We hosted a sustainable orcharding and farming class in the late spring, which was a great success. Keep an eye on our calendar for the new year’s version!
Apricots in the "green and growing!" stage.
Harvesting fava beans. Search our site for delicious fresh fava recipes.
Picking Fava beans and Mustard blossoms between the Apricot, French Prune and Crab Apple trees. The cover crop helps break up the soil, fix nitrogen and provides great beans. The trees have just had the irrigation turned on, but the cover crop is all dry farmed. The soil has a 4" mulch of rice hulls and horse manure free from a local stable.
Apricots mid-April. You can see the faded blooms, and how the fruit stems from them.
Lesley is the President and co-principal of Weston Miles Architects, a sustainable design firm located in downtown Morgan Hill, CA. A licensed architect, she also has significant expertise in sustainable agriculture. She loves giving tours and workshops at The Granary to help spread the knowledge of how to touch the earth lightly.
I have been looking looking around for this kind of information. Will you post some more in future? I’ll be grateful if you will.
My last post was April in the orchard and it is now July 5th. I am including a number of photos from that time through today.
We had a huge crop of Fava’s. Probably the most fun was seeing how much the kids walking by the Granary or Maruricios and Sarah children enjoyed picking the Favas and watching all of the insect activity. As the Favas age, the aphids gravitated to them and about 10% of them were pretty well covered.
This year we had planted not just Fava and Vetch, but also Mustard. We are interested in the Mustards ability to really work the soil that had been so compacted for so long. The bright yellow flowers and fresh young shoots were also a wonderful addition to the garden pallet.
I think this next year we will broadcast the Mustard instead of doing rows. The Fava work fine in rows though. The challenge is to balance production and the aesthetics.
We covered the entire site with 3-4″ of a mixed mulch of rice hulls and horse manure, free from a local barn. Straight horse manure is too saline but this seems to be doing well and the rice hulls make a great mulch, they don’t blow, look relatively neat and don’t degrade too quickly. This year with low rainfall, mulch is really important to keep the moisture in and the weeds down.