Lesson in Patience

• Corn & Tomatoes in a cold summer

• Tractor Woes

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Photo collage is an ode to our John Deer 4520. From top left clockwise: Elizabeth and Paul talking compost, Oskari and our son diagnosing the problem in the wheel hub, essential equipment for creating amazing compost, winter squash harvest, Hayley, Jeremy happy with a new bucket in 2020, current farm manager Sean.

At the moment, this cool weather is slooowing down our summer crops tremendously. I was sure we’d have tomatoes for you… today’s Summer Pint is Strawberries OR Shishitos (see last week’s newsletter for write up on Shishitos). Tomatoes will be here soon.

As such, here’s a dewy bee on a dewy scabiosa on a cold morning for you.

Can you believe it’s July 16th. We’re sort of in shock!

Some cool things happening on the farm right now.

Let’s start with seed and take you through harvest…

The nursery is looking great and about to explode. End of July nursery is one of the biggest of the year as every week that we plant now for autumn may come to fruition 2 or even 3 weeks apart as the days shorten and growing time too. We just put in a big seed order for fall and winter seeds which include more cut and come again lettuces for lettuce leaf mix, a new spinach, arugula, cauliflowers and more chicories including radicchio.

A Goodbye to Sarah and Gratitude to all working at Singing Frogs Farm.

Farmer Elizabeth and Paul are the founders of our farm but it is truly our Farm Crew that does the great majority of seeding, planting, bed prepping, compost making, planning, weeding, harvesting and even selling and delivering. Paul was a the guiding inspiration. Elizabeth keeps the ship sailing with support from everything from human resources, running the CSA, managing the finances and risks, guiding the farm managers, education and the voice of the farm in our local and farming community.

This is coming into highlight this week as we have a major shift on the farm. Sarah has been our Field Manager the last year and has been working on the farm since September 2022 but is moving on. We are excited for her to stretch her wings, take a break and do some farm adjacent work.

We have Kittens!!! The last two weeks I’ve written about animals on the farm, but I just can’t NOT write about animals again this week.

This week we welcomed two feral kittens onto the farm with a third expected to come next week. A friend and farmer lives on a busy road had a mama with babies and seeing so many cats get killed by the road decided to capture, fix and relocate them. The crew has been asking for new hunting barn cats for some time but without luck. We adopted three semi-wild kitties 17 years ago  (Theo, Yaki and Suki). Theo was an amazing hunter bringing in a rodent a day, Yaki brought in a couple a week and Suki was a fat cat who barely ever hunted. Suki has passed and the other two are now geriatric and sleep all day on the Kaiser front porch…

Sometimes, like last CSA, I wax poetic about farming with nature and then it bites us in the butt… or rather it tears up $1000+ worth of lettuce! See Photo.

The past 2 weeks we’ve seen a skunk mom and 4 kits shuttling into culverts in the neighborhood above our house. Skunks are amazingly smart and sweet creatures. Saturday afternoon we spied them in a culvert on our property. Saturday night they went hunting in our fields. Skunks (and Raccoons too) love Earthworms.

Late spring and the farm abounds with life. Our family of Canada geese have moved on (thankfully because they decimated over 100 heads of lettuce). Our daughter is home from school and has been scoping out our bluebird nesting boxes. 3 of the 6 boxes have active sets of young mouths looking for food. We have a family of quail living in our perennial flower beds. The birdsong has been incredible, especially on a cool morning like this morning…..

Photo of mixed beet inspired salad from recent high school grad CSA member Eden! Thanks, we love having photos and recipes from members.

One of the things that’s exciting about the CSA is truly eating seasonally and this week’s box feels Ultra-Seasonal with two items that you really can not get out of season: Fava Beans and Garlic Scapes. AND these are two items that I really only see locally. As such, you may not be super familiar with them and I’ll spend quite a bit of space writing them up. This is one of the joys of a CSA, exploring the seasons through food.

Photos of Ultra-Seasonal Farm Goods… Scapes, Favas AND Clarkia

We have 23 new members joining us today for a June start! Our CSA is now back to having a waitlist. For those of you new in this third and final wave of the season, but also those of you who joined in April or May… please, please don’t hesitate to reach out with questions.

Photo of Cosmos flower with native bee this morning.

Every year on the farm we do a few trials but this year with a team of very astute farm managers (Sean, Sarah and now Bobby!) we are doing a lot of trials and hopefully will be taking our varieties and diversity of veg to a new level for this year and beyond! Having farmed for 18 years sometimes you get into the, “well we’ve always grown X” or “X just doesn’t do well” even though it’s been 12 years since we last trialed it. I love being pushed by younger energy, change is hard and yet the one constant in life, right?

Photo of Bobby watering in new Winter Squash.

It’s nesting and fledging season, a busy time for birds on the farm.

Read more about the Canada family that made their home in one of our ponds, the barn swallow drama, a bird nest in the Fava beans we harvested for you yesterday and much more!

We love supporting Mother Nature while growing food for you in a healthy and vibrant ecosystem.

We’re thrilled to have accepted the Land Stewardship & Regeneration from Northern California Public Media, our local PBS and NPR stations this past weekend. This is the 7th award

In more day-to-day news… today’s newsletter Celebrates Cucurbits. We’re thrilled to have Summer Squash or Cucumbers in all CSA boxes again today and we have many more Cucurbits coming down the line.

Today’s Baby Bok Choi is very “lacy” with pin pricks from Flea Beetles. We’re sorry, we really aim to give you more model produce but aside from this they are delicious and luscious. But I thought it was a great opportunity to talk about pest insects on the farm.

First off, we pride ourselves on not using any pesticides, fungicides, algicides, insecticides or herbicides on our farm… not even organically approved ones. Even organic approved sprays have all sorts of warnings: do not harvest for certain amounts of time, do not spray where pollinators are active (which is everywhere!), wear protective gear and wash thoroughly after application, and more. In addition, whether organic or conventional, sprays kill both good and bad insects, ie: both pests and beneficials!

Photo: Lady Beetle Pupa

This Spring has just been flying on the farm! Early Spring is marked by lots of planting and light greens. We’re moving into Late Spring and it’s exciting to see things grow at lighting speed as the days get longer.

What does this mean? We now have 95% of our Tomatoes, Peppers, Eggplant plus our first 3 successions of Cucumbers, 1st succession of Basil, 2 successions of Summer Squash and 1st succession of sweet corn all in the ground. Summer Squash are already being harvested (read more below), Basil is close behind and Cucumbers behind them!!

Photo: Elle planting succession #3 of Cucumbers. #2 is in the right bed with Eggplant between.

We initially went no-till because we wanted to grow later into the winter and earlier in the spring, and we needed to to pay the bills. The thing is, we couldn’t grow when we relied on a tractor for tilling and prepping beds because it would get stuck in the mud during the winter rains. So our initial steps into no-till, which have since made us famous world wide, were really trying to have produce for our community earlier in spring. It was only later that we learned of science behind the climate farming and that helped us refine our farming model later yet the nutrient density. All of those are now important aspects of who we are and what we teach.

Photo: Red Sky Lettuce for this week’s CSA boxes.

We’re thrilled to be starting our main season CSA and we have 30 new members joining us this week and next plus more coming in our next round May 1st and the last June 1st.  As such, a couple notes on logistics:

Farmhand vs the Farm: Farmhand will be helping us with the software, billing and also is there to help with basic logistics. Don’t hesitate to reach out to this team of real, friendly folks based here in Sonoma County. Reply to any CSA email (hello@gofarmhand.com) or reach out by text 707-595-9859 for any subscription level questions.

We are still here at the farm, but the less time we spend doing logistics, the more time we can spend growing you food and flowers. If you have any question specifically for us (Farmhand won’t be able to answer your question about the Chicory Mix) or if you have an urgent question “I’m at my pick-up site and can’t find my box” please email or call/text Farmer Elizabeth charlie@singingfrogsfarm.com or 707-536-7170. 

Photo: Corno di Toro Pepper with Lady Beetle Friends

Today we are migrating all of your information from our old CSA billing system… CSAware to Farmhand. You’ll still be receiving the same great CSA boxes and bouquets plus add-ons… it’ll hopefully just be easier on for both us and you on the logistical side.

You will receive the activation email in the next couple of days with this information plus more and links to log in and add your credit card information. All information including your order and your box credits will be moved over except we cannot move your credit card information (it’s not actually even stored on either system but in the credit card processors - which we’re also changing).

Photo: Monday we planted our first tomatoes in the fields!!

Tomorrow is Spring Equinox, midway between Winter & Summer Solstices and the technical First Day of Spring! Wow does it feel it! We are just running on the farm.

We have our two new full time crew members Amaia and Sam on the farm now three weeks and they are rocking it, learning tons and farming like there’s no tomorrow. Sarah’s back from a two month trip to Central America and planning and getting things rolling like crazy. Sean’s been holding things together and is going to keep amazing harvests rolling. Leo has been holding us together with his building, selling at market and supporting the work in the field.

Farmers Elizabeth and Paul founded Singing Frogs Farm after years working with small scale farmers and agroforesters in West Africa and Costa Rica. We are blessed to have learned from their knowledge. The biggest take away was that food can be grown intensively, by hand and for local economies on a small scale.

Fast forward several years into our farming and an international organization (the ETC Group) came out with a study comparing industrial agriculture and small-scale farming (plus small scale fishing and herding). They found that 70% of the world’s food is grown by smallholders and another study found 80%. For farmers that means 5 hectares (~10 acres) or less.

We are excited again this year to have Farming Workshops in our mix of farm offerings (in addition to nutrient dense veggies, flowers and also farm tours).

We have a new workshop series for Home Farmers in addition to our ever popular one-day intensive. This spring we have many tiers of learning!