Spring is here in Boonville - March 2026 – Boonville Barn Collective

Happy Spring from Boonville!

I don't know about you, but March here in Boonville has been incredibly busy. We started the month pruning our olive grove and spent last week's 90 degree heatwave transplanting chile seedlings in the greenhouse. Our team is spending this week mowing the rest of the cover crop in the fields and taking care of long grasses around the farm property before we get another bit of rain.

It was a lot of work to prep 70,000 chile starts. First our saved seeds were densely germinated in trays. Then, we pull out one cell worth of chiles at a time, shake off the soil, clean and trim the roots, and then transplant them one by one into the growing trays they will stay in until we plant them in the ground.

Normally, this is a great thing to do when it is cold and rainy and there's not much else to take care of around the farm. This year was a different story! We managed to transplant about 10,000 seedlings each day before peak heat in the afternoon.

Nacho reminded me yesterday that in about 4 weeks we will move all these flats of chiles outside to harden off before they head in the ground mid to late May.

2025 Crop of Olive Oil is Here!

Boonville Barn Collective Olive Oil is made from olives harvested from the 500 olive trees on our family farm. Originally planted in 1993, the grove contains mostly Italian olive cultivars including Frantoio, Pendolino, Leccino, and Coratina. There's also a few others mixed in like Piqual and Arbequina that were planted as a test plot from UC-Davis to see if they could withstand the cold northern California winters. Fun fact - they do not do that well, and we're likely to make some replacements soon.

The 2025 crop of olives was harvested on November 10th and 11th, 2025 and milled in the evenings after harvest. Total production of the grove was 71 gallons of oil. The oil was bottled at the end of last month and it might be the best batch yet. This harvest of olive oil is both pungent and mellow, without leaving too much spiciness on the tongue. We have 320 bottles available.

Olive trees are alternate bearing trees, meaning that they have a large production year followed by a small production year. Heavily pruning trees will reduce some of their production which is why we chose the small production year to prune things back - gotta maximize on the big years when you can!

Hopefully there won't be too many inclement weather events when the trees are blooming (high winds, rain or even frost) so that we will still get a decent crop this fall. If anything, the pruning (reducing tree height, untangling branches, cutting back things too close to the ground) we did will make harvesting easier for our team.

You can purchase a bottle of olive oil here.

How to Cook with Whole Dried Chiles

At the start of the month I chatted with Lisa from The Foodocracy, an online store where you can find some of the most interesting food products from small farms across the country. Lisa has been a supporter of our farm since the start, something we are grateful for!

Lisa and I chatted about how to cook with whole dried chiles, what makes them special, and broke down how to prepare whole chiles for making different kinds of salsas.

This is a great primer if you have never used whole dried chiles before or if you have a few bags sitting in your pantry that haven't been opened in awhile.

Check out our chat on YouTube here.

I've been cooking a lot more with our whole dried chiles thanks to Rick Martinez's cookbook Salsa Daddy. This book is exploding with flavorful salsas and different uses for them besides enjoying them with chips. I appreciate how approachable the salsas in the book are while being incredibly distinct and unique from each other.

In the past few weeks I made a delicious Guajillo salsa that we used in vegetable enchiladas and in a chicken tortilla soup, and I also made a dried Pasilla salsa that we used on grilled pork tacos. And last summer for my birthday, I had a salsa party and made 5 different salsas from the book too.

Pro tip: check out this cookbook from your local library to make sure you like it before you buy it or pick up a used copy.

Calabrian Chile Flakes in Food & Wine

If you found us in Food & Wine this month, thanks for trying our chiles! It was a fun surprise to see our California grown Calabrian Chile Flakes on their website! Check out the article here.

Older Post Back to Farm Updates Newer Post