Baby Julian tries out his new teeth on Dirty Girl strawberries…

All is well in La Selva Beach, California, especially if you like strawberries.  While the broccolini, shallots, radicchios and lettuces slowly inch towards the sun, the strawberries are booming.  The plants are loaded with beautiful, deep red fruit.  It’s time to make strawberry jam!

Dear Early Girl Tomato Fans,

Despite what you may be wishing, it is only April, and there will not be tomatoes until the end of July.

Happily there are strawberries!

The Dirty Girl crew

It’s been a chill slow winter just chippin away at the weedy patches of fall planted veggie beds- and then whamo game on.  I’d been procrastinating my winter projects just trying to spend as much time with baby charlie as i can before he grows up and moves out.  Sierra and Stella have been doing all the markets, orders, errands, bookwork, dump runs, and what ever else comes to mind that i can put on their list.  I’ve hardly noticed the absence  this winter of Eugenio my field manager of 8 years as his brother Sergio has picked up on running the field crew perfectly.  Er, until this week.  The soil has dried up and warmed up enough for the first real sowings, the dutch shallots are sprouting and need to be planted,  50,000 gold cipollini onions are ready for transplant, 50,000 leeks are ready for transplant, and than there’s the zillion or so broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, lettuce, radicchio, chard, and kale that needed to go out two weeks ago.  So, then back to my procrastinated projects.  I’ve been dealing with a 20 foot cooler that i bought a month ago that hasn’t worked yet and now may be taken back and traded for one that works.  It was supposed to just get plugged in and start working but instead its taken hours and days and many service calls to come to the point where the dude i bought it from is willing to take it back and give me one that works.  I also tried to get tricky and re-build my lister and bed shaper so I could use my cool new farm-all model h cultivating tractor to more efficiently cultivate the beds this year (only 3 wheels).  Of course, I wait until I actually need each implement to finish it.  Still working on the row markers on the bed shaper and i haven’t even started rebuilding my two seeders which i should be desperate to use next week.  Oh yeah, and by the time the first waves of beans come up on Green Valley i need to flip the tires of my 1957 Ford F900 cultivation tractor from an 80 inch bed spacing to a 60 inch bed spacing and rebuild the belly bar for cultivating beans.  Which reminds me i need to trailer around the wheel disk, mower, liliston cultivator, and listers from the cool weather La Selva patch to the warm weather Green Valley patch so I can get tomato and bean beds ready over there.  I still haven’t found a compost spreader with 60 inch wheel spacing that drops a single heavy bead down the middle of the tomato beds.  I’ve looked all winter but I guess we’ll just have to do it by hand….again.  And all these plantings need compost spreading, disking, listing, tilling, shaping, seeding, watering, cultivating, and than we can harvest them and bring them to the market to sell.  I really wish Eugenio was back from Mexico.  He’s the only other person on the farm that does tractor work and he usually does about 90% of it.  But I’m not stressed because I’m going to Kauai in a week and I plan on floating aimlessly in a giant blue abyss.  And i want to eat papayas.  Good bye winter, hello spring, happy equinox.

(for Joe, my son on his 37^th Birthday)

 To grow an organic farmer 

You must step in

when grandparents advice your son get a job with Dow Chemical

since he’s so interested in agriculture. 

You must help fix water pumps, put up deer fencing,

remind him in spring to get a haircut,

pluck strawberries at their plump stems

before morning sun’s wilting.

To raise an organic farmer you must

offer a prayer while he loads

his first Kubota on the flat bed

in threadbare keds.

Decorate the refrigerator with photos from the local paper.

Frame the one of him striding between rows

cippolini  onions draped across his arms,

a harem of swooning bulbs.

Pray the right girl comes along.

She’ll want a peach tree for her birthday,

put  out traps when wood rat droppings

streak the trailer’s ceiling brown

during February rains.

To grow an organic farmer you must share his faith

in soil, seeds handled gently.

Invent recipes for turnips,

even if you don’t like turnips.

Fill in at the Farmers Market when tomatoes avalanche,

memorize prices

so when customers force red kale,

chioggia beets, and cranberry beans upon the counter,

you might even make the correct change.

 And when he asks Mom, do you think I can make money at this?

answer , “Absolutely.”

—Mom (And look how far you’ve trudged!  Dad and I are so, so proud of you.)

The vegetables are also responding to this beautiful weather.  Beautiful broccoli, cauliflower, romanesco, lettuces, radicchios, beets, carrots and more are all in abundance right now. Cover crop has been sewn and is just waiting for the rain to come back. 

Baby Charlie is probably the cutest little smiling baby boy in the world, I swear he gets bigger and cuter evertime I see him.

It is hard to believe that we still have a winter ahead of us.  But at the end of that winter lay tender shoots of asparagus and luscious strawberries… can’t hardly wait!

Stay warm and well,

the dirty girl crew