Adventures in Gardening

Almost 6 weeks have passed since I started my Up Garden rotation. It has been a dream; I’ve been harvesting flowers and apples, pruning fruit trees and successfully trapping gophers and voles. It is hard to believe that in just 5 weeks I will be done with the apprenticeship program! I will spend my last 4 weeks in the Down Garden soaking up all I can about growing flowers, cutting flowers, making bouquets and loads more.

Even though the season is starting to wind down, we are reaping the bounty of warm sunny days that continue into the fall on the Central Coast of CA. We’ve harvested red peppers (they melt in your mouth when roasted!), sweet corn, zucchini and dry farmed tomatoes. The Alan Chadwick/Up Garden continues to crank out the pome fruits. I even managed to preserve several jars of apple butter I made from a blend of Gala, Cox’s Orange Pippin and Chehalis apples.  In short, it is an incredible time to be in the garden and growing food.

I also want to share some pictures from a recent apprenticeship field trip to Sonoma county. In a whirlwind tour over this past weekend I visited 5 different farms and farm businesses. Several of the operations we visited were started by former CASFS apprentices like myself. Overall, the trip was incredibly inspiring and has motivated me to push my “what’s next?” plan over the remaining weeks of the program.

Up Garden red peppers picked and ready for harvest:
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A stunning dahlia at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center in Sonoma:
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A swath of golden rod against a bright blue sky in Sonoma.
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Safflower; a recent favorite of mine the blossoms look great in bouquets, hold up well in dried arrangements and can be used to dye textiles!
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Ever since my apprenticeship at the UCSC Farm and Garden began in April, planning for the 2008 Rooted in Commmunity youth conference has been underway. This year, the UCSC Farm and Garden was selected as the host site for this annual event–a convivium of youth across the nation who are a part of Rooted in Community (RIC): a national grassroots network of empowered young people leading their own communities in activities foster healthy communities and food justice through urban and rural agriculture, community gardening, food security, and related environmental justice work.

On Thursday  July 24th, over 120 youth from all over the U.S. visited farms in the greater Bay Area, including the UCSC Farm and Garden (CASFS), which hosted around 70 youth for the day. Despite the hours of planning (subcommittee overload!), the event was a huge success. Many of the youth, though committed to gardening and sustainability in their communities back home, had never been to a farm before. A scavenger hunt tour highlighting the flowers, veggies, compost and beehives of the farm, as well as workshops and veggie pizza making gave the youth a taste of the apprentice farmie lifestyle at UCSC.

At the end of the day, the over 200 youth and adults participating in the conference came together at the UCSC farm to share a meal of pizza, salad and pie, all of which were made by youth at local farms during the day. Then, to ensure that the day was an epic California coast experience, brave apprentices lead the youth on bikes down to Natural Bridges State Park, one of Santa Cruz’s most prized beach spots.

As I prepare to start the second week of my second site rotation, I realize “My oh my, time does fly.”  Only two months ago I looked at this field and saw little scrappy, baby onion sets (the barely visible, wispy rows of green on the right hand side of photo on top): Now those onions are all grown up and after multiple rounds of hand weeding and countless hours of irrigation, they are looking might fine and soon ready for eating.

Another photo that captures time progression well is this apple shot (see photo on left): Look out them apples! They are about one third of the way from being good eatin apples. Seems like it wasn’t long ago they were smaller than golf balls. It looks like all of that thinning work is going to pay off in another two months when we will have full sized apples ready for harvest.

To me, one of the greatest beauties of the gardens is that things are always changing. What an inspiring sight to behold!

Well, I have already neglected my goal of posting weekly updates. Part 1 of my excuse is that we have officially started the harvest season on the farm, which means two super early days per week. (Part 2 is that we are in the process of moving, but that is a story for another time). Apprentices in the UCSC Farm and Garden program produce food for several outlets including: the UCSC dining hall, local natural food stores, a twice weekly market cart at the base of campus, and community members who have purchased weekly produce shares known as community supported agriculture (CSA).

Tuesdays and Fridays are important days during harvest season, especially for apprentices in the field rotation. Starting as early as 6 a.m. we rise to harvest boxes and boxes of veggies and fruits and pack them into individual CSA share boxes. We also harvest enough to fill a truck (including cut flowers) for the market cart at the base of campus. Though a busy and sometimes chaotic event, harvest days are also a gorgeous show of the seasons offerings. Right now we are harvesting greens (swiss chard, spinach and lettuces), beets, onions, carrots, kohlrabi, dill, cilantro, strawberries and blueberries.

It is a great pleasure to share the bounty of our fields with the public and it is this display that encourages our tedious and sometimes back breaking labor. What a feeling of empowerment to know that we are producing healthy, high quality FOOD for our immediate community.

Dense plantings of roses, fruit trees, herbs and perennials are the trademark of the Alan Chadwick (Up) Garden. Next week I will leave this behind to work on the field scale.

This past Friday marked the end of the “basic block” phase of my apprenticeship. The purpose of the basic block is to immerse apprentices in the essential skills needed at the garden and field scale: building hot compost heaps, digging and preparing beds, transplanting seedlings, fruit tree thinning and weeding have been among the tasks we’ve dialed in during these last few weeks. With these basics under our belts we are deemed ready to move on to our site-based rotations where we will hone our skills and dig in a bit deeper. My first rotation of six weeks (together with about 12 other apprentices) will be spent working at the field scales; that is, planting by the acre versus planting by the 40 foot bed. The field scale is a new realm to me; my experience has primarily been at the backyard veggie garden scale. I am excited to learn more about producing food on a larger scale, though we are still working at a small scale compared to most large scale operations. Before moving on, I wanted to share some pictures of the “up garden” where I have been primarily for the last six weeks

The peaches on this tree (top) were lucky enough to remain behind. Many of their brothers and sisters were thinned off to ensure the fattest and tastiest fruits. Countless wheelbarrows have been filled with the thinned fruits (middle) and added to the compost heap. This is Cowboy the Up Garden cat (bottom). He is pretty good at catching rodents, sunning himself and offering himself up to be pet by apprentices.