Planting Pumpkins and Pulling Radishes

We are moving into the last few weeks of our planting schedule at Grant Farms, and this week was a fun mix of planting and harvesting. Monday we planted a  heirloom pumpkin called Porcelain Doll that will be pink in honor of October's breast cancer awareness (and Halloween of course!), and Tuesday was a day full of harvesting- first sugar snaps from our pea field, followed by radishes from a new field we have not worked at yet called Black Two. Wednesday was a mish- mash of activities as well, with replanting some peppers that weren't thriving at our Fisher Field, trellising our beautiful heirloom tomatoes in Pie Four, and harvesting twenty or so rows of awesome and huge soft neck garlic! Thursday was filled with more planting- peppers in Black Two, and replacing some tomatoes in our trellising, and Ian and I seeded rutabagas and turnips with the hand seeder on the east side of Fisher. Friday we worked back in our Greeley Field planting peppers and even broke early to get ice cream, a super treat for us and well needed as the temperature broke one hundred degrees in the field. Saturday was our working member day, and we had a ton of our awesome CSA supporters out to help us with the substantial task of hoeing thistle and weeds our of our rhubarb patch in Pie One. Here are the Fotos from the week:

June 18

Alex, Justin and Stephanie in Pie Three where we seeded the heirloom Porcelain Doll Pumpkins, with Luke in the background. Those are the seeds Alex is so excitedly holding up!

June 19

Me with an armload of radishes harvested for our CSA in Black Two. Isaac,
 Alex, and Justin in the background, also a pretty good shot of the smoke we have
been experiencing from the High Point Fire behind me. Thanks Alyssa, for
snapping the shot!

June 20

Ryan in our softneck garlic field. We harvested twenty rows, which doesn't sound like a lot, but took us all afternoon.

June 21

Ian soaking up the sun for a moment on this beautiful clear day as we seeded rutabagas and turnips with the hand seeder!

June 22

Rachel in our Greeley field planting peppers. We were using sticks to make quick work of digging the holes, and we thought hers looked like a little ram head! Yay planting wand!

June 23

Freshly weeded rhubarb patch, courtesy of some of our great CSA members! A super hot and hazy day fueled by the High Point fire.

Bonus Fotos:

Duckling field trip!!!

Our one hundred degree day in Greeley! Everyone looks like pro planters, down the line! A good image of our furrow irrigation field as well, where water is sent in between rows to the bottom of the field; one of the least efficient but most commonly used irrigation practices in the United States.

Softneck Garlic

a Red Bell Pepper plant

He's gonna hate me but I couldn't resist. Isaac caught in the act with a plate of apple fritters at intern dinner Saturday night!!

As always it was another great week, though super hot and smokey. Sweating and smelling like a campfire is probably not everyone's first choice, but farming just keeps getting better and better. I had a hard time choosing from all the pics of our different tasks this week, as you can see by the number of bonus fotos, and I still feel like adding more! It might have to happen...

XO,

Val


P.S. One quick note, for those of you trying to post comments but were unable to, I changed the settings so anyone should now be able to post a comment who would like to. Sorry for the earlier trouble.

Gettin' our Garlic on

We had an excellent week this week, filled with planting and harvesting and cultivating alike! Justin and Richie began post-holing for our heirloom tomato trellising in Pie Four Monday while the majority of us toiled away hoeing the weeds and grasses between the rows of tomatoes and cantaloupe. Tuesday we harvested the last of the garlic scapes and began harvesting our hardneck garlic crop! I took a bite out of a clove right in the field- delish... and spicy!! The Garlic is layed in piles in the field and the cloves covered by its own leaves to cure before sent out to market. This was truly our first big harvest and was so fun. I think I still smell like garlic a little, several showers later! Wednesday we completed the garlic harvest and moved on to our first round of snow pea harvesting. It was another beautiful day picking peas off the plants into bushel baskets at the north end of Pie Four. Thursday and Friday we had two extra long days in our auxiliary field in Greeley, back to planting, this time a twelve acre field with eggplant, tomatoes and peppers. Our hard work was rewarded at the end of the day Friday with Isaac bringing us popsicles- something was had been dreaming about in the field during the hot days. It was probably...no, definitely, the best popsicle I have ever eaten! Here are the fotos for the week:

June 11

Justin driving the auger into Pie Four to drill holes for our our heirloom tomato patch. We will trellis the heirlooms as they are
indeterminate varieties, which means they will bear their fruit at different times as it ripens over the course of the season.

June 12

Jessica rockin' her Carharts with two bunches of hardneck garlic during
our Tuesday harvest.

June 13

Richie and Kyle harvesting delicious snow peas into bushel baskets in our
Pie Four field. Check out our sweet ride that day- the psychedelic schoolbus!

June 14

Kyle in our Greeley field planting eggplant. He found this Killdeer nest
with four eggs in the middle of one of our beds. The mother bird
scolded us all morning until we were far enough down the field that she
could return to the nest safely!

June 15

A smaller crew of us at Friday Intern Family Dinner with some beautiful roasted chickens with lemon and garlic prepared by Luke and Emma! We also had an excellent salad made with garlic scapes, spinach, lettuce and green onion from our farm, and a vegetable stir fry with freshly harvested, brand new, red ace beets! A perfect end to a long hard week! From left; me, Jacob, Lucia, Elena, Emma, Luke, Greg, Jessica, Justin and Katie.

Bonus Fotos:

A bushel basket of our beautiful snow peas freshly harvested next to a pea plant.

Emma, Kyle, and Elena at the end of the day harvesting snow peas. Three peas in a pod in their tie dyes! I think they planned it.

Lucia planting a pepper down the back of Jacob's pants in our Greeley field. Couldn't resist.

We'll be spending one more day next week in Greeley finishing planting the south end of the field, and harvesting our soft neck garlic is right around the bend. The days are definitely getting warmer, and I have sported a few light sunburns in addition to all the bruises, scrapes and soreness I have collected. I have to say though, for all the minor hurts and aches, I've never been stronger, and the season is really just getting underway. I wanted to thank those of you who are following us on the blog and those who are just checking it out for the first time as well! It's become a highlight of my week to look over what we have accomplished and put together this little photo diary of our time in the fields and at the farm. Have a great upcoming week and Happy Father's Day today to all the dads! To my dad, you've set the foundation for my success in this, and all endeavors. I love you. 

XO,

Val

Fresh Faces, Feasts, and Fruitage!

This week has heralded the arrival of several new interns to our crew, growing our number well into the twenties! In addition, we celebrated the arrival of a few fresh fields of crops for harvesting, as well as our boss Isaac's birthday Tuesday, and our wonderful weekly Friday intern family dinner, with Lucia taking on the incredible (and super tasty!) task of grilling out for near to twenty five people! It was another awesome week on the farm, and we spent a healthy amount of time continuing our planting schedule, finishing Pie Four and Fisher Fields with tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and melons. Hasanbey, Uzin, and Altinbas include the three incredible heirloom melon varieties our farmer, Andy Grant brought from Turkey! We also finished laying the plastic in Pie Four and completed twenty acres of hand planting in that field alone. Finishing the Fisher Field accounted for, I think, ten more. Yay Ya! 


It's also garlic scape season and we spent a portion of just about every day harvesting the curly scapes from our hard neck garlic field for shipment to Whole Foods and other grocers, as well as for our CSA farm shares. The scape is the center of the hard neck plant which spirals in a corkscrew and is what would eventually become the flower of the plant if not harvested. It has a springy, fresh garlic flavor and is great roasted, in a scramble, vegan quesadilla, or even on the grill, as Lucia aptly demonstrated on Friday night. 


Other items of note this week were hoeing weeds, harvesting spinach for the chickens, breaking down in 'Mater (our beat up Ford pick up) and having to drive a school bus around instead, and welcoming some great new people to our crew. Word up to Stephanie, Colten, Alex, Luke, Emma, Seyward, Elizabeth, & Ethan. Here are the Farm Fotos for the week:

June 4

Hollis, rocking the Grant Farms shirt, harvesting some yummy garlic scapes!

June 5

Our crew building a new haystack with bales from a stack that had collapsed. Left to right, Elena behind Richie, Jacob, Megan, Ken,
Colten, Stephanie, and Isaac. We surprised Isaac with a cake and wearing party hats for his birthday, and Jacob wore his all day. Bomb. 

June 6

Nate, calling Isaac after we killed poor 'Mater, trying to haul a heavy wagon filled
with 150 Tosca containers full of spinach for our chickens. The truck was not
up to the challenge and we ended up walking back to Cuca's Kitchen to grab a
school bus to get around in. This story sounds like something I made up, or
maybe a whacked out dream...

June 7

Alex, with a tray of our beautiful Turkish melons, planting in Pie Four. Melons are part of the
cucurbitaceae family that includes cucumbers, watermelons and gourds, and is probably in the top
five lists of awesome words to say.

June 8

Katie and me with my favorite shovel of all time,  Baby Super Shovel. I started out hating it so much, because it really is just a sawed off shovel, and I have no idea why anyone would ever do that. But then the shovel and I spent a lot of quality time laying down
all the plastic in this field, and we bonded so much that this picture had to happen. 

June 9

Luke and Hollis hoeing the perennial flower garden. I grabbed some great shots of our working members in the bonus shots of the week as well. 

Bonus Fotos:

Here are a few snaps of our great CSA working members, thank you everyone for coming our to help us on your Saturday!

Nick and Kara 

Mohan, hoeing around the Passion Flower

Emma, on the left with our working member Laycie

Scape-tasticness.

Elizabeth, one of our touring WOOFers, with hard neck garlic and even more scape-tasticness. 

Our weekly Friday Intern Family Dinner. Outside, sunset, deliciousness. 

Once again, another stellar week at Grant Family Farms. We have new crops bursting with cilantro, three varieties of green and red leaf lettuce, new green onions, and of course spinach, rhubarb and horseradish. It's been amazing to get our new plants in the ground the past few weeks, and even more fun to see them thriving and getting bigger. Harvesting the scapes has giving us a little taste in the spring of what harvest time will get to be like in the fall, and I have a feeling things are only going to get more crazy, and more fun as the season progresses. Have an excellent Sunday, and thanks for checking in.

XO,

Val

Everybody's Hustlin'

This week completed the two months that many of us have been interns at Grant Family Farms and it's nearly impossible to believe. I guess the old adage is true that time does fly when you are having fun... and working at a break neck pace to get things done! This week was started by completing the plastic layer in our Fisher One Field, followed by several days of fast and furious planting of determinant vining varieties of Valley Girl and Taxi tomatoes in Pie Four, more heirloom tomatoes, peppers and eggplant,(yay!) in Fisher, and completed by setting up and preparing for Saturday's Spring Farm Tour. 


Saturday was amazing and it was so fun to see first time visitors as well as our awesome CSA members come out to see what we have going on at the farm this year, take a tour on one of our excellently painted touring school buses, and enjoy some great food, entertainment and support our local vendors. I spent the majority of Saturday giving tours of a small portion of our farm and it is definitely in the top list of things that I've loved doing so far this season. There's just something about getting to stand in the front of a school bus as it trundles dangerously,(not really) down a muddy farm road and ramble on and on about all the things I've learned about the fields and the farm this year! For those of you who don't know, or didn't take my tour on Saturday, I especially appreciated it being a former flight attendant. I'm already used to being in front of people, but this might be the first time anyone actually listened to what I have to say... Ba-doom Ching! Here are this week's Farm Fotos:

May 28 Happy Memorial Day

Thank you to our fallen service men and women, those that have served, are serving, and their families.

Me and Elena riding on the plastic layer for added weight in some difficult soil conditions in Fisher One. Isaac driving, Alyssa in the corner shoveling. We coined this position 'Gardengoyles', and Elena's made reference in her blog too! You can
check that out at http://eeckland.wordpress.com/

May 29

Katie harvesting spinach to feed our seven thousand chickens at the farm. we filled up all the Tosca containers in the background in
the space of two hours. The farm can save a huge portion of the roughly $17,000 it could spend every two weeks on
chicken feed by providing our birds with yummy organic produce past it's prime for human consumption.

May 30

Part of our awesome intern crew planting heirloom eggplant into Fisher One Field. Clockwise from left:
Ken, Chris, Kyle, Ian, Lucia, Hollis, and Katie.

May 31

Chris, Megan, Jacob and Elena after finishing our planting of heirloom cherry tomatoes in Pie Four. We planted four varieties in a
rainbow pattern so come harvest time we will be packing four different colors of purple, yellow and red cherry toms into cartons
for our CSA members!

June 1

Our crew climbing aboard one of our touring school buses to practice giving tours of the farm for Saturday's Spring Farm Tour event.
From left: Megan, Kyle, Hollis, Chris, Katie, and Eric.

June 2 Spring Farm Tour

Lucia and Elena, rockin' their Farm Tour shirts in front of their Peace Bus. They made up one of several teams of interns that lead tours
of Grant Family Farms for our Spring Farm Tour Festival. It was an awesome day, and very full and busy! I wish I had had a chance to
take more pictures of the other events and festivities that went on throughout the course of the day!

Bonus Fotos:

Tanea arriving with a rack of tomatoes in the back of Isaac's truck to Pie Four.

Hollis took this awesome photo of me, Elena and Jacob in the Art Barn moving tables out for Saturday's event. Thanks, Hollis!

The most perfect mini rose that ever grew at the intern house. Elena wore it as a pin all day Wednesday.

Me driving 'Mater, our super old and cranky, sixty year old Ford F-150 Explorer on the way to wrangle a long horn cow for our petting zoo on Saturday! You've witnessed my growing obsession with driving the tractor, this thing ranks up there pretty high as well. I think the smile says it all, right? PS, thanks Justin for the pic, and for letting me volunteer you to come with me!

So, that wraps up two full months at the farm. I'm definitely stronger, tanner, and slightly smarter for starters. I can't believe how fast the time has zipped by! Shout out to all the cool CSA members and people up to visit the farm on Saturday, as well as our vendors and volunteers. It was such an excellent day, and I had a blast meeting those from our community interested in supporting local business, agriculture, and healthful eating! Welcome to June, everyone! 

XO,

Val