There's something missing in your boxes today, something you've gotten from us every week since mid-June. That's right, for the first time in 18 weeks, there are no tomatoes in any Terra Firma CSA box. Some years, our tomato season ends with a bang. That bang most often comes with an early fall rainstorm that saturates the soil and soaks the plants, causing all of the fruit -- even the unripe ones -- to [MORE ...]
At Terra Firma, we rely utterly on PG&E not just to keep the lights on, but to run our irrigation, washing and drinking water pumps and refrigerate our produce. But for the many people who might take it for granted exactly how dependent they are on the giant utility company in their daily lives, it was frustrating and inconvenient to have no power for an entire day and night last week. The initial media coverage [MORE ...]
We woke up this morning with no electricity on the farm. The powers that be at PGE in their infinite wisdom shut the lights off just after midnight. For Terra Firma, that means our coolers and irrigation pumps are not running today -- and for possibly several days. There is no Recipe this week, we apologize for the inconvenience. You've probably already heard that PGE was planning on shutting power to hundreds of thousands [MORE ...]
Orange is getting a bad name right now, what with all the crazy news coming out of Washington these days. That's unfortunate, now that it's fall. I would hazard a guess that if you gave people a box of crayons and told them to write the names of the 12 months using a different crayon for each month, most people would use the orange crayon for October. Unlike many parts of the U.S., California [MORE ...]
Late summer is Dragonfly season in Terra Firma's fields. Every day around sunset, thousands of them take to the air en masse, hovering and swooping over our tomato, melon and other fields. I enjoy watching them, but until recently I had never given any thought to what they were doing. I've always known that immature dragonflies, which live in water, were carnivorous. But I hadn't known that their primary source of food is mosquito larvae. [MORE ...]
We're a week away from the Fall Equinox, and despite all the hot weather we've been having, summer is wrapping up on our farm. It's true that it can stay plenty hot in the Sacramento Valley this time of year -- the record high temperature for today is 106. And in the Bay Area, you may be just getting your first taste of "summer weather" that can often last through October. But the summer [MORE ...]
Cover crops -- crops grown specifically to improve the soil rather than to produce income -- are a critical part of our farming practices at Terra Firma. In the winter, over half our land is normally "covered". But since we also grow quite a few winter vegetables, there are times when we want to grow a summer cover crop in a particular field. A good example is our overwintered onion and garlic fields, which we finish [MORE ...]
After the "nicest July ever" that I mentioned a few weeks back, Summer of 2019 seems to have had second thoughts. Like a child just realizing that it's time to go back to school, it's making a dramatic last stand against the coming Autumn. This month has been far hotter than its predecessor, not setting any records thankfully but still much hotter than we would like. On our farm, there is one big difference [MORE ...]
At least a few times a year, we come across the scene of a minor crime on the farm. It's almost always theft of small, easy-to-transport items like chainsaws or other valuable tools. Occasionally, someone will steal a farm pickup truck and take it for a joyride. Earlier this year, someone made it just a few hundred feet down the road before driving one into the irrigation canal. On those occasions, we call the [MORE ...]
Last week the U.N. released a report that clearly stated that the world's food supply is threatened by climate change. It received quite a bit of attention from the media, including this article in the New York Times. Any time the media talks about climate change and agriculture, I get nervous. Agriculture is not separate from humanity, it is one of our most basic activities. Humans caused climate change through a variety of activities; [MORE ...]
Back in the spring I wrote a newsletter about our confused onions that went to seed instead of making edible bulbs for us to harvest. While we were initially disappointed, our attitude changed when we found out seed for that the onion variety, the Early Red Burger, was no longer available for us (or anyone else) to buy. We now had an opportunity to save the seeds ourselves for our own use, as well [MORE ...]
If you drive around a rural area, you'll see some big, shiny new tractors out in the fields just about every day. But during the busiest times of year -- planting and harvest seasons -- you'll see plenty of old tractors as well. Farmers tend to use their newest tractors more, because they are less likely to break down. But they also keep their older tractors around, sometimes for twenty years or longer, for [MORE ...]
Just this week we added yet another feature to our list of social media resources: a Terra Firma Farm You Tube channel. We will use this channel every once in a while to post videos of cool stuff that we see around the farm, live action farming footage, and other things we think might enhance your experience of being a TFF subscriber. First up? A quick video I took of a noisy bumblebee pollinating [MORE ...]
Way back in 2003 when a group of our CSA subscribers helped us first secure a piece of land with the security to plant fruit trees, we decided to focus primarily on Peaches and Nectarines. Taken together, these so-called "stone fruit" produce over a long season and are far more popular than Plums, Pluots and other summer fruits. If you've ever had a summer fruit tree in your yard, you know that all the [MORE ...]
Growing cucumbers organically is challenging just about everywhere in the continental U.S. thanks to a small pest with a big appetite. Two actually. Cucumber beetles are the size and shape of Ladybugs, but that is where their similarities end. These "Diabrotica" as they are known to entomologists, are green and yellow. One variety is striped, the other spotted. Cuke beetles will eat any number of dark green plants, including many of the vegetables we [MORE ...]
Happy July 4th Holiday! We've packed you a seasonally appropriate box of produce this week; more on that below. With tomato season hitting its full stride this week, we present the following interactive textual Ven diagram to help you figure out which of the many varieties of tomatoes you get each week. Click on the links to see the seed catalog description of each variety. First, identify the color of the tomato. We do [MORE ...]
Tomato season kicked into full gear at Terra Firma over the weekend, as you will see in your boxes today. As TFF subscribers, you are sharing the harvest of one of the only producing tomato fields in Northern California right now. We pride ourselves on pushing the limits of how early we can plant tomatoes, generally shooting to start right around March 1st. It's not always a winning strategy: wet weather can cause numerous [MORE ...]
If more country tunes were written by farmers, there would be a song about Apricots: how they love you and leave you with a broken heart and an empty bank account. Then, just when you are getting over them and moving on, they show up again, knowing full well that you still love them and will take them back. Our apricot crop this year is the kind that makes a farmer fall in love. [MORE ...]
We have been growing Garlic at Terra Firma since, well, since before it was Terra Firma. In fact, when our founder Paul Holmes starting farming up, garlic and tomatoes were his primary crops. The climate in Winters is very close to perfect for growing garlic. The "stinking rose" is a winter crop, planted in the fall and harvested in late spring. It loves water when it is growing, and hates it when harvest time [MORE ...]
Imagine you come to work on a Monday morning to find your workstation has been moved to a room with no climate control. Your job description has been changed without any notification. The project you were working on on Friday has been cancelled, and there is an email in your inbox that says "New Project Tasks: Deadline, today at 5 pm" with 25 attachments. That was essentially the situation we found ourselves in at [MORE ...]
There are many ways to learn your lesson farming, but many of them involve failure. I remember quite clearly arriving for the first time to work at Terra Firma (called Sky High Farm back then) in February of 1993. It was warm and sunny and we were busy planting potatoes. A couple of weeks later it started raining, and kept raining for most of a month. The potato field flooded, and the potatoes rotted [MORE ...]
The storms that swept through California during the last week produced record amounts of rainfall as well as record cool temperatures for late May. They also ruined millions of dollars worth of cherries and strawberries. Cherries and Strawberries have a few things in common. Although the first grow on trees and the second on small plants, together they are generally the first fresh fruits of spring. This makes them vulnerable to wet weather. When [MORE ...]
Most vegetables go through a series of life stages including vegetative growth, flowering, fruiting and senescence (aka, "death"). Our goal as humans -- farmers, gardeners, and eaters -- is generally to succeed in growing them until they produce the part we like to eat. But like all plants, a vegetable's goal in life is to reproduce: to flower and then create offspring. The happier a plant is, the more likely it will spend more [MORE ...]
If you're paying attention to trade policy at all, you've probably heard that the Trump Administration is threatening to raise tariffs on Friday on a large part of the exports that China sends us, again. This news caused the stock market to fall, and it also likely caused the hopes of soybean and corn farmers throughout the country to fall as well. They have taken the brunt of China's retaliatory tariffs against the crops [MORE ...]
There's a lengthy series in the New York Times this week about farming and climate change that includes a "How-to" guide for consumers to reduce the carbon footprint of their diet. I would guess that most TFF subscribers are already doing most of these things: eating less meat and more plants, for example. But nowhere is there a mention of eating locally and in season, shopping at farmers markets or joining a CSA. Our [MORE ...]
Strawberry season is here! We started harvesting a trickle of strawberries last week from our field; mostly too late to get them into your CSA boxes. But we knew that with summer-like temperatures coming this week, the numbers would jump dramatically and they did. The first berries of the season are in your boxes today. As things often work on the farm, our other short-season spring crops also jumped into the fray. After teasing [MORE ...]
On our farm, "the harvest" is a daily, never-ending activity that involves the majority of our team's time and energy. Picking the crops, washing them, sorting them and packing them is a year-round activity. Anyone who calls this "unskilled labor", as it is so often referred to by the media, has never done it. There are lots of tasks to be done at Terra Firma other than harvest, but they are done by a [MORE ...]
The use of antibiotics in conventional livestock production has made meat cheap and abundant, but it has also contributed to the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacterias like E. Coli and Salmonella. Now, a new drug-resistant pathogen is spreading rapidly through hospitals and nursing homes around the world that might also be linked to the overuse of agricultural chemicals. But in this case, the pathogen is not a bacteria. It's a fungus: Candida Auris. People don't [MORE ...]
During the fall, spring, and winter I enjoy foraging for wild mushrooms in our fields as well as the surrounding woods. We don't get many of the exciting varieties that Bay Area mushroom hunters treasure, like chanterelles or morels. But there are tasty varieties that are easy to identify and find. 2019 has been a good winter for mushrooms, as they love rain and constant humidity. It hasn't been such a good year for [MORE ...]
Almost ten years ago, Yolo County (where Winters is located) came out with a preliminary study identifying major sources of carbon pollution here. Compared to other counties surrounding us, we don't actually have much. There is very little industry here, and the cities are fairly small by Sacramento and Bay Area standards. Still, rather than focus on the rapidly developing commuter suburbs of Davis, Woodland and West Sacramento, the study focused almost entirely on [MORE ...]
During the numerous winter storms of 2019, much of our farm was covered with lush green plants grown specifically to protect the soil from wind and rain. Cover crops, as they are know, are a core component of our organic farming practices as well as our major source of nitrogen fertilizer -- which they pull from their air and "fix" in their roots. By naturally covering the soil this way, we greatly reduce erosion [MORE ...]
Of all the crops we grow, asparagus is one of the least predictable and most temperamental. For the centuries that it has been grown, this has made it a difficult and risky crop to plant. And yet up until twenty years ago, the incentive was huge. Because asparagus was always the first fresh vegetable to be harvested each spring, and had a relatively short season, the demand was guaranteed. And the first crops to [MORE ...]
Right around know, you are hoping for something completely different in your TFF CSA boxes. Not just a different type of cabbage or citrus, but something entirely different from the stuff you've been getting from us all winter. Despite the popular idea that March is "spring", from a farming perspective it's actually the deep end of winter. Asparagus is generally the first new vegetable of spring, and the season can start as early as [MORE ...]
We frequently get requests to post a list of the CSA box contents early in the week so people know what other food they need to buy each week. We've tried to do it a few times, but haven't kept up with it. We're going to try again starting in a week or two, posting a tentative list on the website each Monday. It will be posted under the "Member News" tab. Most weeks [MORE ...]
"Hi, I'm a Terra Firma vegetable, and it's been 120 days since my last drink." There aren't many places in the United States where you can reliably grow fresh fruits and vegetables in the winter without irrigation. In most of the country, it's simply too cold to grow vegetables at all. Most fresh produce eaten in the U.S. between November and April comes from the Desert Valleys of Southern California, Arizona, or Mexico. These [MORE ...]
There's a very simple way to kill most weeds for much of the year California. You simply cut the plant's root just below the soil, or better yet, pull the root out of the ground and leave it lying there. In a day or less, the plant will wither and die in our dry Mediterranean air, whether it's hot or cool. But during wet weather the same task is much less likely to succeed. [MORE ...]
If you live in the SF Bay Area, you have probably heard the news about the prepared-meal delivery company Munchery, who shut their doors and their bank accounts recently without paying their vendors or employees. I'm sorry for anyone affected by this incident. Many TFF subscribers have already read my opinions about venture capital-funded start ups that promise to "shake up" the food business. They offer things that existing business owners know are simply [MORE ...]
Hi All, Alicia here! I have been working here at Terra Firma for a little over a year now, focusing on CSA coordination and sales with our stores, restaurants and wholesalers. Pablito is handing the mic to me this week to encourage you to spread the word about our CSA program. What makes our CSA so special? Terra Firma Farm has been running a community supported agriculture program for over 20 years, beginning at [MORE ...]
Yesterday morning if you looked east from some of our fields you could clearly see the snow-topped mountains of the Sierra Nevada, all the way from Mt. Lassen in the north down to the peaks South of Lake Tahoe. Thanks to the storms of the last two weeks, those peaks got spackled with over 10 feet of snow. Down here on the farm, we got soaked with almost 10 inches of rain. During the [MORE ...]
Skimming one of the numerous articles in the news media this week about the federal government shutdown, one number jumped out at me: $23,000. That's the amount that an entry level TSA worker makes. This year, even Terra Firma's lowest paid employee will make more than that.* In California, the minimum wage went up by one dollar per hour on January 1st of this year. That represented an increase of 9% from 2018, step [MORE ...]
Happy New Year! I would guess that most people, given the choice, would prefer rain to come during the week while they are at work instead of on the weekends. Obviously if you work outside, as mostly we do here at Terra Firma, you prefer the opposite. So it was that we enjoyed watching the horizontal rain and hurricane-force wind from inside our cozy homes on Sunday, knowing all too well what it would [MORE ...]
The question that everyone asks a farmer in late December is "Did you have a good year?" They are generally referring to your crop or crops, and for some farmers the question is easily answered. For example, our neighbors who grow walnuts had both low yields and low prices this year. No silver lining there. At Terra Firma, it's a harder question and I'm always hesitant to answer. We've had years where things were [MORE ...]
Every year as fall transitions into winter, and again as winter changes to spring, something amazing -- and a little terrifying (for a farmer) happens in our fields. The weeds in our fields change. The warmth- and sunshine-loving weeds that torture us for six months of the year stop sprouting. And any that remain begin to produce seeds, even if they are only a few inches tall. It's not that hard to understand how [MORE ...]
When I was a child, we often drove past a General Foods factory where they made bouillon cubes. I still remember the smell of homemade soup cooking wafting through the car windows. This week, you will smell that same fragrance when you pick up your TFF box, before you even open it. The aroma is celery. There is no perfect time to grow celery in Winters. It's too darn hot in the summer, and too [MORE ...]
There's nothing like finishing six days worth of farm work in two and a half days and then coming home to find out that the federal government has issued a recommendation that no one eat any Romaine lettuce -- especially if part of the work you were doing was harvesting romaine lettuce for your CSA boxes that week. Last Wednesday morning, we had to quickly craft a response to our customers -- you -- [MORE ...]
The person who invented the three-day summer weekend was not a farmer -- it's hard enough to stop work for one day during that time of year when days are long and crops never stop growing, much less three. Thanksgiving on the other hand, comes at a time of year when even farmers can take a day off. It serves as a deadline of sorts for us at Terra Firma: our season never ends, [MORE ...]
The past week has been a nightmare for the thousands of people in California who have been displaced from them homes, many of them permanently. And while some disasters are highly localized, the smoke from the fires has covered much of the state, making it impossible for anyone who goes outside to forget or ignore them. The timing of the Camp Fire in Paradise, coming just before the holidays, couldn't have been more awful. [MORE ...]
Happy Halloween! Just in time for the season, we've got a horde of scary black and orange monsters rampaging through our fields. Unfortunately, they are not cute kids dressed in costumes, but rather unwanted insect visitors. And they are feasting not on candy, but on our broccoli, cabbage, kale and cauliflower. Bagrada bugs are "stink bugs" -- large, shield-shaped insects with a hard shell and a long proboscis that they use to suck the [MORE ...]
I wanted to address a few issues that subscribers have communicated with us recently in this week's newsletter. First: Plastic. We have entered the time of year when there starts to be more plastic in your boxes. Several subscribers have raised concerns about this, and we understand the reasons. We bag items for several reasons: 1) It makes weighing loose items like potatoes or tomatoes easier, and keeps those items from moving around inside the [MORE ...]
Carrots are challenging for us to grow here most of the year. If they could talk, they would tell you that their preferred climate would be drizzling, foggy and cool. And yet, in order for us to harvest carrots in fall and winter, we have to plant the seeds in the dry heat of August and September. Carrot seeds are slow to sprout and the seedlings slow to grow, and require almost constant moisture for [MORE ...]