On our own now!

This is a picture of the farm we run from a-far with the pond!

Well, its been way too long and I sort of lost track of time with my blog! Sorry!

Brian and I left our internship at our last farm a little early, on Christmas. We left because we got an offer to manage a three acre farm in Woodside, which has been in existence for 9 years, for a bay area restaurant group. After seeing the property and the unique opportunity, we could not say no. We felt we had learned enough at our farming internship to try it ourselves! The farm is in the Santa Cruz mountains, within the rural area of Woodside. There are three acres of farmland set on a 600 acre cattle ranch. We can see the ocean from the house and farm and are surrounded by redwoods! Brian and I will run the farm and sell vegetables to three bay area restaurants. We have about 40 to 50 varieties of vegetables planned for the season. We live on the property in a barn that has been converted to a very nice house. We have our own kitchen and an indoor toilet (at the internship we just had a port-o-potty). There is also a beautiful pond that we are really looking forward to swimming in on hot days!


The barn, which we live in the left-hand third of. The center is actual barn, and the right hand side is a garage.


The pond, which ducks live in and we intend to swim in!!

After leaving our internship we went back to Mexico, this time to the Yucatan. We drove, had an amazing time visiting all the ruins and cenotes, and racked up 10K on our trusty Subaru! It was a great trip.
We moved out to our new farm on March 1st and have not been able to get into the field yet since we have had SO MUCH rain, which is a good thing. We have been planting a ton in our greenhouse (which is a hoop house made of PVC and greenhouse plastic, which is 40' long and stuffed to the gills). We have over a thousand transplanted tomatoes, a lot of kale, chard and cauliflower. We also have some eggplant, basil, and herbs started. We are now just waiting out all these rain storms to actually plant in the field!!


A shot inside the greenhouse.

We have also built some "New Zealand Compost Boxes" and are making plans for a chicken coop. It is time, finally. We want to get between 5 to 10 mixed purpose chickens to have around. We also have a small garden area that is not far from the house (separate from the 3-acres) in which we planted heirloom tomato starts and potatoes. It is our test garden. We want to try some things before planting a ton of it and then not liking it! Oh, and not to forget, our cat Kazy, has been helping us to reduce the population of voles and mice around here!

I will really try to keep this thing updated this time, but we shall see. Hope it's a great growing season this year!

This is a shot of the field a bit more "up-close"; from our deck.