When the Almond Tree Blooms

I am pleased to report that both the sweet potato harvest from a backyard garden in Woodland, California and the rice harvest on Pleasant Grove Farms have both reached their successful conclusion. The latter involved over a month of four combines working into the night 7 days a week cutting over a thousand acres of rice. The former entailed three people digging through 12 ft garden beds for a hour in search of delicious sweet potato tubers. Both mark the end of two very different agricultural adventures (described in previous posts). I walk away from this harvest with the satisfaction of having been part of the production of food: a milk crate's worth of sweet potatoes and well over fifty 55,000 lb truck loads of rice. Sweet potato patch before harvest The fruits of our labor Peppers still going strong With harvest completed, my farming job will begin to look more like a regular 8-hour office job. I have rice samples to sort, weigh and analyze, data to enter, ...

Sacramento Valley Summer Garden A major motivation behind my somewhat bizarre and masochistic decision to stick it out in the Central Valley is that I was really excited about the summertime abundance that flourishes in the intense heat. The previous summer I had spent at the UCSC Farm and Garden Apprenticeship Program in Santa Cruz, where an especially fog-cloaked, gloomy July stunted the warm weather crops, spread disease and kept us from harvesting much besides kale, carrots and lettuce. Those three vegetables are delicious in their own right, but in the summer, I want to eat summer stuff, like peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, watermelon and even some okra. Save the greens for the rest of the year, when I gladly will cook up kale, collards, broccoli raab or any other leafy vegetable and eat it with much gusto. In Santa Cruz, the problem we faced in enjoying the bounty of summer was a lack of heat and an overabundance of cool, damp weather. Out here in the Valley, what I lacke...