All the news that's fit to eat
by Judith Redmond of Full Belly Farm, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop I was recently in Detroit for a food and farming policy meeting. While there, our group took a field trip to meet local leaders in the urban gardening and farm to school movement. On the way, looking out the windows of the bus, we [...]
The farm is so alive during this time of year! Everywhere you turn, it seems like something new is blooming, growing or coming to life. Though the hot summer seems to be racing towards us, with harvests of tomatoes, melons and squash coming soon, everyone seems to be totally rejuvenated by the bright green hills [...]
By Judith Redmond of Full Belly Farm, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop Years ago, when European lords and ladies were interested in botany and agriculture, greenhouses were elaborate, beautiful buildings covered with glass and full of complicated heating, cooling and lighting equipment. If these grand greenhouses at Kew Gardens or the Palace of Versailles form [...]
By Judith Redmond of Full Belly Farm, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop When I first heard the term “food safety” I knew that even the term itself was a problem, representing an approach to our food that calls lettuce bathed in chlorine “safe” and lettuce with a speck of dirt on it “contaminated.” Now, a few years [...]
From Full Belly Farm, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop This week we wanted to let folks learn a little bit more about the people who work at Full Belly Farm, so we interviewed one of the crew members who irrigates the crops, Arturo Gaxiola. Full Belly: First, please tell me a bit about your job [...]
From Full Belly Farm, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop March 18, 2013 Saturday March 16 was a banner day at Full Belly Farm: one of the earliest days in recent years that we were able to plant our first tomatoes. A crew of 8 carefully transplanted the tomatoes from their warm safe spot in the [...]
by Paul Muller of Full Belly Farm, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop There is an eye with which we experience the world, an interaction between the object perceived and the observer. Often times two people looking at the same object or event can see very different things. It is a Confucius-like allusion that could be [...]
As the weather warms and dries a little in February and March, it’s easy to think that spring has arrived and therefore the warm weather crops should be close behind. But the delay from the green house or the field to your FarmShare is 2- 3 months or more. Some of the leanest months for [...]
Courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop Although the Capay Valley is increasingly known for it’s amazing fruit and vegetable farms, there are other projects and crops worth noting! These three made it into several local newsletters recently, along with a little Capay Valley history. Organic Indigo From Riverdog Farm We are growing a ½ acre experimental [...]
By Rawley Johnson of Full Belly Farm, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop October is my favorite month on the farm because of its in-betweenness. The weather is not so extremely hot anymore but not so extremely cold yet either. The first rains freshen and green up the parched dry ground, but spares us the [...]
By Paul Muller of Full Belly Farm, Courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop For those of you who were able to attend our October 6th Hoes Down Harvest Festival, thank you for making the day an incredible experience and wonderfully successful event. Nearly 6,000 folks celebrated the closing of a long summer season with dance, great [...]
By Judith Redmond of Full Belly Farm, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop Last Saturday was the Equinox – it happens twice a year, once as the days become shorter, once again as the days become longer. For us here in the northern hemisphere, we feel the approach of Autumn. On the other side of [...]
By Hallie Muller of Full Belly Farm, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop Twenty five years ago the Hoes Down Harvest Festival at Full Belly Farm started as a seed with the intent of bringing people out to the country, creating a memorable time and at the same time planting in their heads the significance [...]
From Full Belly Farm, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop. Last week, if you were to consult a weather map, you would find that temperatures in the Bay Area were almost 50° cooler than those that we were experiencing in Guinda. The daytime highs forecast for our coming week are as follows: 111, 109, 108, [...]
Courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop The Full Belly family is eagerly awaiting the arrival of a new member – the first of the third generation – due in late August, a perfect melon ripened baby who will certainly have at least a dozen arms outstretched each day for holding. Amon and Jenna are undoubtedly [...]
from Full Belly Farm, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop We use our hands a lot in our work at the farm. Pulling small weeds, cleaning garlic, picking flowers, finding cherry tomatoes hidden in between the vines. Our fingernails aren’t polished, our fingers aren’t dainty. With work, hands flatten out and get bigger and stronger. [...]
By Paul Muller of Full Belly Farm, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop Sunday Mornings start the week in a relatively quiet and reflective time here at the belly. We can sleep in – usually about 7 am or so – start slow, sip rather than gulp a cup of coffee, and maybe engage in [...]
By Andrew Brait of Full Belly Farm, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop My son’s 8th grade class recently celebrated graduation from middle school with a trip to an amusement park. When asked about the day, he remarked, “It was wild, Dad, kind of like our life on the farm.” If farming and seasonal production [...]
Judith Redmond of Full Belly Farm, Courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop Resting in a prominent corner of our farm, under a native black walnut tree, there’s an enormous Allis Chalmers crawler tractor. This is one of those yellow tractors that were built in the ‘40s and 50’s, weighing up to 70 tons, with huge [...]
By Judith Redmond of Full Belly Farm, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop Years ago, when I was studying at the University of California, I noticed that there was research being done on “organic” agriculture with results that proved it to be not viable. Upon closer examination it turned out that the researchers had compared [...]
Dried Fruit Stores Sweetness By Heidi Lewis Fruit dried on the vine or in the sun is the most ancient of food preservation methods known to humanity—and it’s still practiced today. Using the sun and the free hot air to dry fruit is another way farmers can be sustainable. It’s an efficient use of excess [...]
By Dru Rivers of Full Belly Farm, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop The rain these past few weeks has been an incredible blessing. Us “old timers” at the farm were getting pretty anxious about the lack of water this winter – already planning to cut back on crops in fields where water is in [...]
By Roxanne Crittenden, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop Even though I grew up here in California, I find the cycles of abundance and scarcity here a little surprising. In a Mediterranean climate like ours, winter is a time of plenty when it comes to fresh produce. Greens, root vegetables and citrus all thrive in [...]
By Becca von Trapp of Full Belly Farm, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop Well folks, the rain has finally come. Here at the farm we are heaving a collective sigh of relief as we are finally able to hang up our rain-dancing shoes for a little while. With the pregnant clouds, a new form [...]
Courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop This week Nolan O’Brian, one of the Full Belly Farm interns interviewed orchard manager, Jesus Jacobo Garcia. Where were you born? My hometown is called “El Fuerte” (the strong). It’s a neighborhood in Sinaloa, a state in Mexico. It’s a beautiful part of the country. There are many farms [...]
By Dru Rivers of Full Belly Farm, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop Almond blossoms are everywhere at the moment on Full Belly Farm – filling the air with honey scented smells and brightly dotting Highway 16 as it winds the twenty two miles up the Capay Valley. Along the way the five small towns of [...]
By Heidi Lewis Great contemporary dramatists like Beckett, Ibsen, and Chekhov were the first to indicate a “pause” in their scripts. Nobel Prize–winning playwright Harold Pinter became inextricably pinned to his dramatic use of silence, which was famously dubbed the “Pinter pause.” The pause was meant to convey unspoken dialog between sentences. In television drama, [...]
By Thomas Nelson, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop Farmers, seed and equipment suppliers, food distributors and retailers, NGOs and community members from across the country, came together last week at the 32nd Annual EcoFarm Conference at Asilomar, Pacific Grove. Located in a stunningly beautiful coastal setting, propagators of a sustainable food and farming system [...]
By Paul Muller of Full Belly Farm, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop It is a fine Sunday morning. The sun is shining on a windless, cloudless blue sky. The light frost last night kissed crops with the cold they need to be sweet and slow growing. Late December and early January are historically our biggest [...]
By Judith Redmond of Full Belly Farm, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop Every work day, Road 43, leading to our Full Belly Farm becomes a busy thruway. First, as soon as it is light, our crew arrives, parking their cars under the trees along the sides of the fields. Families and car-pooling neighbors head [...]
Courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop I’m trying to make sense of time. It is after all, the end of another farm year. If we agree that “time flies” we must concur that time really is all relative. Did every day or week or month clock out at the same pace? Was it a straight [...]
By Judith Redmond of Full Belly Farm, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop Each season on the farm has its own tempo. The harvest overwhelms everyone’s attention for most of the year. The lambing season in February is another high point. Paperwork and regulatory reports flood through the door at year’s end. Animal chores are [...]
By Paul Muller of Full Belly Farm, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop The farm is sliding into the rhythm of a welcome fall. Last week’s rain was a signal to slow down, breathe deeply, and remember crisp, clean October color. Damp air permeated even the driest of spaces and the moisture washed everything clean. The [...]
A Yolo County Land Trust Event By Judith Redmond, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop Top chefs and food purveyors, representing 27 of northern California’s most innovative and creative restaurants, 13 wineries and 8 farms with tastings of their summer produce gathered in Winters on September 11th, each to showcase their best, created from products [...]
By Judith Redmond of Full Belly Farm, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop The Armenian cucumber is actually a variety of muskmelon and like other types of muskmelon, it is native to Armenia (a former republic of the Soviet Union.) We have several small plantings of these exuberant cucumbers (also called Painted Serpents) and the [...]
By Paul Muller of Full Belly Farm, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop For Old Timers around here, their world of memory and recollections about oddball weather events embodies a skill that is part genius and part B.S. When I say that this has been a most unusual year, they can point to the floods of [...]
By Heidi Lewis “Ginormous” sounds like a word a second grader made up to mean super-duper big—but it was, in fact, accepted into the Webster’s Dictionary in 2007. New words must go through a rather rigorous trial to get into dictionary-land, and ginormous is fairly high ranking — #7, between Bollywood and microgreens. New words don’t get in without causing [...]
By Judith Redmond of Full Belly Farm, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop Despite heavy rain, a surprisingly large group of people turned out for the Full Belly Open Farm Day. While we couldn’t sample the strawberries as in years past, we were able to walk around and enjoy the muddy farm. Several families showed [...]
by Paul Muller of Full Belly Farm There is an infusion of springtime powering the life force of bees, goats, people and plants intent upon being fully alive in spring-moment. Full Belly Farm this week is alive with color and bursting with flowers everywhere. There are fields of bright yellow mustard, white sprays of arugula [...]
By Judith Redmond of Full Belly Farm With a little warm weather, the fields are drying out and plants have all started growing remarkably suddenly as if a switch just turned over to ‘ON’. Now they’re in a race to catch up with the spring. In one week we saw more growth in the asparagus [...]
By Judith Redmond of Full Belly Farm This morning, the weather makes it feel more like winter than spring, even though it’s the end of March. It’s pouring down rain, it’s cold and there’s a howling wind on the loose. Cache Creek is raging. Wet fingers are numb in just a few minutes of bunching beets or digging carrots. No one relishes [...]
By Hallie Muller of Full Belly Farm Last weekend, our small community celebrated a 96-year old tradition: the official crowning of the Almond Queen. In a valley rich with history, this is a standing room only event because it gives our community the chance to celebrate the talented and successful young women living among us. This year, six seniors at Esparto High School vied [...]
WEST Weekend Along the Farm Trails Sep 25 & 26 Sonoma County, CA Hoes Down at Full Belly Farm Oct 2 & 3 Guinda, CA Water Forum Oct 4 Berkeley, CA CENTRAL Mushroom Hike – Ryerson Woods Sep 26 Deerfield, IL Permaculture Course Focus on Suburban & Urban Oct 9-16 Stelle, IL Cornbread from the [...]
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