We picked up Oganic Purple Vetch, Lana Woolypod Vetch, and Kanota Oat seed at Farm Supply today. $80 a bag!!! Ouch! We plant the vetch as a cover crop. Vetch is a legume that helps to set natural nitrogen in our soil (similar to alfalfa, peas and beans). The oats serves as a trellis for the vetch to climb, which exposes more of the plant to sunlight and creates a healthy crop. Some of the vetch will be cut for hay and baled to feed our goats during the winter. The rest gets tilled under to create a green mulch for a healthy crop of pumpkins and vegetables next summer.

We’ve nearly had more rain this past month than we had all of last year. We had a major storm 10 days ago which brought much needed rain. Unfortunately it brought destructive wind too. One casualty of the storm was our small greenhouse. It is amazing what 55 mile an hour gusts can do. Almost every sign at the farm store was blown over, and we lost some of the decorative accents on the buildings. Lots of broken branches too, but no other real harm done.

The girls have spent the last month pruning. Becky finished the berries and grapes. Mandy has almost finished the first fruit tree orchard. She has three more to go. Each variety is pruned a little differently. We are pruning the crowns down further on the apple trees, to control their size, so they will be easier to harvest next fall. We also heavily pruned the persimmon and plum trees. We had an extremely heavy crop last year and lost several branches. The slender branches can’t hold the weight of an abundant crop, and it seems we just never thin aggressively enough. We are hoping that scaling back on the breadth of the branches will make a difference.

Our bare root trees arrived this week and we are getting ready to plant. This year we are planting 36 Angel Red Pomegranates (a new variety that is supposed to be especially good for juice), 20 Fruitless Mulberries (shade for our Threshing Bee event we hold every September) and a few individual fruit trees (Honeycrisp and Mutsu) to replace ones that we lost to gophers or deer.

Something new we are planting this year is a few Feijoas. They are a very pretty, somewhat small evergreen tree. They bear an oblong fruit which smells like a blend of pineapple and strawberry and tastes like a guava. Sometimes folks refer to them as a Pineapple Guava. They are sweet and rich in Vitamin C.

We are also planting some Jujubees, PawPaws, and two different varieties of Hardy Kiwis. We have a lot to learn about how to trellis and propagate them. Thank goodness we have a farmer friend who knows a lot about unusual varieties and she generously shares her knowledge. It will be several years before we get our first crop, but we are anxious to see how they do in our soil and weather conditions..

Before we plant bare roots, we make wire baskets from chicken wire for each plant or tree. We place the wire basket in the ground before the tree is planted, and nestle the roots in the basket before refilling the hole with soil. This offers at least some protection from gophers. We dip the roots in solution of Vitamin B-1 before we plant them, which helps protect the trees from shock and gets them off to a good start.

I will try to weigh in again soon and let you know how planting went.

My best,

Joy

Our farm store is still open 6 days a week. We are only closed on Wednesdays, so every day is full. We are still harvesting heirloom tomatoes, summer squash, cucumbers, eggplant, green beans and apples daily. The tomatoes are really loving the warm afternoons and are still flourishing. Each morning the Becky brings in a whole wagon load. Nights are nippy, so we know winter is just around the corner.

We finally finished harvesting the last of the culinary pumpkins and winter squash. Everything is now displayed at the farm store. The girls had a friend stop by and the three of them finished pruning and tying the last of the olallieberries. Late weeds were hand-pulled. The prunings were hauled up to the compost pile. We gave the berries a good long drink of water and they are settled in for the winter. This spring we will come back and dig up stray runners coming up during the center path of the rows. We lost several plants due to gophers, and will use these volunteer starts to replenish the plants.

We spent afternoons mid-week raking leaves. The large stately oak tree behind the farm store gently showers us with leaves. Raking leaves is a never ending job, but even so is satisfying. The leaves waft down gently in the breeze and make you feel as if you are part of an autumn postcard. The acorns are unusually heavy this year. I wonder if that means we are going to have a wet winter?

At long last all of the gourds have been harvested and the front field is full of bright orange bins filled with gourds. We sell freshly harvested green gourds at the farm store for fall decorating. They are mostly shades of bright green and white. We will haul them up to the barn in a few days where they will be placed on pallets to dry over the winter. Once dried they are tan in color, and are usually covered in black mold. This is all part of the normal drying process. Once dried, the mold and outer layer of skin is removed with a scrubbing pad and water. Underneath will be an attractive natural wood-like surface. We sell cured gourds to crafters and artists to make bird houses, musical instruments, vases, ornaments, etc.

Friday the girls put the forks on the skip-and-drag. They used it to load picnic tables two at a time and haul them up to the barn to protect them from our heavy winter rains. Next spring we will haul them back down, for another summer and fall season. We have nine picnic tables in all, they are heavy and a bit unwieldy, so it took several trips. One more task accomplished! Next we stacked all the outdoor chairs and banquet tables so they too can be stored away safe for the winter.

Saturday the farm store was busy. After I finished baking two different kinds of cookies in our farm kitchen, the girls took care of customers while I worked on cleaning our storage container so all our assorted picnic table umbrellas, scarecrows, lanterns, etc. could be packed away.

We headed up to the barn to store gourds on Sunday, and realized we needed to do some serious housecleaning in the barn first. We moved a lot of lumber and reorganized the several different bays so we would have room to properly dry our gourds. We had some ground squirrels discover our cache of dried gourds, and they probably destroyed at least 200 gourds, probably about a $1000 loss. It was so sad! We took all the empty damaged shells over to the compost pile. Looking at the bright side, we should have some great compost next summer!

Today I’m getting the website up-dated, and trying to catch up on paperwork while the girls run the farm store. I’ll try to get some pictures up-loaded soon so you can see the seasons un-fold on our farm.

Joy

Last Tuesday we had a school group visit our farm. The students wanted to help with a farm task, so they helped us harvest all of the late crop Jack-o-lanterns in the u-pick field. They carried them down from the fields and placed them in piles near the road. We thanked them for their help by letting each of them choose one of the pumpkins they harvested to take home with them on the school bus. Some of the pumpkins were almost too large for the kids to carry! They had a great time (and so did we)!

A local restaurant that features our produce called and needed more heirloom tomatoes. The girls made a quick run after we the farm store closed to deliver a box of freshly picked tomatoes for the restaurant's guests to enjoy for dinner that night.

We were almost out of our homemade fudge again, so we stayed late on Halloween night and made nearly 40 pounds of Chocolate Walnut and Pumpkin Pie fudge. We use our own walnuts grown on our farm. We have been getting more and more requests to ship our fudge. Friday we shipped several pounds of Pumpkin Pie fudge to Florida. It's rewarding to see how folks appreciate quality and fresh ingredients.

I spent the weekend baking in our farm store kitchen. I baked Snickerdoodles, Honey Ginger Cookies (using wildflower honey harvested from our farm and our own free-range brown eggs) and my newest culinary creation: Oatmeal Pumpkin Spice Cranberry White Chocolate Chip Cookies. I'm trying to come up with a shorter name :-). They've already been a big hit at the farm store. Yumm!

Saturday the girls worked on the olallieberry patch. Olallieberries are from the blackberry family. The old canes have to be cut off at the ground, and the new canes have to be tied up on trellis wire. Fruit is only born on one year old canes. It is a lot of hand labor, and the canes are thorny. Hopefully time spent on tender loving care now, will result in a bountiful crop of sweet delicious olalliberries next June.

Sunday I took care of customers at the farm store while the girls hauled a pickup load of pumpkins to the cows and Grandpa's pigs. In the cow pasture, they took great delight in taking the pumpkins to the top of the hill and rolling them down playing our own farm version of bowling. It's turned into an annual ritual. The cows adore pumpkins, and graze from pumpkin to pumpkin first eating the seeds, and then the entire pumpkin itself. Nothing is left but the stem. Nothing like a herd of contented cows and a pair of happy girls with grins bigger than a jack-o-lantern!

Halloween is behind us ... yet pumpkin season isn't over. Thanksgiving is still a few weeks away, which means folks are looking for sweet tasty pumpkin and winter squash varieties to make pies, soups, breads and all sorts of other holiday goodies. That reminds me, a need to up-load some new recipes and up-date our current harvest section on our website.

Monday the girls spent the morning harvesting culinary pumpkins in the front field and brought them to the farm store to sell. We brought in some late season winter squash (mostly Butternut and Spaghetti), a few Cinderellas, lots of Baby Bears (make great soup bowls), and some One Too Manys (white with bright orange stripes). Hopefully we'll get the rest of the field finished tomorrow.

Tonight the girls went to a Young Farmers and Ranchers meeting in San Luis Obispo. They are looking forward to meeting other young people involved in agriculture and who farm for a living. Farmers face so many complex issues today. Land use, building codes, environmental health, water quality, erosion, insurance, encroaching development, etc. The list goes on and on! All of them with a fee, permit, license or $$$ signs attached. The Young Farmers and Ranchers keep abreast of the myriad of issues facing farmers, and the girls hope not only to learn, but to educate others about the many issues that must be overcome if small family farms are going to be preserved in our local community.

My it's late! I'll try and pop in again next week and let you know what took place on the farm.

Joy