Farm News
There is a project down by the creek that gets a certain focus each November. The project is the invaluable space that is defined by the area that butts up to the edge of our fields and extends to and along the border of Cache Creek. It is here that we are slowly, but surely making progress in turning a pile of noxious, invasive weeds into a unique farm ecosystem.
Farmers are good at growing things (that is the whole idea behind farming), but I have learned that to be good at growing something, you generally have to have completely messed it up a handful of times. This is the secret sauce to farming. Farming well cannot be taught in a book because no two farms are the same nor are any two crops the same. This is the reason farmers don’t make promises on crops they have never grown nor will they make a guarantee on a field they have never farmed.
As a kid, confined to the original 20 acres I grew up on, I hounded my mom to put a wildlife pond in the north east corner of the farm. She listened, but never let me do it. In hindsight had she even said yes, I would have had no idea how to make it happen. Now the farm has grown to include some neighboring property, including an area by the creek that screams to be developed back into the wildlife habitat it had always been. With my childhood passion in mind, I started teaching myself to be good at growing back native habitat one “crop” at a time.
It took me three years to figure out how to grow an acorn into an oak tree that would survive the first hot summer and not be eaten by the deer (the trick: drip irrigation and six-foot-tall horse fence bent into an 18-inch pipe shape to protect the little oak trees from the deer). It took me two seasons to be able to identify the difference between creeping wild rye, a California native grass, and weeds (the trick: a powdery white-greyish color on the strands of grass and the pattern on the edges of rhizome-style root growth). It took me five years to select my lineup of native plants that do well here and I have a chance of getting established.
This is on the list for November. I have a pile of native plants in pots to plant. There is a huge stack of grass seed ready to be sown. There are plans and supplies in the shop to build a development of barn owl boxes. I love this stuff.
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