Cloverleaf is hiring a temporary (September- mid October) staff member to help us prune our apricots!  If it’s a good fit for you and us, you could come back in January to prune the rest of the orchard, thin in April, and/or work harvest in the summer (May-Sept). Experience in farming, especially orchard work and pruning, is great but not necessary. We want to hire someone reliable and hardworking who is excited about pruning trees and comfortable going up and down an 8 foot ladder and doing physical work. Cloverleaf is a 4-acre organic stone fruit orchard with nectarines, peaches, a few plums and figs, and apricots. We will be a crew of 3-5 and we may have you help with other miscellaneous tasks. You’ll need a car to get to work with the potential option to carpool from Sacramento or Davis areas. Pay is $15 an hour and work weeks will be about 30 hours a week (our schedule has been variable as we try not to work on very smoky days). Email your resume and a short explanation of your interest in the job to thecloverleaffarm@gmail.com 

If you can’t work right now but are interested in helping out with winter pruning and/or next year’s harvest, feel free to email us about that as well.

We’re opening the orchard this weekend for a peach u-pick – sign up below for a time slot between 8 am and 1 pm.

We have a bumper crop of Blenheim apricots this year, and we’re opening the orchard for a U-Pick on Saturday, July 3rd. We will be using a sign-up system again to help space out the crowds. Please register for a slot so we can be ready for you and your family or friends!

Come join us to pick Royal Blenheim apricots for $2.50/lb. Choose a 30 minute slot between 8am and 1pm and show up at the beginning of your slot for a picking tutorial so you can pick ripe delicious fruit. Bring water & whatever clothing and hat you need to be comfy in the hot weather.

This is a great opportunity to load up on apricots just in time for your Fourth of July celebrations. In pie, cobbler, ice cream, smoothies, fruit salad, on the grill, or just straight into your mouth, you can’t go wrong with a beautiful Blenheim apricot.

Hi. We sent out our welcome email with the detail on the locations and times that we will be dropping of your boxes of fruit starting next Wednesday (6/9/21). If for any reason you did not receive the email, but have subscribed to the CSA, please contact us via email or at 503-902-8831. We are looking forward to the coming season of fruit, and want it to end up in your hands and mouths. Thanks. Tree Kilpatrick.

Hey there, if you are still considering our Community Supported Agriculture program to pick up a box of delicious mixed fruit once a week at one of our many drops (East Bay, Napa, Winters, Sacramento, Davis) please be advised that we are going to close sign-ups soon. The 1st of June we’ll stop signing people up and begin focusing on providing the best fruit for all our subscribers. So if you’ve put it off now is the time. We take Venmo, Pay Pal and check payments and it’s easy to sign up here on the website. https://thecloverleaffarm.com/join-our-csa/

Thanks.

Tree Kilpatrick (The Tree who farms trees).

Hey folks,

We are about three weeks away from harvest. I wanted to let everybody know that we still have sign-ups open for the CSA and the Ugly Fruit club. Check the website for those things.

The Davis and Central Berkeley sites are full or nearly so, but there are locations through-out the East Bay, in Napa, in Winters and over in Sacramento with plenty of openings. The Ugly Fruit Club will be receiving an email about the new ordering process soon. We are not going to invoice that anymore. Ugly’s will be sold through the website. The Sacramento Sunday Farmers Market stand will start up in 3-4 weeks as well. We are going to be out in Arden with all the other vendors who used to be under the freeway. I’ve heard it’s a great market, so we hope to see some of you out there. Finally we will have a few U-picks this year, but those won’t begin until late June. As always you can buy our fruit at The Davis Food Co-op, The Sacramento Food Co-op and Bi-Rite in San Francisco. Thanks for the support. We are looking forward to the fruit and the harvest as much as you’all. Tree Kilpatrick.

Join Our CSA

The Ugly Fruits (It’s an Exclusive Club)

While suspended in an international resurgence of political and emotional upheaval in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police, I’ve been thinking about the origin story of racism and police violence in this country and how it happened first on the land in the field. We built this nation-state on land stolen from indigenous people and this economy on labor extracted from the enslavement of black people. One of the original iterations of the police force in the South, literally called the “slave patrol,” was tasked with chasing down slaves and preventing slave revolts. Since then, there have been too many institutions created to reinforce our systemically racist food system for me to name here (but you can read about them here).

In this moment, I invite you to think critically about the history of your food. How did it get here? Who owns — and who lost their rights to — the land this food was grown on and why? Why is it that our food system still depends heavily on undocumented migrant farmworkers? Who and what sort of system are you investing in when you make your food choices? How can you engage with the food system in a way that addresses these historical and contemporary injustices?

If you believe that black lives matter, support black farmers. If you believe that our racist food system should no longer reap the benefits of stolen land and labor, support BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of color) farmers. Farmers of color are calling for reparations of land and resources that they have been historically denied so that they can nourish and redistribute these to their communities. Soul Fire Farm created a reparations map for black and indigenous farmers and compiled this list of black and indigenous-led farming organizations that you can follow and support. 

• National Black Food and Justice Alliance 
• Federation of Southern Cooperatives 
• Southeastern African American Organic Farmers Network Black Family Land Trust 
• Black Belt Justice Center 
• Black Urban Growers 
• Detroit Black Community Food Security Network Land Loss Prevention Project 
• Southern Grassroots Economies Project 
• Farms to Grow 
• Cooperation Jackson 
• Black Oaks Center for Sustainable Renewable Living
• Truly Living Well 
• Malcolm X Grassroots Movement 

Locally, you can support the following black and indigenous-led farming organizations. This is not an exhaustive list, and you can follow our farm blog to see updates to this list. If you have contributions to this list, please email them to kaitlinoki@gmail.com. 

• We Grow Urban Farm (West Sacramento)
• Three Sisters Gardens (West Sacramento)
• Yisrael Family Urban Farm (Sacramento)
• The Worm Whisperer Farms (Sacramento)
• Black Bicycle Farm (Davis)
• Urban Tilth (Richmond)
• Black Earth Farms (Berkeley)
• Brown Girl Farms (Oakland)
• Acta Non Verba (Oakland)
• Raised Roots (Oakland)
• Sogorea Te’ Land Trust (Oakland)
• Hummingbird Farm (San Francisco)
• ACORN: Advancing Cultural Opportunities for Reclaiming Nutrition (Santa Rosa)

I leave you with this poem titled “Black Gold” by Naima Penniman, Program Director at Soul Fire Farm in New York. If you prefer to watch it in cell phone video form, you can listen to Naima performing it here.

Peace and love,

Kaitlin, Tess & the Cloverleaves

We sell a lot of fruit to a lot of different people. And I’ve gotta say: y’all CSA members are my favorite. You’re similar to a farmers market customer — you make eye contact, converse sometimes, maybe even offer a compliment or some heartfelt feedback — but more loyal and committed, less fickle and not so easily seduced by conventional alternatives and prices. You’re less cost effective than a grocery store with its relatively massive purchasing power, but you don’t perpetuate food insecurity nor erect financial barriers imposed by the operating costs of middlemen. You’re different from the average shopper in that you seem to understand the value of our labor and our fruit, enough to make a financial investment at the beginning of the season that sustains us farmers through busy hot summers and dreary wet winters.  

And we know you have options. Maybe you’re in it for the deal, but let’s face it, you could be paying less at a huge supermarket chain. Or maybe you’re in it for the “local,” but California is the agricultural mecca of the United States and just about everything is locally available in this state. Maybe you’re an organics enthusiast, but there’s sooo many organic big ag options at a lower price at your local grocery store. Maybe you just love the regular delivery service, but you could be having “Farm Fresh to You” dropping a box right at your door. Maybe you think the taste is incomparable, but you could buy the same exact fruit at the food co-op and avoid the whole upfront financial commitment you made earlier this spring and probably some food waste. Maybe you think the CSA model is the future of socially sustainable agriculture, but heck, you chose our little farm!

After studying and working intimately with food systems for more than five years, I’ve realized again and again that at the epicenter of all of the damage endured and perpetuated by agriculture is the broken relationship between the consumer and the producer. For the vast majority of our existence, the consumer was the producer. Over time, the vast majority of our species has become estranged from the soils, the practices, the ecology, and the people who nourish our bodies and souls. As a modern-day producer, the degrees of disconnection are apparent in the dismissive tone of a shopper who contests our prices. Or when I receive my monthly paycheck, it’s not hard to recall that our country’s agricultural origins were born in the throes of slavery and displacement.

Per the logic of laissez faire economics, there’s no reason for you and I to have this relationship. It’d be easier for us to sell one kind of fruit to one kind of buyer. It’d be easier for you to buy your fruit somewhere cheaper and more convenient. We know this. We know you made a choice, and we know your choice makes it possible for us to make a choice that gives us a little more power in this crazy relentless world. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you, dear CSA customers. We love you. We hope to see you next spring, and if not, please continue to support small-scale farms that are trying to build a different world for farmers, customers and the planet. Peace. 

We get asked frequently on tours of the farm about how climate change is affecting us as farmers. While we haven’t seen a lot of big changes yet, there are many small changes that add up. This year, the late rains led to much more brown rot and a much larger compost pile than we planned for – we doubled our compost bin size this year, but it is overflowing every week. The drought that ended last year meant that we were uncertain about our water supply, and resulted in a long-needed groundwater management act going into effect next year, but so far we have heard that the new act will put a lot of small farms out of business. In the winter, we are never sure if we are going to get enough chilling hours for fruit set, so we leave more fruit wood on while we are pruning, which results in more thinning in the spring. Local weather, of course, isn’t what climate change is about – this summer has been one of the coolest I can remember in Davis, but world-wide it has been the hottest summer on record. I watch the videos of the Arctic ice melt with dread.

Sometimes it feels as a small-scale farmer that there isn’t much we can do about climate change. We have to drive pick-up trucks and vans to move the produce — one my least favorite things is to be stuck in a traffic jam with peaches in the van in the Bay area. We have made small changes: install solar panels on the top of the barn to power our water pumps, put in soil moisture sensors to reduce water use (see photo), use no-till farming to reduce our tractor use, and this year we made fewer and more efficient trips to the bay area. Still, I don’t know how many hours I’ve spent picking peaches feeling like we aren’t making the changes fast enough to fix agriculture and the planet’s problems. I feel like farmers are well poised to help with climate change if we worked together with scientists – farmers deal with food waste, water use, soil carbon, vehicle emissions, land use on a daily basis. This latest article in Science is some glimmer of hope – if the world planted a trillion trees (i.e. 132 trees per person), on top of reducing emissions, humans might be able to pull through this. Of course, that means that every person needs to have access to enough land to plant and maintain 132 trees. I know the Cloverleaf crew is fully on board with this mission – hopefully we will find enough land this winter to accomplish it!

Peaches are like people. They are born by their aging tree mothers arranged in clusters of commingling shapes and sizes. They grow and swell to maturity against the odds of climate change, disease, and an onslaught of ravenous wildlife and insects. The result of all these environmental pressures is an immense and amazing spectrum of difference. Us farmers spend our days combing over every little variability in every peach, often impressed and amused by the diversity. 

There’s the winking peach, who’s skin tightens up into a goofy gnarled toothless grin and looks like it might just spit into a spittoon. There’s the mini peach, often found in the leaf curl-ridden canopy of the trees or down in the shade in a cohort of mini peaches that bartered for limited nutrients in these restrictive growing conditions. There’s the split pit peach, who generously provides a home for a family of pincher bugs. There’s the pecked peach, who nourishes the red-breasted robin mothers of speckled blue eggs. There’s the outie peach, who, well, has an outie (see below). There’s the voluptuous peach, who somehow soaked up the sun before the rest and is already bursting with juices when the farmer arrives. 

Perusing the piles of fruit in the grocery store, the average customer wouldn’t know such diversity exists. Not unlike the lingerie stores that plaster airbrushed images of the bodies of models in a storefront window, grocery stores will only allow their shelves to advertise a particular shape, a particular color, a particular texture and a particular size of peach. The rest of these fruits find their way to feed the earthworms, the trees themselves, the squirrels, a snacking farmer, or maybe even an open-minded customer.