-I post nearly weekly from Valentine’s Day until Thanksgiving a blog about Molino Creek Farm. So, this is the second to last post for 2026.

Rain. Every vignette, each part of the farm…the entire region…is being wetted. This rain drives the moisture deeper into summer-dried soil awakening new life for the winter season.

Forest Drops

The rain is captured and concentrated in the high boughs of redwoods and firs. Drizzle coalesces into big drops plummeting, sometimes making sharp smacks against limbs, shattering. Mostly, though, the raindrops are muffled quietly diffusing into deep, fluffy needle duff. Giant bananaslugs scoonch across trunks leaving silvery slime trails. 

Scrub Soak

Resinous coyote bushes slump, covered with white fresh seed fluff made heavy with water. The bushes densely glisten even under cloud-capped sky. Exploring newly emerging liverworts or mushrooms, you dare not squeeze between those hulking shapes: brushing up against one instantly soaks. Edges of shrubby patches will have to do for the liverwort expeditions. Alarm squeaks resound: families of golden crowned sparrows flush deeper into cover.  They are the cryptogam farmers.

Flushing Grasses

Gopher mounds bristle like alarmed hedgehogs. Although dense, the single first leaves of 2” tall grass seedling spikes haven’t covered the moist, deep brown soil. Ferny blue-green rosettes of California poppy catch droplets that magnify and distort their otherwise tidy appearance. The arched dense cover of perennial grass blades dance and bob in heavy downpours.

Tilled Mud

Furrows of loose soil, freshly plowed or harrowed flatten gradually as they saturate. Mud puddles form in tire tracks. Liquified dirt flows in rivulets, down rodent holes, backing up against obstacles, painting one color what had been complex hues of soil surface-chopped plant residue. In between showers, these tilled areas waft thick and sweet soil scent.

Puddled Roads and Trails

Cows lower their massive noses to road puddles – convenient drinking areas far from the trough. Birds delight in the ubiquitous baths, wings splashing, heads scooping, beaks open sucking up sweet fresh rainfall. Every trail and road is dotted with puddles.

End of the Season

The last Palo Alto Farmer’s Market of the season for Molino Creek Farm this Saturday. Bodhi powered the tractor across the fields, discing and planting cover crop into the night Tuesday. Orchard cover cropping progressed with whatever hours I could spare, however many hours my body could muster – alas, only half done before this week’s rainstorm! Imagining the swelling of bell bean seeds, licked by snails, prodded by earthworms in the freshly turned soil.

Strong dark wax boxes of winter squash are stacked high and curing just inside the south-facing doorway of the Two Dog Farm greenhouse. 

Farmers wend their way slowly one more time down the rows of tomatoes, happily surprised to be harvesting tomatoes this close to Thanksgiving.

Heavy shoulder bags of apples filled on the steep orchard hillside and hoisted onto the sorting table. Fuji and Braeburn are the last varieties this year to go to market. Sweet and juicy but each having their own very unique flavor, vastly different. We will too soon miss the crunch of that wonderful fruit. A reminder to relish the appreciation of what you have before its gone. I take extra-long to finish a fresh-picked apple nowadays, making sure to chew and taste while gazing at the skin and flesh…the juice…the release of complex aroma upon each crisp bite.