Appreciating the Farming Community

Most of the time we spend on the farm we are there just us and the plants.

While we make decisions and see whats happening around the farm, our minds are filled with knowledge and advice from other farmers in the community.

Growing up we saw how the farming community here was very unique and being in it now we can see how impactful it is to all the farmers.

There are times all throughout the year where we are able to see how amazing this farming community is and how lucky we are to be a part of it.

What makes this farming community so strong is that all the farms are supported by the communities they sell to, which allows them to continue farming and helping other farms succeed.

Everyone is always busy on their own farms which makes it difficult to check out other farms.

On Monday we got a visit from Tom Willey, a retired organic farmer in the central San Joaquin Valley. He was up in the area for a couple of days for a gathering of farmers on soil and Margaret Lloyd, the small farms and organic farms advisor for UC Extension here took him around to a few farms including ours.

It was very fun to show him around our farm and chat with him about farming. He has a lot of experience and always was testing out new crops and ways to do things.

We learned some tips and tricks that he has accumulated over his years of farming and are looking forward to using them to improve our farm.

While chatting with him our dad was brought up and Tom talked about how our dad helped him so much. Tom had a new field that was extremely weedy and from talking to our dad he decided to solarize which helped remove most of the weeds and keep the farm business going strong.

It felt even more special to hear Tom tell this story as yesterday, July 1, was the eighth anniversary of our dad dying from cancer. Our dad was a lover of tomatoes which was passed on to us and we spent yesterday picking lots of tomatoes.

Even though he is not here we feel his impact on the farming community all the time. When other people in the farming community learn who our dad is, they always have a story about him that has left a mark on them which we’ve never heard before.

Growing up we saw our dad talking with and helping others but we didn’t realize the impact he made on those farmers in helping them learn to farm or solving a big issue.

He had some great mentors when learning to farm in England and the US, so he felt it was important to help any other farmer that needed it in whatever way possible.

We are very lucky recipients of our dads support of other farmers as they are wanting to help us in whatever way we need.

Last week we started to notice a few of the melons ripening up and the warm weather over the weekend means that we will have some at the farmers market today ahead of July 4.

We will mainly have a small cantaloupe variety along with a few Galia melons. There are so many more in the field that will ripen over the coming weeks.

In addition to the melons we will have a lot of cherry tomatoes. The sungolds and sweet 100s are producing really well while the varieties that we put in our mixed baskets are starting to ripen up.

Over the last couple of weeks the heirloom tomatoes have been trickling in but this last weekend we had a lot more and we will finally have a good amount this week.

They are mainly Cherokee Purple but a handful of other varieties that just getting started.

At the market today we will have all our ripest heirlooms along with some that will be best to eat in a few days if you want to eat them on July 4 or are going out of town for the weekend.