organic farming

All Weather in One Day

Vibrancy

Bare twigs are erupting from buds into clusters of flowers and whorls of spring green leaves. It is bud break. Unfurling walnut leaves are the subtlest green whereas apple leaves emerge more deliciously bright. Even evergreen coast live oaks have a flush of new spring leaves – some pinker, some shiny olive green. The really stunning eye-hurting green though is from the grasslands, which haven’t been this bright due to years of drought. The last two years, the grasslands greened by December only to brown again by March. This year, the amplitude of green keeps ramping up each week and today was so shimmeringly brilliant as to in contrast dull the sky’s pure blue.

Molino Creek Farm’s Vibrant Green Returns After a Long Drought

All Weather in One Day

Sun, clouds, rain, sleet, wind, hail. We recently had a few days with everything possible in a day’s weather. The most striking part was the pea + sized hail, which pelleted the landscape, wave after wave for a long, long time…wide large storm stalling across the North Coast. The hail bruised miles of freshly emerged poison oak leaves, releasing its distinct pungent, acrid, sweet scent that soon blanketed the land, seeping through car vents and into homes.

Poison oak is emerging – an amazing color

Forest Fall

For months, we’ve had storm after storm, but only more recently have we had truly ghastly wind storms. The latest storm dwarfed the prior. Giant trees toppled, shredding through the canopy sending branches flying far. Just across Molino Creek canyon, a half-acre of trees all pitched sideways at once, roots pitched, baring the slope like a landslide. Where we had just spent a hundred hours cleaning fallen limbs to buffer from wildfire…there is now another big project to tackle once again. The entire forest is so thickly strewn with 6” + branches, it is a wonder that any branches or trees remain; it is very difficult to walk anywhere in the forest even along the trail we used to walk to the creek.

An Entire Grove of Trees Pitched Over in Windstorm

Wildlife

When the weather clears, pent up bird song erupts. The birds are singing their spring songs. Song sparrow and house finch melodious jabbering dominates the sound scape, and the whole farm is enveloped in near frenzied mating song. Calling from nooks above the farm and echoing from the canyon walls: turkey gobbling. In the meadows just below the farm, there are huge groups of turkeys with a fair number of showy, strutting toms.

Raptors are calling, as well. The eerie screech of a barn owl reminds us that they are still around: bone-filled pellets stack up below the redwoods at the water tanks complex. In the recent profound breezes, the farm kestrel hovered and dove, over and over, little need to flap. The wind seemed to agitate the red tailed hawk into frequent screaming as it darted between tree tops.

Farm partners have been mowing the cover crop- the fields dried out fast enough with the wind so tractoring was possible. I wanted to follow to gather the scent of fresh-mown grass and also found a juvenile California red-legged frog hopping across the shortened sward.

There are only 2 barn swallows just yet and those two males wheel and swerve in constant play. How soon will their kin arrive, their mates?

Flowers

The first sky lupines blossomed on the farm this week, tailing the first poppies by a few weeks. Bush lupines started blooming as well along with scarlet paintbrush and blue-eyed grass.

First flowering lupine among the Stipa pulchra, purple needlgrass

The scent across the farm comes from a series of blossoming plums, the first over a month ago but more blooming each week. Plum scent contains the highest of sweet notes and just a little low musk to add a bit of interest. The first cherry blooms also erupted this week, but more cherry blossoms are soon in store.

Quickening Farm Pulse

The greenhouse is stacked with young farm plants – Two Dog Farm’s seedlings are itching to get planted soon. Meanwhile, the fields are nearly already mowed, well in advance of nesting birds this year. Soon, the tilling will begin as it has in the brussels sprouts fields along the coast. This Spring, the plow contends with a huge hole that opened up in our lower field. That hole seems as close to a mini active sinkhole as anything we’ve seen:  it is 3’ across and that deep, an odd crater that suggests a both a drain and the spigot for the artesian lake that we got twice this year.

The orchardistas must now hurry: three weeks and we’ll need to irrigate again. The soil quickly dries as the trees leaf out and the cover crop rockets skyward. The pruning is nearly done but young trees need propping! So much to do…

-shared here from my usual posts at Molino Creek Farm’s webpage.

Apples

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about apples and want to share a bit about what I know about this wonderful fruit.

A Rose by Any Other Name

Apples are in the same plant family as roses. When you are eating an apple, you are kind of eating a rose hip, only sweeter. Check out an apple flower and you’ll see a wild rose – five petals and a big bunch of stamens. An apple orchard in flower gives off a dusty rose smell. We’re lucky apples don’t have thorns. Other fruits are in the rose family, too: cherries, apricots, plums…

Apple Blossoms with Honeybee

Apple Lore

Wild apples are found in their genetic birthplace in southern Kazakhstan in the Tian Shan mountains. Apples were domesticated at least 1500 years ago from the wild species Malus sieversii. Bears and people spread that wild thing around far and wide and then folks started messing with it to make better fruit. The result was a cultivated variety with different species names, such as Malus pumila, Malus sylvestris, Malus communis or Malus domestica. If you don’t have a favorite variety of apple, there are plenty to try. Worldwide, there are 7500 varieties grown. Locally, you can try more than 70 varieties at the annual apple tasting at Wilder Ranch. This year’s tasting is on October 8th and hosted by the Monterey Bay Chapter of the California Rare Fruit Growers.

Gala Apples – a favorite!

Our Region and Apples

Our region is famous for its apple cultivation. Martinelli’s Gold Medal apple cider has its history in Watsonville. There are still around 2,000 acres of apple trees in the Monterey Bay area and almost all of those apples go to Martinelli juice, which is made primarily of the apple variety Newtown Pippin with some Mutsu (aka Crispin) mixed in. With the many juice taste tests I’ve participated in, Newtown Pippin wins easily, but Mutsu is a close second.  Martinelli is now offering organic apple juice, reminding me of one of the reasons organic agriculture got its boost.

Organic Foods Movement and Apples

One of the earliest boosts for the organic foods movement was due to apples. The Natural Resources Defense Council published a peer reviewed scientific study demonstrating the carcinogenic danger of Alar, a synthetic spray used on apples and found on apples in the store. The news show 60 Minutes caried this story in 1989 and the public quickly stopped buying apples. Lawsuits followed and Congress passed legislation, and then the organic food movement got a big boost.

Growing Apples

It’s not easy to grow any apple for profit but growing organic apples is even more difficult. The labor alone is a wonder. I figure that an organic apple is handled 6 times before you pick one up at the market.

  1. The first touch: fruit thinning

Touch one: fruit thinning. If the farmer is really good, they only touch the fruit a single time when thinning fruit. There can be up to 6 flowers per cluster, and it is best to thin that cluster to one fruit or there are all sorts of problems. Lack of thinning makes for smaller fruit, not a problem if you want juice but a big problem for sales. If you don’t thin enough, there’s too much weight for the apple branches and branches break. Also, without sufficient thinning the tree makes more seeds using more nutrients that then don’t get invested in the next season’s buds. So, you get a tree that bears every other year: aka alternate bearing.

  • Touch two: harvest

Someone has to harvest the fruit from the tree. These apples go into harvest bags that have to get hauled to the sorting table.

  • Touch three: the sort

Apples need to get carefully sorted. You make sure that any insect damaged fruit doesn’t go to the store and that the right sizes are in the right boxes.

  • Touch four: the boxes go into the truck for delivery
  • Touch five: the boxes go off of the truck at delivery
  • Touch six: the apples go on display

Apple Soil

Many of us believe that the key to success in apple growing is good soil stewardship. Apple trees grow best in close association with soil fungi also known as mycorrhizae. The tastiest fungal associate of apple trees is the famous morel mushroom, but I don’t know anyone who has successfully and purposefully grown morels and apples together…it’s a dream. Mostly, the fungi that collaborate with apples don’t make tasty mushrooms but they can help the apple trees absorb nutrients and water. There is also evidence that apple trees are healthier if they are aided by their fungal associates. I’ve learned lots about apple growing from the author Michael Phillips. He swore that placing piles of hardwood chips made from the fine branches of trees was key to a healthy orchard as fungi love that kind of wood and, in turn, feed the trees.

Well-thinned Mutsu Apples: good for cider or sale of large apples

Growing Apples and our Climate

The native habitat of apples is not at all like California, so we have to think carefully about how we manage apples in our climate. One major issue is that California has a hot, dry summer. Kazakhstan’s mountains have moist summers, so either we irrigate apples or plant trees where their roots reach moisture deep in the soil throughout the summer. Full sized apple trees have roots that reach 20’ down; dwarfing rootstock is smaller. Full sized apple tree also try to reach their natural 40 feet height, so despite the deep roots the height of the tree can be a real problem. Shorter trees and dwarfing rootstock means more thirsty trees.

The other problems with growing apples in our region have to do with heat. Many apple varieties need enough ‘chill hours’ to be healthy; a chill hour is one hour less than 45 degrees while the tree is dormant. We don’t get a lot of those right around here (especially with warming winters) and areas south of us on the coast are nearly impossible to grow many types of apples because of that. The other temperature issue is hot roots. Apples don’t like warm roots- too warm and the trees aren’t as healthy. The answer is to keep the understory watered and mulched.

Apple Friends

If you grow an apple tree, you are bound to attract critters. There are always birds wanting to eat the fruit: I get acorn woodpeckers, California scrub jays and Steller’s jays pecking away at fruit. Fallen fruit feed gophers and mice. Gray fox harvest fallen fruit or fruit right from the trees. If you are in town, you might also get opossum, rats, and raccoons doing the same. One of my favorite butterflies raises its young on apple leaves: the California sister. But, there are many other species of butterflies and moths that do the same. Finally, you need to watch an apple tree in blossom to appreciate the number of pollinators that celebrate apple blooming season.

Your Apple Tree

I hope you can appreciate the apple tree a little bit more and maybe you’ll be inspired to help care for one. If you don’t want to grow one yourself, perhaps you can help care for one through many of the community orchard projects happening all over town. At the very least, when you see that apple at the market, now you may appreciate the life that it had before it made it to the sales display table. Each fruit has its own story, but apples have a special place in our local history.

-this post originally published by Bruce Bratton on his extraordinarily useful BrattonOnline.com weekly blog

Hot-Hot, Hot!

Extraordinary heat roasted Molino Creek Farm and much of California these past many days. Wilting heat. Obliterating heat. Maybe if you come from Death Valley you might say ‘that’s nothing!’ We’re pretty sure it was something like 109F for hours at one point, what was it…Sunday? The scorching affects the memory. Every day it has been well over 90F inside with no way to cool down. Water out of the tap was warm out of the supposedly cold side. We’re not used to anything much over 80 outside. Normally, cool nights help chill the house and the bodies. Nights didn’t get under 80. Day after day everything solid has been heating up. It will take days for things to cool down again. They say that coolness comes back this weekend. With each consecutive heat wave, the next warm spell is worse because everything is that much drier. We hope that this is the last heat wave, but we typically have heat waves through even November these days.

Heat Signs

The night time cricket chorus got much louder, more constant and the chirps quicker. Midday bird song is nonexistent; dawn chorus is muted…there has been no dusk bird chorus. The quail calls don’t seem to have changed, though they seem much braver. Most birds are braver- not wanting to expend much energy running or flying away if they don’t have to. All bird beaks are wide agape all day, panting.

We’ve had smokey sunsets. No fog. Odd stillness or weird winds. Off shore tiny slow breeze. So still for so long and then yesterday a big pushy wind from the southeast for almost an hour, then occasional breezes from that same direction for a bit…warm breezes!

A young coast live oak bent over ninety degrees, perhaps from 2020 fire damage. A still hot afternoon and another oak was shedding leaves more rapidly than a deciduous tree would on a windy day in fall.

The black walnut trees hang wilty and droopy, just ripening their crop of fruit.

Molino Creek Farm is rife with black walnuts growing without irrigation

Dust hangs in nearly still clouds after a car passes by.

The moon shines a muted pale orange from California’s wildfire smoke.

Bug Days

Besides the crickets, our most entertaining of insect buddies, there are others. There were eight dragonflies zig zagging above the upper orchard the other warm evening. Below them there was a buzz of yellow jacket wasps, finally building a population back to devour damaged apples. Maybe the two were related: dragonflies feasting on yellow jackets. But, maybe the biomass of insects supported by our lush organic, regenerative orchard is providing more diverse insect fare. Yellow jackets also feed on insects…they might be mopping up pests like scale, aphids, mealy bugs, coddling moth larvae, etc. It is nice to see so many predators in the orchard helping with pest control and feeding the birds.

Bearing heavily, Molino Creek Farm’s Community-managed regenerative orchard

Changes in Birds

The swallows are gone. I’m not sure when they left, but there are no more barn swallows to wake up to, I already miss their long sentences of chortling squeaky chirps. Off they went to the south land for the winter. Any bets on when the golden crowned sparrows return from their Alaskan haunts? One morning I’ll awaken to that three noted sad song some say is ‘I’m so tired’ and realize that they are back for the winter. Usually, this occurs on the Equinox. There’s an annual betting pool for their return date just like there’s a betting pool for the first significant rain (>1” in one ‘event’). Want to join in with your bet?

One by one the quail are getting eaten by the Cooper’s hawk: piles of feathers keep appearing. A couple times this week, I heard that hawk screaming, terrorizing other birds in the larger vicinity.

Crop Update

Two Dog Farm tomatoes are starting to ripen. They are also producing a bunch of really fine looking (and tasting) peppers. Their dry farmed squash are chugging along- they like the hot weather, apparently.

The apple crop is getting ripe and burning. Gala apples though not quite as sweet as they should be but have dark brown (not quite black) seeds, so almost ripe. They’ll put on some sugar in the next couple of weeks and we’ll be hauling them to market. The heat wave made some apples burn on their sunny sides. A few years ago when the Fuji apples burned, they regained their color and it wasn’t so shocking. Let’s hope for the best or we’ll just have some visually scarred apples for cider not sale.

A sunburned Gala apple

-published originally on my blog at Molino Creek Farm’s facebook and webpage

Bluebirds Now, Acorns Later

The bluebirds’ wet warbles call from fence lines, the birds swoop, scooping up grasshoppers from the dusty ground, picking off caterpillars from stalks of dry grass. Acorns fatten on the oaks, not yet ripe, not yet falling. The days shimmer from bright sunshine and a clear dark blue sky. It is nearly half way between the summer solstice and the fall equinox; the days are becoming noticeably shorter, the nights sometimes warmer, the cricket songs more diverse and louder. And, full moon is tomorrow.

Citrus Hill, now with oodles of new avocado trees growing up fast

The Silence of the Birds

The jays and acorn woodpeckers are more silent. Most of the birds have quieted considerably. Cooper’s hawk is terrorizing the entire range of bird life, but the quail are its favorite game. It is everywhere: flying through the apple orchard, winging around corners of buildings, soaring above the fields…full of the energy of the hunt. The northern harrier is more surprising, returning for stints and then disappearing for a day or hours – its hunting ground extends beyond Molino Creek Farm. Two red tailed hawks are constantly but less energetically hunting, sometimes soaring, often perched, watching, waiting. The night brings the barn owls’ metallic screech; these are as commonly calling as the great horned owls- the fire may have favored the return of barnies because there is less of the great horned’s favorite dense tall forest cover. There’s even a barn owl baby calling in the San Vicente creek canyon just over the ridge. I worry, though, since there are great horned owls…when will we find a pile of barn owl feathers in the field- that’s a repeating pattern: the great horned owls always seem to win.

Sunflower Show

 Judy’s sunflowers are making quite a show. What skill to keep a batch always coming into bloom through the entire farming season, making bouquets for farmers’ markets each week. Bright yellow cheerful sunflower heads…the dominant cut flower in the irrigated field alongside onions, zucchinis, cucumbers, and pole beans. She grows a lovely small patch of diverse market crops.

Sunflowers – for sale at local farmers markets

Apples A’ Hoy

Meanwhile, in the apple orchard the burgeoning crop of fruit is unbelievably large. Almost every branch of every apple tree is bent with full weight of fattening fruit, props holding them from breaking or resting on the ground. The frequent zipping by of the hawks have substantially decreased bird damage to apple fruit. Gala apples are always the winners: last to set and first to ripen. We recalled that the second week of September is the week of gala, but it might be early…

Oranges at Molino? Moooo

On Citrus Hill, near the Barn, we have been plucking cara cara oranges from the two trees we planted a few years back. The first substantial crop of cara cara has been wonderfully juicy and sweet: Score! Cara cara navel oranges are crosses between ruby red grapefruit and navel orange. Its flesh is redder than normal oranges. We are very very stoked to be able to grow a tasty orange: the others we’ve tried make okay juice, but they aren’t that good to eat just plain- cara cara oranges ARE good.

The view downhill of Molino…down Molino Creek Canyon to the coast

Night Walks

Shorter, hotter days create conditions for night watering of the orchard, leading to late night walks to turn off irrigation valves. This leads me to unavoidable opportunities for nurturing the nocturnal naturalist in me. Tonight’s observation: black widow spiders aka Molino farm road median lurkers. Over and over again I witnessed (for the first time!) black widow spiders busily building web networks 4” or less from the soil surface on the unimproved road median strips, emanating from web encrusted gopher holes that must be their lairs. Another nocturnal roadside observation: the emergence of many brown field crickets, now evident in the chorus from various areas. Also, slender shiny dark brown ‘night ants,’ tiny cockroaches, big greasy looking black field crickets, and a myriad of different spiders. No mammalian eye shine gave something away with my bright headlamp, darn.

Rodent Fiasco

The fact that this is an epic Rodent Year still is in force. Mark Jones reports hundreds of rodents fleeing the path of the mower. Every inch has been rototilled by gophers. Farmers are losing crops. Orchardists are seeing girdling, making for more urgent trunk clearing. Every storage shed reeks of mice. A family of 10 mickey mouse deermice greeted me when opening up the small orchard tool storage shed. The bunnies have proliferated in areas, as well. And that fox which we had been seeing down the road a bit…well, its moved onto the farm! Prints in the dust, leaping fox scattering to hide: welcome back Gray Fox!

Hoping you get some warm weather basking!

-this is from my weekly blog at Molino Creek Farm’s webpage

July Awakens the True Summer: Warmth and Welcome Shade

Sunshine rakes across exposed skin, prickly hot. A cooling light breeze helps, but the shade offers a more pleasing comfort. We smile entering the cool understories of lush walnut trees or beneath the canopies of perky well-watered apples. It is nice to have both the summer warmth and the cool shade in proximity. Our creature brains welcome the return to normal weather patterns with this typical July weather at Molino Creek Farm. The past week’s temperatures were precisely what the dry farmed tomatoes, winter squash, peppers, avocados, apples, and sunflowers crave: highs in the mid 70’s and lows in the upper 50’s. The cool breezes emanate from the tops of the billowing fog racing down the coast 200’ below the farm, obscuring our view of the wind-swept waves.

Don’t all you folks way East of us slather at our weather, it comes with a cost…the potential for FIRE! (I shouldn’t have said that). Do non-human critters worry about fire?

Wildlife

How would we know if our critter friends fret about wildfire? The turkey mothers seem to worry less about their young than the quail, judging from their skittishness. Bigger birds might have less worry and these turkeys look proud and bold. The turkey ‘chicks’ which we encounter along the road out from the farm are mostly pretty big, half the size of the adults and not so many as the quail. The quail are raising their second flush of teeny-tiny young fluffballs, stumbling along the roadsides. Their big brothers and sisters are nearly the size of adults- they grew so very fast. A 30-strong covey isn’t unusual to see on the Farm- we might have 4 of those calling their territories here and there. The coveys of quail have mostly orchestrated their flushing formations, launching and landing in unison.

A high flock of 50+ smallish swallows (species TBD) gathers at the top of the Salix Stream’s highest burnt Douglas firs, alarm calling and scattering when our resident red-shouldered hawk flies by. The above-door barn swallows have either just fledged (neighbors) or are feeding their second clutch (my house). A large flock of Brewer’s blackbirds has settled back on the farm after their off-farm nesting; they are accompanied by at least one adolescent bicolored blackbird. The pair of band tailed pigeons who are robbing chicken feed bravely from the coop are still at it.

No new news on the gophers and voles. The gopher population still as the upper hand as the vole population rebounds, crowded into thick-thatched corners of the farm, here and there. I predict the gophers will start losing ground to voles later this year…

Farm Activities

Mark Jones is still the rock star behind the mowing- weed eating and mowing to get the grass down to a fire-safe, dirt-touching mulch. Adan made a pass through the tomatoes with the tractor, tilling in the summer weeds. The Two Dog crew has been assiduously hoe-hoe-hoeing the row crops which had an unusual flush of weedy amaranth this year, so lots of work! Free the peppers!

As I type, Molino Creek Farm has made its debut at the Downtown Santa Cruz Farmer’s Market. Judy took many beautiful sunflowers, zucchini and various other goodies to say our first hellos to new friends and old.

Organic Tasty Gala Apples, Growing Fast for a September Harvest

Crop Report

Tomato bushes are 18” across and a little taller with the first green, shiny fruit plumping up half way up their stems. Two Dog winter squash is bounding- tendrils stretching and long stems bounding from vibrant plants whose bases are adorned by big yellow blossoms. The orchard mulch project is gaining ground- we’re almost through with raking, delivering, and placing the first mulch field, aka “Squash Field”- an acre of ground just past the Old Apple Orchard. We’ve got much more to do with the 1-acre “Habitat Field” near Cherry Hill. And then, we have more patches to gather as our hunger for hay mulch has grown with the new plantings the past few years. Our 3 acres of orchards seem to want to be fed 3 acres of hay, easy math.

The Heavenly Scented San Pedro Cacti are in Bloom Right Now at Molino Creek Farm

Flowers

There are very few flowers alive on the landscape. The row crops are too small to make many flowers, yet and the wild plants are too far from rain to be making many flowers. The exception is toyon – a rose-family shrub that we’ve planted here and there for habitat and pollinators. Toyon is aglow with big bouquets of small white flowers, abuzz with bees and even attracting Allen’s hummingbirds. And so, things are drawn to our home landscape gardens. An old Molino tradition is cultivation of the sacred columnar San Pedro cactus, a native of the west slope of the Andes. Twice a year, San Pedro goes to bloom, opening its massive white fragrant trumpets at dusk. The flowers are full of drunk and dazed honeybees and you can smell the divine smell many yards away. And…what a show! Otherwise, we keep a few salvias and petunias and things flowering for color near our homes and those must serve as nectar and pollen respite while the pollinators await the Great Flowering – thousands of coyote bush: those are while out.

-from my weekly blog on Molino Creek Farm’s web page blog.