Tom’s teaching this workshop! Please RSVP if you’d like to attend ..read more

From Annie’s website: Tomatoes! From Garden To Table. A FREE talk with Elizabeth Boegel Follow the tomato through its entire story arc from garden to table! Elizabeth will start with some history and botany of the tomato, then move into the different kinds of tomatoes and which ones are best for different microclimates and growing conditions. Elizabeth will also go through the process of prepping the soil and planting, how and when to trellis and prune, possible problems, the process of pollination and how to attract native pollinators, common myths of tomato growing, harvesting and preservin ..read more

Last Friday, I picked up these four chickens from our local feed store. I ordered them from Dare2Dream Farms in Lompoc, which is where I’ve gotten many of our chickens over the years. They delivered them to the feed store for a small fee, I met their van at the appointed time, the chickens were boxed up for me, and I brought them home. I installed them in a large dog crate made of wire mesh, that we bought years ago expressly for this purpose. Tom sets this crate up in the coop, underneath the hen house. I line it with straw, add a waterer and feeder, and then that’s the new chicken home for ..read more

Other than snipping lettuce for delicious salads (one such harvest above), I’ve had little time to hang out in the garden. Between work and the rain (and the rain, and the rain, and the rain), I’m very rarely in a place where I am doing any observing. That stinks, really, because observing the natural processes in my garden is one of the great joys of my life. Anyway, we finally had a break in the rain late last week, so I went outside to do some exploring in between writing lectures. Spring peepers were making a racket in the nearby creek, our almond and nectarine trees were opening their bu ..read more

*Note from Elizabeth: Tom is posting today! We've been driving electric cars for a number of years. When our trusty Mazda Protege 5 that we purchased after Adam was born finally got too old to properly maintain, we first looked at hybrids, but then settled on the first of a series of Chevy Bolts that have come under our care. We leased a couple of different Bolts between 2017 and 2020, and purchased our current Bolt in 2020. In all that time, we had never taken a trip that would require stopping to charge the car part-way through the trip. The Bolts have been very capable of handling our norma ..read more

When we installed our top bar bee hive (made by my father) ten years ago, we picked a nice site in a place that got morning sun and afternoon shade, was sheltered from wind, and mostly hidden to passersby. We also leveled the site before putting the sawhorses and hive in place, resting them on concrete blocks to keep the legs up off the soil. Over the years, the earth has settled and shifted. This is due to many factors: One, this is earthquake country; two, we have 100% clay soil which swells and shrinks during wet or dry periods (and in California, it’s either very wet or very dry, not much ..read more

In the past couple of weeks, I have toured several different farms and gardens where the caretaker sung the praises of foliar feeding. “The plants absorb the nutrients so much faster and growth just explodes!” said one farmer enthusiastically. Every time I hear a comment or recommendation regarding foliar feeding, my inner bullshit alarm goes off. I just don’t believe it actually works. But is my hunch true, or am I just stuck in old thinking? Years ago, I was enamored with the idea of making compost tea and then spraying it as a foliar feed on my veg and fruits. I was sure it would improve t ..read more

We have an enormous Valley Oak (Quercus lobata) in our driveway garden. It’s in a very inconvenient place, right on the edge of the driveway, and because of that you’d think its growth would be compromised. Fully half of its root system is compacted by concrete and parked cars. This isn’t good for any tree, and definitely not for Valley Oaks, which usually grow in grasslands and oak woodlands. But this tree was planted many years ago by a squirrel and the previous owners of this house never pulled it out, so it’s grown into the space and is extremely healthy. Valley Oaks can also take some ir ..read more

On Sunday, Tom baked apple pie to take to a family dinner. The apples came from one of our trees as well as a friend’s tree, so we had two different apple varieties. The pie was a hit, of course, and the best thing was that Tom baked TWO, so we have pie for dessert this whole week, hooray! Last night, before pie (B.P.), we ate a dinner of pasta with yet another batch of homemade pomodoro sauce (the tomatoes just keep coming from the school garden). We were patting ourselves on the back because it felt like a real ‘farm to table’ dinner; the tomatoes, basil, garlic, and apples were all from ou ..read more

In my school garden, we have an extremely vigorous grape vine. It is practically covering the fence from one side of the property to the other; it’s beautiful in three seasons, producing nice flowers in spring, prolific fruit and green leaves in summer, and flaming red leaves in fall. My guess is that this variety is ‘Roger’s Red,’ which is a hybrid of our native California grape. The fruit is tasty, although quite seedy. This year, the grape grew to gigantic proportions, produced an incredible amount of fruit, and has made the wildlife around the Environmental Center very happy (we have a tu ..read more