Morning Song Farm News

This week's harvest is a bit fruit-heavy with less leafy greens. Despite Spring and Summer's being known as fruit season, really for us here in Southern Cal, Fall is probably as important. We're beginning to collect macadamia nuts as nut fall has arrived in earnest. We harvested the first decent dragon fruit yield ever this year, but still not enough to put in boxes. We do think we will be including them next year, this time, unless Operations hogs them all like they did this year. :/ The variety we grow is from Guatemala, and I think the best of all that we've trialed...at least for Southern California. Grown as a trellised cactus, the fruit is spineless and has a rich, floral taste that is hard to describe. I like them best when thoroughly chilled. The flowers are spectacular and open for a single day. We're in the midst of our pineapple guava harvest. For the first few weeks I labeled the bags because so few have seen the fruit in the store. Now I'm sav...

We had a tough time last week getting the lids shut on our boxes, particularly the large shares. Despite the ongoing war with rabbits and squirrels, our gardens are offering bumper crops of lots of different items; with thousands of row feet of tomatoes coming soon! We really weren't expecting the baby kale-dominated braising mix to be still going strong in the middle of summer, but there it is; looking great. The basil looks succulent this week, and we're proud to offer large box subscribers our carefully tended Arugula. We've discovered using winter row covers to guard against  this time of year's total flea beetle devastation and we've cut beautiful, small bunches for all large shares. (There's no way large bunches would have fit in the boxes!)  Little by little we're providing less outstanding organic greens for resident squirrels by shoring up the matrix of entrances to our gardens. We've fenced, dug down and buried chic...

Ha! First year in many that we beat the local apricot thieves to our harvest and can actually offer apricots at all. Only large boxes, but it's better than last year, or the year before, or.... I have to admit I've somewhat sidelined taking care of the apricot grove after years of pointless care, so the trees are in need of caretaking. As soon as the fruit is gone, we'll do the summer pruning, mulching and feeding. Perhaps my local, vocal, neighborhood remarks about stealing from others finally sent the message needed. Or the thief moved away. What's true is that sometimes locals don't see stealing a neighbor's fruit as, well; stealing. And in this case, it's not just stealing from us here, but from everyone participating in our CSA. Too, our loquats weren't stolen this year, either; and large shares got a taste of this unusual back yard fruit. Similar in flavor, I really prefer loquats to apricots; the skins are tart and bursting with flavor. The se...

Cress We're excited about the Cress field that is coming along nicely; we think we'll have our spicy cress bunches in our boxes next week. The rosemary looks like we can take cutting again next week, so we'll have sprigs in all boxes as well. We're harvesting macadamia nuts every day now, although the harvest is impacted from the miserable, squirrel population, we still have some nuts to share. We got ahead of ourselves last week, and tried to crack out nuts that really needed a little longer to dry out in the nut room; causing significant waste. We'll have nuts for all as soon as we're sure the nuts are dry enough to crack out easily. We're thinking the Hass avocado season is upon us shortly, probably starting in two weeks. Yeah!  And this week is the first harvest of our easy to peel Satsuma Mandarins. They've developed a nice tang and are quite sweet. Soon we'll have enough Navel oranges to put in boxes each week, right now there's rea...

I've posted a second harvest ticket this week because we had to switch things around a bit between Tuesday and Wednesday. Only Tuesday large share subscribers received the giant zuchs. I'm going to allow our zuch garden to provide another batch of giants, and hand out to Wednesday large shares either this coming week or next. Eggs! We now have increased our egg productin to the point where we can accept 5 or 6 more orders a week! If you'd like to have a weekly dozen or half dozen added to your CSA box, email us! Our eggs are remarkably special. First, we feed them with a top-notch, certified orgtanic, soy-free feed (from Modesto Mills) along with garden and orchard scraps. Chickens love melons and oranges, by the way! They're free to roam inside a coyote-proof enclosure and have a large red barn to escape the elements and roost in at night. We have a pet llama, Couscou, who shares their space and protects them as well. Since Couscou moved in, we haven't had a...

So I’m nervous about posting our blackberries on the harvest ticket, I’m really surprised how slow they’re ripening, and despite our pre-dawn heroic efforts, we’re barely able to find enough to put in our large shares. I’m pretty sure we’ll be in blackberry heaven next week for all. Tomatoes are here! Yeah! What’s up with the non existent apricot shares? Yup, got ripped off AGAIN. So we care for our apricot trees, water, prune, feed and weed all year. And at the last minute, every year for 4 years now, they’re stolen. Every last ripe one. We have ONE tree of unripened fruit left. I’ll tell you, it’s beyond discouraging, because in a way, our property rights are confiscated if we can’t grow and care for a crop without pretty much certain 100% theft.   Whomever picks, does it at night and can’t tell between ripe and unripe, so they strip pick (which means they pick every last one and sort later.) (And since all those apricots were destined to go into our CSA boxes, each a...

So, we're finally cracking out our macadamia nuts this week. The harvest, considering HALF the farm is planted to macs, is disappointing, as I've mentioned before due to squirrels running amok on our organic farm. There is NO organic solutions, and this year our CCOF inspector point blank suggested we give up, as others have. We're accepting defeat and will start chain sawing the West grove this week. We'll maintain the East grove, in the hopes that someday a solution will arrive, or until we need the land for something more productive. We plan on planting olive trees in the West grove. This week is pretty much the last of our persimmons, you'll find only one each in the large shares. I'm trying to dry the ones left on the trees that are overripe. You'll begin to see an avocado or two in boxes most weeks now for a while. The greenhouse is rapidly filling up with our heirloom tomato starts. I can't believe it's that time of year again! We moved our s...

Well, I think this is the best ever harvest ticket as far as readability goes. Each week I fiddle with different ways to get the ticket up on this blog. This week, it looks pretty readable. Yeah, me. In light of our ongoing agricultural theft issues, we have decided to cut down some of our lime trees to make another row crop area that is easier to defend. So by September, we should be abandoning Garden X and Baby X which is the furthest away from the center of our farm and concentrating on our soon to be named new row crop garden next to the chickens. It's always a tough thing for me to cut ANY tree down, and I pretty much had to leave the farm as the chain saws were going. But I know that there's no sense in working so hard at growing stuff that I can't get in my CSA boxes because of theft. We're figuring out costs this week to install security fencing and razor wire. We'll probably do a combination of chain link, electrical and razor with some motion detection th...