Garden Planning & Lots of Rain
New years and new growing seasons always start with hope. We hope for growth, we hope for joy and often we hope for something better than what preceded. We enter these times with goals, aspirations and visions of what we want to achieve. In this way, beginnings are some of the most exciting times of our lives.
One of our biggest aspirations for this new year is to continue cultivating new areas of our ranch. This past month we’ve been focusing on our new vineyard development project as well as the beginnings of a large produce garden. In the new vineyard development field, we have planted a cover crop that will help add organic material to the soil, aiding the growth of our future young grapevines. Our baby vines have been purchased, grafted and planted at the nursery and will grow there for a year before being delivered to us and planted in the Spring of 2022. Growing the vines at the nursery for their first year allows them to mature in the safest possible environment ensuring that they are healthy and strong when the time comes to plant them in our vineyard.
In the garden, we’ve tilled the soil, laid out our garden plan and started planting. Our first addition to the space has been 9 fruit trees which include various types of apples, peaches, nectarines, cherries and plums. They will soon be joined by a wide variety of vegetables, fruits and flowers. When selecting seeds, we decided to stick to all heirloom varieties. Using heirloom plants will enable us to re-use our seeds year after year while yielding higher quality produce with great flavor. Our hope is not only to grow produce for ourselves and our team, but also to provide fresh and responsibly grown food to our guests and a relaxing and immersive area for enjoyment and learning.
From a weather perspective, January came with warm dry days and cold clear nights. While our weather patterns have become harder and harder to predict here on the Central Coast, we generally get the vast majority of our yearly rainfall from December to February. December and the first 25 days of January passed with hardly a drop of rain and some unseasonably hot days (4 days above 85 in January!). From a farming standpoint, we depend on getting a certain amount of rain each year so drought conditions can be scary. Equally scary however, is the thought of having all our rain fall at once on land that is still recovering from the fire. So we keep a keen eye on the weather forecasts and try to prepare our drainages and roads, cleaning culverts and digging diversion trenches.
The night of January 26th brought atmospheric river conditions that would go on to drop more than 8” of rain over the following 48 hours. For fear of mudslides and flash flooding our area was placed under an evacuation order. Even though we are located on a steep hillside, the combination of our terrain and soils makes most of our ranch well-suited for safely shedding water. The downpour has made for lots of digging and culvert maintenance, but so far we have been spared any real damage or problems!
As always, we’re learning some things on the fly and are steadily reminded that even the best laid plans can depend on things beyond our control. Still, we do what we can to prepare and stay hopeful for what is to come.
Cheers,
-Greg & Sydney