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