Wow. Growing your own food is hard work.

For the past month, I’ve been living (and continue to live) in the Canyons of California on Puma Canyon Ranch. Here on the ranch (what most people would call a farm), there are dozens of acres of avocado, lemon and orange trees. However, there is more than fruit here on the farm, we’re also growing produce.

Over the past week, I’ve been helping to turn an area into an organic produce field. We’re growing the produce for a local restaurant in Santa Barbara called Pizza Guru. We began by tilling the field (although the land will never be tilled again) and then we created a series of raised beds. Each bed is 4 feet wide with 2 feet of walkway between each bed. Once that was completed, we built a drip irrigation system. From there, we began to plant.

Yesterday, we planted rows of tomatoes, lettuce and onions. Today we’re planting more lettuce as well as garlic and squash. Once we planted everything, we added a homemade fertilizer and then we added a homemade mulch to the top. Now we wait….

The lettuce will take about three weeks to start producing and once it is done, the bed will be overtaken by the second crop (either tomatoes or onions). This fall, we’re going to have completed the construction of both a shade house and a greenhouse where we’ll continue to grow produce year round.

The coolest thing about the ranch is that we have gardens all over and each night, I can go out and pick what I want for dinner. My new favorite food is kale.

However, what I’ve taken away so far from my short experience, is that I want to give a shout-out to all the farmers around the world who feed us. This is a very difficult and thankless task, one I will never again take for granted.

BTW – I’m photographing my experience on the farm and you can see my pictures here.