Nevermore Farm - Growing And Conserving A Variety Of Unusual Produce And Livestock

Welcome! Nevermore Farm grows and conserves a variety of unusual produce and poultry in partnership with Scofield Farms, a producer of extraordinary almond nutmeats. Our growing practices reflect a strong commitment to innovative sustainability. We attend the Woodland Farmer’s Market and Capay Valley Farmer’s Market, offer CSA subscriptions, and are willing to deliver our products to homes and businesses in the Woodland/Davis/Colusa area. Member: Seed Savers International, American Livestock Breeds Conservancy   Our Turkey Sales are still available, we have some nice birds available that were not ready at the holidays but are now finished, call if interested. Please visit Heritage Turkey Sales link to learn more about our birds. If we can answer any questions or you would like to purchase birds, please contact us. Breeding season is approximately March through August. We are closed to the public except by appointment. No pets. Contact us at: 530-574-3597 or Click Here to email us

Well, it’s pretty much mid-summer, and there is so much to do that it’s impossible to do it all…..tonight Ken and I were working outside on the main row crop garden, which was losing ground to weeds. A few days ago, all the weeds were cut down with a weed-whacker. Tonight there was much burning and spraying of roundup in the fallow rows with no vegetables. We are rototilling between the rows to cultivate out those weeds…mostly a plague of crabgrass. We are paying the price for our poor weed control of the garden last summer, when most weeds had a chance to fully go to seed. But, I can’t be too hard on myself, since at the time I was working fulltime at UC Davis in addition to trying to farm. Anyway, I did my part to worsen the local air pollution for the night. While I feel somewhat about the smoke, fire is a valuable tool to managing a garden. It destroys weed seeds, pathogens, and restores nutrients to the soil. It’s actually one of the best control methods possible for weeds on the scale that we grow, and it beats paying Monsanto for even more Roundup. I really look forward to the day that we can come up with a weed control system that eliminates the use of herbicide, but we’re not there just yet. My big idea is that in about 2-3 weeks from now, the weeds will be crispy-dead. I am going to pay for a truck-load of compost, many, many tons, which will cost somewhere around $700. We will rake the dead weeds off the rows and top-dress the rows with about 3-4" of compost, and then call it ready for fall planting. No disturbance of the soil tilth, and the compost will act as a form of weed suppression. To me, it’s a win-win situation.

Today it strikes me as interesting how quickly things change, and move along. At the time of the last post, very little garden produce was ready, and had it not been for your good fortune in running amok at our friends’ blueberry patch, I’m not sure what we would have had for our CSA boxes.

I’ve just woken up from a daytime nap after feeling like a wrung-out dishrag, and it’s time to get into the field and plant beans. But not before I take some minutes to write about how I got so tired. We were up at 6am to attend the Best Show on Tracks, which had been billed for weeks as being an antique tractor show. Well, I cam away stunned at having been privileged to see a slice of our American history that may have been a once in a lifetime opportunity.

This morning’s thought of the day is, "no kidding". I’m paraphrasing my reading the paper before starting work…."fires break out all over the valley from high winds"…..no kidding. "Winds are hammering the region’s farms and ranches"…….no kidding. You get the idea.

Yesterday my thoughts settled on some interesting observations concerning "things we turn our backs on in America." Specifically, two topics meandered throughout the day: hemp and edible weeds. I began the day with an extensive conversation on legalizing indsutrial hemp (or rather, the lack of progress to date thereon), and ended the day serving up a fine plate of weeds for dinner. I’ll elaborate.

It was 100 degrees today, and no wind. Yesterday was 100 degrees, with a lot of wind. Neither circumstance was really much fun.

It’s amazing the things I see, now that I work at home almost every day. If I haven’t already mentioned this, we have a free-range red-fronted macaw that flew in here about 6 months ago. It lives here now. Its former owners came on several occasions to try to reclaim it, but fortunately for the bird it had more brains than the whole carload of its owners, and eluded all sad attempts at capture.

Life is moving at lightning speed these days, and I could write about a lot of things. But one item sticks most in my mind. Today I had a conversation with a client that acts as a distributor, and we were discussing the financial nuances of what a farmer like myself can ask for in the way of prices in a distributor-sales setting. I was asked if I had considered becoming certified organic, because then I could ask for more money.

Once again it’s 8:30 in the evening, we’ve just come in from working all day, and even though it was work work work, it’s never even close to done. This day started with a whole lotta irritation. Specifically, some yahoo came down the east access road to our property. They backed over an irrigation riser with their vehicle, causing a 20 foot geyser. Then, they apparently panicked, because when we went outside, we found that someone had tampered with the valves on our domestic well, changing them such that had we not had a safety override on the system, our well pump could have burned up. I am making a certain amount of surmises as to what happened, but this kind of occurrence has just cemented my decision to hedge off our eastern border as time goes on. There are no end to idiots who will cause accidental damage and then try to "fix it" when they don’t know anything about how to do so. So I had to waste some hours trying to dig out the broken line and flush the line. Ah, Sundays.