Wind Dance Farm

These Garden Reports are emailed to friends and family to let everyone know what’s going on, what’s ready to be harvest and work needed in the garden.   I hope you will be able to come to a Sunday “Garden” work party.  Enjoy working in the garden, hang out, go swimming, harvest fresh fruits & vegetables, prepare a meal and eat!  Call or email me if you would like to come to a Sunday work party at Wind Dance Farm.

Scott:  805-305-1032 or sritterbuck@yahoo.com

Finally another wonderful garden report!  I will be out in the garden this Sunday cleaning up the garden and harvesting a few late season vegetables that are still around.  As always, if anyone would like to come over and help, let me know.  The days are getting shorter and cooler and all the leaves are turning color and falling.  This is great for the compost pile(s).  There’s lots of fun work to do and still things to pick and eat.  Call me and come on over.

Ready for Harvest

Zucchini and Squash– These plants just don’t give up.  Get the last few before our 32 chickens find them.

Eggplant – still lots of them.

Peppers – We still have lots of peppers.

Carrots – Lots of carrots.

Apples – We have 4-5 trees with apples.

Figs – Check out the tree near the chicken coop for some ripe figs

Strawberries – We have another round of great tasting strawberries.

Beans – We have purple, green and yellow bush beans ready to pick and eat.

Snow Peas – Lots of them in the raised garden bed…think stir fry.

Corn – Our last round of corn is finally here.  Pick the big ears and enjoy.

Lettuce- walk around the raised garden beds to find them.

Work Needed (lots of fun with a large group of friends)

-Add compost to garden beds

-Clean up garden beds, remove older plants and build new compost pile.

Other Things going on…

Rain and Wind – As I sit and write this report inside my warm house I can see and hear the first rain storm of the year blowing outside.  One of our maple trees just cracked in half.  Other trees are bending way over in the heavy winds and our alpacas look like they just walked out of a car wash. 

Rooster BBQ – It was finally time to off 4 of our 5 roosters.  They were starting to fight and cause a lot of stress to the hens.  We now have one rooster, 31 stress free, cage free hens and two somewhat worried Turkeys.  A week after the killings we started getting eggs from the younger hens.  Call me if you would like to be on our egg list.  We sell them for $5 a dozen.

Avocado update – We have lots of avocados on our trees and expect to be selling them next year at our local farmers market.  If you need a case or know of a local restaurant that may be looking for avocados, let me know.

Olive update – Five more weeks before we pick our olives.  We are looking at picking Saturday, November 21^st.  (The weekend before Thanksgiving)  Call me for more information.  As for the quality of our olives, we were lucky to have a very hot spell about a month ago to knock down some of the olive fly population.  With the additional fly traps, baits, the heat spell and hand picking out hundreds of infected olives we are now looking at a good harvest this year.  The fly damage might be low enough to avoid sorting tables at harvest time.  To improve our quality of olive oil and to speed up the harvest on the picking date, I am putting together a group of people to pre-pick bad infected olives off the trees a few weeks before the picking party.  Please let me know if you are interested in this.  It was with everyone’s help last year that we were able produce a silver medal olive oil.  Good job everyone!

Running update – Last Sunday was the City to Sea Half Marathon race and I finished with my best time ever. (1:40:33)  The best part of the race was having Mason, Maren, Lisa and my mom run/walk the 5K race.  Everyone had a great time and Maren was the youngest person to enter the race at age five.  I now have two more months of training to get ready for the Santa Barbara International Marathon.  If you want to run, let me know.  I am running between 20-30 miles each week and would love to have someone to talk to during my runs.  So far I have logged about 180 miles of training in the last 3 months.

That’s it for this week.

-Scott

Many thanks to those who have helped pick in the past!