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!

That was quite the downpour we had yesterday after a stormy few days. Not surprisingly, our bottom lands flooded to their high water mark. Farming on the slopes into the Atascadero valley bottom, a flood plain, this is no surprise, this is Mother Nature’s way of slowing and sinking it. Sadly it doesn’t work as well because instead of a meandering mashy area, the Army Corps of engineers dug a channel which we now know as the Atascadero Creek which made most of this land passable and farmable. Atascadero is a  Spanish word for wet muddy place and it used to be like a smaller Laguna de Santa Rosa. But with the valley as it is,  we’re ready for the flood every year and we flood a little most years, but it’s not been to the high water mark in 2 years.

Photo shows the same shot yesterday flooded and today in sun.

Outside of national news, in more local news, you may have heard that deals have been reached to shut down most ranching and dairy operations at Point Reyes National Seashore between The Nature Conservancy and ranchers. It has us thinking about humans and ecology and how we can work together which is an important topic for us. At Singing Frogs Farm we’ve learned that humans can work and even enhance Mother Nature. Yes, we can farm and create habitat. In fact, humans have been tending and living as a part of nature as long as we’ve been here. Why must it be viewed as food factories vs conservation?

Photo: Chilly morning with Hoar Frost on Toscano Kale (we have a cover crop of clover under these plants that’s doing great!)

We have a lot of people joining our waitlist, as is normal for the New Years’ Resolution season. We love knowing how people know of our farm and recently one was new to us, it said the book The Regenerative Agriculture Solution by Cummins and Leu, founders of Regeneration International and president of International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements. We know both authors but didn’t know they put out a book. Our farm has been featured in a number of books but I ordered this one to see what it was about. It refers to us a few times but I thought I would share their quick write up of us… read more…

Sahya and Leo show off some of our Brussels Sprouts going out in today’s boxes.

This week we are writing more of a meet who was your farmer as we are saying goodbye to Jose this week. Jose has been working and living on the farm since February.

Jose came to us with a deep well of no-till, market farming experience from his home country of Chile where he worked on and helped start more than one no-till farm with friends. A few years back he met, fell in love with and married friend Heidi and they moved to the States together where she had family.

Photo of Jose building our newest Caterpillar tunnel to grow more luscious light greens in winter this November.

On the farm, winter means many things for our farm crew. To begin, transitioning to every-other-week CSA allows for bigger projects to happen on the “off” weeks, since we now have two days that are not longer dedicated to CSA. Although winter can feel long and endless, that is not the case for farmers in California. The slowest seasons of farming are limited to December and January (the days before and after Winter Solstice - the shortest day of the year). We are truly sunlight farmers and hours are sun is where it’s at for growing photosynthesizing plants that make food for us. As such, we are working the fields minimally these two months. We also have fewer products to harvest, hence the switch to every-other-week boxes. Once February comes around, we will be ramping up our planting. Until then, the farm crew is taking a much needed seasonal break.

Photo of Great White Heron hunting for rodents and frogs in cover cropped fields along our now full seasonal ponds. 

This week we want to share with you another cornerstone to our farm crew! Maddie has been working with us since January of this year, coming out of working for a season at a low-till farm in Homer, Alaska. Maddie is a lifelong traveler, and has spent seasons working on several other small farms, from Watsonville to Chicago to Vermont. We are so grateful that she has made the move back to her home state of California.

Maddie harvesting Parsley for your CSA box this morning in a deluge, we put up a canopy because it can take so long to ease the wet burden.

As we look outside, it certainly feels like late autumn and early winter. The days are shorter. There’s a frost in the morning. On the farm we’ve transitioned our work day later, and now it’s sunset as we leave at 4:30 pm, we’re in a north-south valley with high west slope and trees so our sun sets even earlier.

Photo of Hot Compost on a Cold Morning shows Sean startled by the steam as we’re dumping from tractor into wheelbarrows to be applied to mint and daffodil beds, prepping for spring!

Continuing our series of Meet Your Farmer with Elle this week, getting you to know the people who seed, plant, tend, harvest, pack and delivery your produce. Elle has been working at Singing Frogs part-time a year. She grew up in Sacramento, and spent time cooking and gardening with her mom as a child. She attended CalPoly San Luis Obispo, majoring in Environmental Science. Her love for regenerative farming was sparked by a study abroad trip to Ecuador, where she lived and learned on a regenerative bamboo farm. After this, she spent the rest of her time in college gardening at the Student Experimental Farm, where she and her friends got to explore sustainable farming methods - from planting a food forest to raising chickens and ducks. 

This week we’ve had some more more regular frosts (last week they were very light), and as such we have had a lot of movement on the farm. Yesterday the 4 of our last 5 beds of tomatoes came out plus shishitos, bells and jalapeños, which have or will become winter beets, frisée, raddichio, lettuces and fennel! But we’ve also been moving in other directions...

Last week I mentioned our first Cover Crops went in, this week before the rain Friday many more will. We grow Cover Crops in our lowest fields over winter because we cannot grow food crops down there. Most every winter we flood there and if flood water touches food, it may not be safe to consume since we don’t know where the water came from.

Finally we had our First Frost last Friday, and another even lighter frost this morning. We are in the cool Atascadero Valley Bottom, and over the years we’ve chatted with other farmers over and over and found that we’re almost always the coldest farm in the county. This is great on hot days and allows us to grow great greens, but the last and first frosts can be hard on us. Until 2020 we almost always had our first frost right at or before Autumn Equinox, but the last few years it’s been mid and late October.

With last week’s newsletter we received quite a few comments on the photo of Mocha the Goat. We all love animals, and I’ll take this moment to talk about animals on the farm (photos in this week’s email).

In our 17 years here we’ve had quite the menagerie of animals. We’ve had up to 500 laying hens, plus bees, ducks, cats, dogs, goats, sheep, and of course Charlie the Llama. Let me start there, since you all get emails from Charlie the Llama. We inherited Charlie when we moved onto the farm almost 18 years ago. The prior farmers took advantage of the fact that llamas are very clean and always use the bathroom in the same location and brought him inside to watch TV. As a result, he was extremely sweet with humans….

We’ve got the Fall Blues. It’s not all a bad thing.

October is a time of heat waves and this heat wave has been a doozy. And the beginning of this heat wave we had several days with 50 degree shifts and even one 60 degree shift from 43 degrees in the morning to 103 in the afternoon. That is harsh on all living creatures, from human to the goats, certainly the plants and even the soil organisms. All of us have been feeling a little Blue abut the heat and our inability to do our normal work. Our veggie crops are doing fine because we’ve been babying them. We’ve been irrigating more frequently but also, have been holding out from planting. Last week we did not plant a single new plant on the farm because these babies would have fried. That is NOT a good thing, it means a gap at some point this winter. This Monday, despite the heat, we forced in a bed of Toscano kale and one of Little Gems because the heat looks like it is coming to a close.

Meet Your Farmer: Bobby Bobby Bobby

Bobby has worked at Singing Frogs for just over 12 months and during that time has become an invaluable part of our team. Bobby initially became interested in agriculture while living in Ecuador. His first mentor was Charito, an indigenous abuela who lived and farmed high up in the Andes. Her dedication to growing food and her joy for feeding those around her was an inspiration that he still carries to this day.

As a small farm, we have been asked frequently what our stance is on Measure J.

             Singing Frogs Farm is in opposition to Measure J.

Here are some of our thoughts: There seems to be a bit of propaganda on both sides. Yes, a large portion (some say as high as 90%) of US meat is raised in CAFOs. Yes, we have a couple of CAFOs in the county. Yes, we absolutely are anti-CAFO. Those CAFOs however are smaller that the big big CAFOs we see in documentaries but still a problem. Overall, Measure J seems to be well intention but misguided… a quick write measure that would be quite problematic. One big problem being it doesn’t value the merits of ranches, only size. We would love to have legislation that helps reduce CAFOs, this is not it.

Happy Autumnal Equinox! This weekend is the Autumnal Equinox, a very important milestone in our farming calendar…

     …. and according to the calendar it will then officially be Autumn, although we consider the Autumn Equinox really the middle of the autumn season. This is the end of the season of harvesting the big tropical fruits (tomatoes, eggplant, peppers), and the beginning of fall crops. We harvested our first Winter Squash and set them to curing in the barn last week: first Red Kuri and next Delicata! And we took out our first bed of tomatoes Monday, red slicers, and replaced with a new planting of Rainbow Kale that will take us well into 2025! As an early crop of Basil is coming out of the hoop house, we’re seeding Spinach and January carrots!

Photo - 2 Praying Mantids scouting for food (pest insects) on a bed of Statice Flowers

It’s been a busy last week as we are planting out more and more fall and winter crops. The farm looks stunning right now. We are highlighting another of our fabulous farmers that keeps this place rockin’ this week, Sean

Sean has been farming with us for one and a half years now and that’s just some of his farming, he worked at a larger scale, organic farms in Connecticut & Pennsylvania for three years before joining us. Actually, we offered him a position after two years, and he deferred to stay closer to his girlfriend who was finishing nursing school. The next year, we offered him a job again and thankfully he accepted. They both moved out here & she works at Sutter Hospital.

From all of us on the farm, we want to wish you a happy September! In the farming world, the start of September is very welcome, as it signals the changing of the seasons and the slowing down of summer. There is something tangible in the air as the mornings are getting colder and the days are getting shorter. As with the season changes, so does our farm crew. We have a pretty rocking team right now, and want our CSA members to get to know the folks who are growing your food and packing your boxes. Consider this the first installation of Meet Your Farmer!