Over the last thirty years, there's been a different kind of gold rush in the hills of the central valley. Mandarin Oranges have gone from a specialty and highly seasonal fruit item to a staple of produce departments and lunchboxes, available from California for almost six months of the year. I think most fruit lovers don't have any idea how many different varieties are grown, and how much work plant breeders and farmers have [MORE ...]
All vegetables are sensitive to temperature changes over their lifespan, from "birth" through to harvest. Seeds germinate more quickly when the soil is over 60 degrees, but will simply cook if the soil gets above 85 degrees. Tomatoes ripen much slower when it's cool then when it's hot. This time of year, Broccoli is the most temperature-sensitive crop we grow. Cold temperatures can slow down the maturation of the broccoli heads, adding a month [MORE ...]
Everyone loves Terra Firma carrots. For years they have been far and away our most popular winter vegetable, and we've never quite managed to keep up with the demand for them. Back in the days when we sold at farmers markets, there were weekends when we could have sold a thousand bunches if we had been able to harvest that many. You've probably noticed we put Carrots in your CSA boxes every week in [MORE ...]
Sometimes the difference between us having an item in your boxes at a certain time of year comes down to a single day. Today is one of those days. Planting vegetables in the winter is often a frustrating process. Heavy dew or frost every morning means that it is rarely dry enough to work the soil before 11 a.m. -- and that's only we get the right combination of sun and wind. Since [MORE ...]
Happy New Year and Welcome to Terra Firma's 2020 CSA! For many people January represents a blank slate, a fresh start, a chance to get things right that might have not gone so well the year before. We often see a jump in the number of folks subscribing to our CSA, as people make resolutions to eat better, cook at home more often, or buy more local food. If that describes you, then welcome! [MORE ...]
At the end of each year, it's common to hear people talk about how the time has "flown by" or otherwise passed in a blur. I have never found that to be true on the farm. Every year that goes by feels like a long, long time. 2019 had the potential to be a rough year. The weather was challenging almost from day one, offering few breaks between the storms. February in particular was [MORE ...]
One of the most ubiquitous pests we deal with on our fall crops is the appropriately named Cabbage Moth and it's offspring the Cabbage Looper (so called due to it's inchworm-esque mode of walking). In addition to its namesake, the Cabbage Looper also is quite fond of most other cole crops including broccoli, cauliflower, and kale. Or put in another way: roughly half the crops we grow in the fall, by acreage. Unlike some other [MORE ...]
What a difference a week can make on the farm, and in California in general. Last Monday our area was actually under a Fire Weather Watch, with dry wind blowing dust everywhere. One week later and the farm is a muddy mess. It was still dry on Thanksgiving, as the first storm last week essentially missed us completely. But we received five inches of rain over the weekend from the second storm. At any other time [MORE ...]
Terra Firma is a family farm, but not in the mainsteam mythology, TV ad kind of way where everything is done by the members of a single family. Hector and Elena are full-time owner-operators, along with their son Hector Junior. But they have lots of help from dozens of other people on the farm who work alongside their spouses, cousins, nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, and in-laws. I may be one of the few people [MORE ...]
We started picking Satsuma Mandarins on Saturday, and with that, we have now fully settled into "winter mode" -- a relatively calm period at Terra Firma where we harvest citrus, root crops, and leafy greens. But it doesn't feel like winter, especially not when it's 85 degrees and sunny every afternoon as it has been for well over a week. And there's no winter rains in the forecast. It's not time to panic yet [MORE ...]
Last week I wrote about carrots -- a vegetable we grow that few other farmers in our area grow. Another one is lettuce. Most of the lettuce that grows in the area around our farm is actually a weed: wild lettuce. This thistley country cousin bears little resemblance to the stuff in your salad -- it's one of the least palatable plants imaginable, bitter and spiney. But it thrives in the hot dry weather [MORE ...]
It might surprise you, but for over 25 years, we've been one of the largest carrot growers in the Sacramento area. But that is a deceptive statistic. Very few farmers grow carrots at all in this area, so the 4 or 5 acres we grow each year put us at the top of a very short list. California produces most of the carrots grown in the U.S, but the majority of them are grown at the [MORE ...]
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 ...]