A Day at FARM 2.6

Our first major event at FARM 2.6 was a total success! We hosted a number of workshops with help from the community including artful fence building, tree pruning, beehive building, wool scouring, wool spinning, compost building, irrigation, fiber/dye garden building, and orchard planting! We followed all of these wonderful workshops with a contra barn dance called by Erik Hoffman!

Over a hundred people came to the event and completely made over FARM 2.6! With the help of all the FARMers, we pruned an entire orchard and planted an entire new one! We irrigated the new orchard and built beds for the fiber/dye garden. Thank you to everyone who volunteered their time and energy!

A Day at FARM 2.6 begins...

Beds in a spiral design are built in the fiber/dye garden.

Just two FARMers havin' a good time

Yolo Co Master Gardeners led a fruit tree pruning workshop

The Apiary Collective led a bee hive building workshop

Compost and 3-bin-system building workshop!

Sacramento Tree Foundation helped us plant our new fruit orchard!

The contra barn dance begins as the sun is setting

FARMers contra dance after a wonderful day!

An Intern’s Perspective


Hello, FARMers! My name is Elli, and I an intern at FARM 2.6 through UC Davis. I am majoring in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems and have worked with FARM for the last 4 months. Part of my internship requirements are a weekly reflection, and I thought I’d share an excerpt I wrote recently about a meeting we had on a new ethnobotanical garden in the works.
“I had just come from another meeting and was feeling uninspired, exhausted, and overall worn out with projects. Upon reaching FARM, those feelings were almost instantly lost. Everyone in the room was united by the common interest of plants, but we were more than just united. We were infected with possibility. And it was contagious. Good lord, was it contagious. I left that meeting feeling more inspired and excited about my learning, my school work, and my purpose in life than I’ve felt in awhile. These statements are not overly dramatic, also. My purpose in life is to feel this excited about what I am doing and who I am working with.”

November 12, 2011 :: 8th & K FARM Sunchoke Harvest!

FARMers at 8th & K harvested wheelbarrows FULL of sunchokes (also known as Jerusalem Artichokes) today! Sunchokes are a little known tuber that looks like ginger, cooks like a potato, and tastes like an artichoke. Pretty crazy! Harvest included major whomping on the HUGE stalks that sunchokes grow, digging up the underground tubers, and cleaning off soil from the massive tuber chunks attached to the roots. We harvested over A HUNDRED POUNDS of sunchokes! Holy Moly! That was enough to fill two wheelbarrows! Half of our incredibly successful harvest went to the folks at Cesar Chavez Plaza and the Yolo County Food Bank, and the other half to FARMers.

Endless tubers to dig up! They even begun to grow underneath the sidewalk!

FARMers posing with less than half the total harvest!

FARMer watering down the freshly amended soil that used to to be the Sunchoke plot :)

What else is happening in the FARM community?

November 3-6, 2011 :: The Domes Build!

Early morning haloes for the garden volunteers

Look at that pick-ax mid swing!

The Domes are a cooperative housing community on the UC Davis Campus that are being rebuilt by volunteers after the threat of being closed down by the University. Many FARMers are also apart of the Domes Community and showed their support by working long shifts painting, landscaping, making wheelchair accessible paths, sawing, sanding, and sealing carpentry projects, and feeding all the volunteers! FARM supported the project by lending a multitude of tools to the volunteers! (Photos by Jay Erker)

November 2, 2011 :: Advisory Board Meeting

A group of eleven dedicated FARMers gathered tonight to discuss the future of FARM 2.6. With the sunsetting over the mountains to the west and a delicious dinner, we excitedly shared ideas for this magical space. Because FARM 2.6 is so much larger than the 8th and K FARM, we’ve decided to diversify what we grow and raise. While urban farming tackles row crops like lettuce and tomatoes, it is limited by space and city law in regards to animals and trees. Luckily for us, FARM 2.6 can offer a more agricultural experience!

We’ve decided to pursue an orchard for part of the back acres! This will be in addition to the  36-tree orchard we already have. What will we plant? We have a donated olive tree and fig tree at the moment. We are currently looking for more fruit tree donations! Because fruit trees take 3 – 5 years to mature, what will we do in the mean time?

ANIMALS! Woot woot! We are considering getting fiber animals such as sheep as well as milk animals such as goats! Would you like to learn how to milk a goat? How about spin wool into yarn, and then knit it into a hat?  Sign me up! We also have Derek Downey, a local bee-keeper, who has agreed to set us up with a beehive of our own! (Yes, bees are animals, too!).

What we really want to know, though, is what YOU want to see! Would you come out to the FARM for baby goats (called kids)? Tell us what you are interested in! This is a collective FARM, meaning everyone has input! You can email me at epearson@ucdavis.edu with any ideas or suggestions!

October 15, 2010 :: Cool Davis Event

Today was our first official volunteer day at FARM 2.6! We had a small group come out to tackle weeding and fertilizing the orchard. We used compost from the chicken coop to fertilize all 36 trees in the orchard. We also began painting signs for the orchard to label all the trees. With so many different varieties, it will be exciting to instantly recognize them!

Volunteers painted these beautiful signs for us! We spread compost around the base of each tree.

Autumn is here at FARM 2.6!

Santa Rosa Plum Tree at FARM 2.6

We are just beginning work on the beautiful new FARM site. We sit about 7 miles west of Davis in the type of farm country that allows for the most spectacular sunsets. The new site includes a 36 tree orchard with over 25 different species of trees! That means that something is always fruiting.

What is in season at FARM right now?

Bartlett Pears!