I keep four Royal Palm turkeys; a tom and three hens. They are beautiful; white with black barring on the feathers- very striking. Unlike top heavy, Pamela Anderson style supermarket turkeys, these birds can clear a runway with a few flaps and fly like hummingbirds. I keep them in a pen where they’re safe from the foxes, coyotes and bob cats and only let them out into the field when I’m around to keep an eye on them. (Plus, my concern that they will visit my neighbor and make a mess on her lawn is well founded.) But a flock of wild turkeys had entered our yard and three wild toms were strutting in front of their captive brethren in a brazen display of vanity unbound. My hens viewed their visitors with frank amazement but the tom was beside himself; huffing and chuffing until his head was blue, gobbling like a lunatic, blowing out his tail feathers and dragging his wings in an aggressive demonstration of frustrated prowess. “You better hope Andy doesn’t let me out or I’ll kick your ass!”

It was the first day of Spring; a busy time on the farm. The crew starts at 6. We had vegetables boxes to pack and a truck to San Francisco to get out the door before 8. By 9 in the morning I wanted to be finished with the herb harvest in our Corralitos greenhouse because after that it would be too hot and by 10:30 I needed to be in the Hollister field with a load of Jerusalem artichoke tubers for the crew to plant. It was the kind of day that calls for split-second, air-traffic controller type multi-tasking precision. I gathered up an egg that a hen had laid in all the excitement and left the turkeys to live out their drama.

I grow vegetables for a living but I keep animals too. All the animals have a role to play. My turkeys give me my egg every morning, my goats eat poison oak bushes and animate the landscape, and my donkeys are lovely, long-eared court jesters, always willing to “speak truth to power.” I also keep cows on 80 acres of grassy range. They’re Dexter cattle, an antique heirloom Irish breed and they never get very big. My bull only weighs 800 pounds which, compared to the 2000+ pounds that an Angus can weigh, makes him practically a bovine Chihuahua.

By nine in the morning I was already running an hour late. Manny called from the greenhouse- he needed boxes, bags, and help. And Jose called from the field- he needed seeds, rubber bands, and help. Then somebody called from the insurance agency needing information to clear up some lingering paperwork I‘d blown off for months. And while I was rummaging through the office to find the numbers for the insurance lady Guillermo pinned me down and pointed out that I’d failed to get him a new hand truck he needed to replace the one that broke. So much for “split-second, air-traffic controller type multi-tasking precision.”  The phone rang again; an unfamiliar number. Against my better judgment I took the call. I heard a woman’s pleading voice.

“Excuse me, but I think your cows are loose in my yard.”

“Say again?” Holy Mother of Jesus; just what I need.

“This is Rosa, your neighbor from across the canyon. My yard is full of your cows and I’m worried they’re going to fall in my swimming pool.”

“I’ll be right there.”

“And some of them are heading down my driveway towards the highway”

I jumped in my flatbed and hit every pot hole as I went bucking down the dirt road. My trajectory flattened out and velocity increased as I reached the paved County road; a left, another left, then a right onto a quiet street, and there they were; six Dexter cows sauntering through the suburban yards, lingering on the lawns, tip toeing through the tulips, and peeing on the petunias. A worried woman stood in the street in front of her home. I’m afraid that I had a huge grin on my face.

“Are these your cattle, sir?”

“No,” I laughed. “They’re not.”

She didn’t seem to believe me. It didn’t help that upon seeing me the cows came scampering over, surrounded my truck and commenced to moo.

“But I know the owner.”

I actually knew the cows too. In fact, my bull was their baby daddy. Every afternoon when I haul the cull vegetables and trimmings from the day’s harvest and packing out to my field to feed my own cattle I drive right past these cows and they always bawl for me to stop and throw them something over the fence. I drove down the lane back towards the canyon and the cows followed me. Rosa, the woman who’d called me, was in front of her house that overlooks the canyon.

“I was so worried that the cows might drink swimming pool water and get sick from the chlorine. Are they yours?

“No,” I said. “They’re Ken‘s. If you’ll watch them for a minute I’ll go get him and we’ll get them out of your yard.” I was glad Rosa wasn’t angry. The cattle seemed happy in her sunny yard, cropping big mouthfuls of weeds from along the fence line.

I found Ken‘s brother filling the garbage can in front of his home. He called Ken. “Hey, Cattle Baron. Get over here. You‘ve got a stampede on your hands!

Ken and his wife were shopping. They left the mall in a hurry. With me in front calling them and luring them forward with a handful of hay and Ken and his wife following behind to motivate the stragglers we walked the cows back down into the cool of the canyon, threading our way through tall ferns and nettles and brambles and redwood trees. With any herd of cattle from 3 to 3000 head it seems like you’re only really herding two animals- the boss cow who leads the herd into mischief and the recalcitrant cow at the back of the mob who can’t be convinced to follow anyone. We found the hole in the fence and lead the cows through and back into a little meadow. A chorus of frogs who’d been chirping up a storm fell silent the moment we entered the glade and all we could hear were the cows cropping at the green grass.

Ken went to get a hammer, some nails, and some wire. There’s an enormous old-growth redwood tree at the edge of the field and I paused to visit it for a moment. My carefully orchestrated plans were in tatters. This ancient tree had been there a thousand years and seen lightning, floods, fires, and earthquakes. I took its silence as a survivor’s counsel to not feel so much urgency about my own day. I turned to leave. I was now a full 3 hours off schedule. Some stuff I’d planned would just have to happen tomorrow. But that’s ok. The vegetables would be there when I arrived. After all, that’s one of the great things about veggies; besides being beautiful, healthy, and delicious, they stay where you plant them.

© 2013 Article and photos by Andy Griffin

Redwood tree photo of Andy’s daughter about 6 years ago on our home ranch property.

I don’t grow GMO crops. It’s not much of a choice, really. The research and costs that go into creating and patenting a GMO means that the labs choose to focus on large-scale crops that will guarantee the quickest, largest return to their investors. There’s not much of a potential for an immediate return on the oddball crops I grow, like Portuguese cabbage, Erbette chard, Momotaro tomatoes, or Padron peppers. But, if given a choice, I wouldn’t grow GMO crops anyway. Yes, I’m aware that gene splicing offers tremendous opportunities for food and medicine. And no, I’m not a scientist, so my technical expertise is limited. But I do know that science answers the questions that it’s paid to answer. If the question is, “Can we genetically modify a cotton gene to make a plant that is resistant to Round-Up brand herbicide so that our huge-scale cotton grower customers can control weeds chemically, thus giving our company an entry into the genetics market while building and adding value to our core business of herbicide manufacture and sales?” then the “scientific” answer is going to be, “Yes, Monsanto! Let’s get started on that research right now.” But if the question is, “How can we improve a cotton plant through traditional methods that don’t demand species transfer but that can give low-income farmers a disease resistant, drought resistant, insect tolerant, open pollinated crop that they can use both as a crop plant and to reproduce their own seed so as to help create a more sustainable agricultural system world-wide?” then there’s no potential goldmine for investors and the “scientific” answer will be, “Uh, that sounds idealistic. Who’s paying me to research this?” Of course Proposition 37 does not address whether or not scientists or the companies that sponsor them can or should conduct research into genetically modified organisms, it only asks that food products made with GMOs be labeled so that consumers can know what they’re buying.

I went to UC Davis, but I got my degree in Philosophy, not agriculture. I learned that one of the easiest logical fallacies to fall victim to is the so-called “genetic fallacy.” Simply put, a proposition isn’t wrong just because it comes from someone you don’t like. For example, if Hitler says that 2 + 2 = 4, it’s still true, even though Hitler is a psychopathic, genocidal monster. So just because Coke and Pepsi both say that Proposition 37 is bad policy doesn’t mean we have to agree with them even though they are Patriotic, sweet, and powerful. (Although it is funny to think that the company that made an advertising slogan out of the phrase “It’s the real thing!” should be defending the honor of genetically modified sugar beets. I guess they are “real” genetically modified sugar beets.) But there are a lot of unanswered questions about the consequences of introducing GMOs into the biosphere. Like “gene creep.” I grow some of my own seed crops. If a grower sets up next door and plants GMO sugar beets for Coke some of those beets could go to flower, spreading pollen on the wind and contaminating my heirloom beet seed crop. Crops modified to resist herbicide could cross with closely related plants in nature, spreading modified genes out across the gene pool and compromising the integrity of natural species. Can I, should I, could I sue Coke? The consequences of these “gene spills” are not clear but I don’t see Coke or Pepsi or Monsanto stepping up to take responsibility. But Prop 37 is only about the public’s right to know if the food they buy contains GMO ingredients- it doesn’t address the tangled issues that surround ownership and responsibility of the gene pool.

Besides being a farmer I am a consumer. As a consumer I like to know what’s going into the food I eat or feed my family. So I’m voting for Proposition 37. Who knows; it may pass and then everybody will have a chance to see how dominant GMOs already are in the food chain. If I was a CEO at one of the big corporations that seems so afraid of transparency I’d re-think that fear. One of these days there’s going to be a quantifiable problem with a GMO, like me losing my ability to grow open pollinated, heirloom beet crops, and someone is going to get sued. (Probably me for “stealing their genes.”) If the public doesn’t know what they’re eating, and the companies responsible for creating and promoting the GMO in question appear to have been hiding that information then they’re going to seem culpable. But if GMO foods are labeled, and the public buys them anyway, then the public has only itself to blame when there’s a catastrophe. We only vote once a year, and we’ve never been given a chance to vote on whether or not GMOs should be introduced into the biosphere, and we never will. It’s already too late. But we eat every day. The choice we make at the supermarket is a close to a vote as we’ll ever get on the issue of corporate responsibility for genetic modification and the inevitable consequences to the environment.

© 2012 Article and photos of non-GMO vegetables by Andy Griffin. 

Julia feels that, as a mother of two teenagers and a business person/farm wife, she is super busy and that meals we share with our family should be nutritious, balanced, seasonal, and based around the vegetables that we grow on our farm. And furthermore, she thinks that the best recipes for us are the ones that honor our busy lives and make things easier by offering quick, efficient, kid-friendly, and flavorful ways to prepare our meals so that there is time before and afterwards for homework, school activities, chores, etc. I, of course, agree 1000%.

And Julia loves her electric tea kettle. They’re so convenient. You see them all over England where people take tea seriously.  Just fill up the glass pot, set it in its little electric nest, plug it in, and in no time you have water heated to just the right temperature and the machine clicks off automatically when it’s done. No more fussing with that old, tarnished, nagging metal tea kettle that whistled and spat and steamed when the water was finally boiling. Me, I got pretty used to that old metal teapot over the years and even when it was hot and impatient and squealing with rage I had the ability to tune it out until I was good and ready to get my butt up off the sofa and take it off the flame. Sometimes, when the modern electric teapot quietly clicks to a finish I fondly remember that old teapot and I wonder if “convenience” isn’t overrated.

And Julia super loves her Kenmore electric range with its smooth ceramic-glass stove top that is so easy to clean. Food can’t fall down under the burner coils and get burnt into crusty carbon that must be laboriously scrapped and chipped out like in the past with our old gas stove. How convenient. It’s also super convenient that there’s a special cleaning goop manufactured for use on the stovetop that must be used to preserve the peak efficiency of the ceramic-glass stovetop surface. Personally, I find the Kenmore annoying to clean, and not least because Julia feels that only she takes the maintenance of the stovetop seriously and the rest of us in the family can’t be trusted to do an acceptable job cleaning the stovetop so she has to do it herself. Now, seriously; how is that “convenient?”

But I gotta hand it to the Kenmore designers. One time I was in a fog in the early morning; I got up, filled Julia’s little electric teapot with water just like I’d always filled the metal steam whistle abomination. Then I plopped the quiet, mild tempered little electric teapot down on the super smooth, easy to clean, ceramic-glass range top, just like I used to put the kettle on the old gas stove, I turned the knob to high, and wandered off to feed my donkeys, dogs, cattle, goats, and turkey. I knew that presently I’d be summoned back to the kitchen by a whistle. Soon enough I heard my daughter shrieking and I came back to find the kitchen boiling with clouds of acrid, black smoke and orange flames shooting up from the combustible plastic bottom of the cute little modern electric kettle. After the flames were extinguished and the melted plastic congealed and cooled and the smoke blew away so that we could see the stovetop, it looked like Eyiafjallajökull. But for all that I was able to clean the range top to a polish quite easily before my wife got home, and if my daughter hadn’t of tattled on me I bet Julia wouldn’t even have noticed that anything had happened until she went to make tea and couldn’t find her pot. Go Kenmore!

So we agree on the substance issues concerning food and cookery, Julia and I, we just differ in style. My pride and joy is my mud oven, constructed on strict Mesopotamian principles that were already antique when the first ziggurats rose above the Euphrates. My oven was given to me by myself for my 50th birthday and built for me by my multi-talented artist friend, Jon Bailiff. He formed the oven from the adobe mud I dug from my own back yard. He mixed the mud with sand from our creek bottom so that the mud, once dried, would resist cracking, and he reinforced the blend with our own oat straw grown by me on the farm in Hollister. Finally, for the ultimate, super-traditional binding agent, Jon used dried donkey poop that was created by my very own donkeys, mixed and mashed into the oven mud by my son’s feet, Babylonian style! What could be more satisfying than a meal cooked in this traditional oven entirely created from vegetables that I grew myself on my own farm, using meats from animals I’d raised and slaughtered, and spiced by herbs from my own garden? And did I mention that my oven is heated using fire wood gathered by me down in the canyon and hauled out on the back of the very same donkey that created the essential traditional binding agent!

Ok, so I cheat a little; the salt comes from the ocean via some multinational corporate conglomerate, I suppose, and the ceramic cazuelas and ollas that I prefer as cookware were imported from Spain by The Spanish Table in Berkeley, but you get the point. And no, I don’t grow the black pepper either. But Julia seems to enjoy the meals I’ve cooked in my outdoor kitchen even though I get the idea from all the eye rolling that deep down about two millimeters under the skin she believes that my interest in archaic cookery is a culinary mutation of the same atavistic mania that prompts other fat, bearded, middle-aged men to dress up in grey Confederate military drag and “reenact” the battle of Antietam in county parks across America. Except that at least Antietam was fought in 1862 whereas the struggles I have with proteins, carbohydrates, vegetables, and fats were first won by professionals back before Sargon was born. But if my wife thinks that I have barely advanced beyond mankind’s discovery of fire she is wrong because, psychologically, I have both feet planted firmly in the Iron Age. I love cast iron cookware! I’ve got cast iron pots, cauldrons, pans, trivets, skillets, and even a cast iron stove that stands to one side of my mud oven.

Since my wife is gone on an extended trip I have just bought myself a brand new, 30 pound, cast iron wok. Julia isn’t high on cast iron cookware. She feels that cast iron is heavy and that the care that must go into maintaining it clean, well-oiled, and free from rust is annoying.  Can you believe it? But wait till she sees this wok! She’s going to say it’s the most convenient thing to come along since….since….

First of all, let me mention that I have already have a wok, but it’s the kind that’s designed to be placed on a ring over a gas fire. On the super-slick Kenmore stovetop the old wok will barely get hot since its rounded bottom presents almost no point of contact and it wobbles and rocks like a drunk on a unicycle. Plus, I lost the ring a decade ago. But my new Lodge cast iron wok has a flat bottom that sits squarely on the smooth, easy to clean, ceramic-glass Kenmore stovetop, so when I turn the range on high the wok is soon smoking hot to its outermost lip. I took the wok out for a spin this last Sunday. First I cleaned out our refrigerator. I found a carrot, half of a cabbage that wasn’t too disgusting, a jalapeno pepper, the rest of a block of tofu, some dried out rice in a pot that a kid had not put a lid on, and a bag of green beans. Then I picked a head of Romanesco cauliflower and some chard stems. I chopped everything up in little uniform slices and put them in bowls along the counter next to the stove, arranged from the most substantial ingredients like carrot and cauliflower through to the tender, leafy things. A little oil in the wok, a little garlic minced to flavor the oil, and I was off. I called the kids to dinner and by the time they’d unplugged themselves from all their electronic devices a meal of veggie fried rice was ready. They attacked it like sharks.

Julia is going to like this 30lb cast iron wok because with it I can efficiently create quick, balanced, flavorful, kid-friendly meals using our own vegetables, but she’s going to love it because of the convenience it offers. Think about it this way. We practically live on top of the San Andreas Fault. It’s not a question of “if” but rather “when” do we experience a major earthquake? And when the quake hits that sleek, electric Kenmore range with the easy-to-clean, ceramic-glass stovetop is going to be about as useful for cookery as our mailbox; less useful, actually, because at least the mailbox is stuffed with combustible brochures from the AARP that can be used as kindling when my stash of pinecones and twigs runs out. So when the earth stops shaking I’ll pick up the plates and jars off the floor, seize up my totally undamaged cast iron wok and head out in the yard to catch my donkey. Prima and I will go down into the canyon to gather firewood. When I’ve got some coals happening I’ll nestle my cast iron trivet down in the ashes and put a kettle of water on to make some tea for Julia. Once she’s got her tea I’ll get the rest of my heavy iron in position and wok out!

© 2012 Article and photos of Andy’s mud oven and Prima carrying firewood by Andy Griffin.

Photo of Kenmore Electric Stovetop from Kenmore.

The customer is always right— except, of course, when she’s dead wrong. I should know; for over twenty years I “stood behind my product,” literally and figuratively, in a series of farmers’ markets from Monterey to Corte Madera and I have listened to so many, many customers that I sometimes wonder if there’s anything I haven’t heard. During those years in the markets I made a lot of good friends that I still keep up with. And I had thousands of happy interactions with good-spirited, kind, pleasant, patient, intelligent and understanding people. It says something about my psyche that most of those positive experiences have slipped through my memory like clear water through sand, and now, five years after participating in my last farmers’ market, the people that I remember are often the most problematical individuals I dealt with. We are harvesting radicchio today so one woman in particular shines out of the past like a new penny.

It was a summer morning in San Francisco at the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market at its old location down on Green Street. I saw her before she saw me, an elegant woman languidly riding a crest of self-confidence. She swanned into my vegetable stall looking like a million bucks, or rather like a trust fund, two hedge funds, three homes, and a million bucks in liquid assets. After a brief appraisal she selected two heads of Chioggia radicchio. I put the radicchios on the scale. They were big, purple, and heavy. “That will be four dollars,” I said.

She plucked some bills from her purse and handed them to me. “My husband prefers coleslaw made with red cabbage,” she said. “But being Italian, I prefer a shredded cabbage salad made with a Savoy cabbage. I see that you don’t carry it.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. I wasn’t surprised that she was Italian but I’d taken her for an Argentinian. She had that deeply tanned look, with blue eyes, ash blonde hair, gold accessories and a certain Latin-flavored accent to the voice that I’d encountered in upper class women from Buenos Aires.

“But these are Chioggia radicchios,” I said. “Not red cabbages.”

She looked me right in my mud brown eyes. Her baby blues were as cool as an alpine lake in the Val D’Aosta. “Are you going to tell this Italian housewife that she doesn’t know her vegetables?” she asked.

I considered my options.

What I wanted to tell her was that Chioggia radicchio has a deep purple color, not unlike red cabbage, and that upon achieving maturity it forms a ball-shaped head, like cabbage, but that radicchio is a chicory, a member of the Compositeae, like its distant cousins the lettuces, artichokes, daisies, dandelions and sunflowers. Red cabbage, although it looks superficially similar to Chioggia radicchio is classified in the Brassicacea, and like its mustard, radish, and cress relations it will display a distinctive flower with four petals arranged in the shape of a cross when it blooms.

And I wanted to add that radicchio is much-misunderstood by us Americans, who have only recently encountered this vegetable and know it mostly as it appears torn up in pieces as a bright component of the popular ready-shreddy bagged, pre-washed salads. Most consumers here are yet unaware that in Europe this bracingly bitter green is appreciated as a cooking green to be grilled or caramelized. I wanted to share a couple of recipes with her. And I also wanted to tell her that in the 20 years that I’d been growing radicchio I’d seen the seed become more available, and that the variety of radicchio in her hand was called “Leonardo,” and that it was the best, most consistent form of red-headed radicchio I’d ever grown.

She waited for me to speak.

“The customer is always right,” I said.

“Now you’re talking,” she said, and she collected up her purchase and swept off.

So was I a money-grubbing sleazebag, or what?

In my defense, even when I argue with my own wife at home it rarely works out well for me, so I certainly don’t see any percentage in arguing with someone else’s wife on a sunny morning in a beautiful city, especially when “winning” means looking like a dumb peasant, losing four dollars, all the while shaming an entitled Italiana and probably losing her business forever. I’m fine with being a peasant, but I prefer to be a shrewd one. And, simply put, I needed her four dollars more than I needed to be right.

So the following weekend guess who shows up at the market? My Italiana trots her tootsie into the stall and confronts me with a hard look. “That was the worst tasting red cabbage I’ve ever bought,” she said.

I couldn’t think of a thing to say.

“But my husband said it was very nice radicchio.”

“I’m delighted,” I replied.

She rolled her eyes, sighed, and gave me the flash of a smile. “You’re a doll,” she said. Then she bagged two bunches of basil, handed me some money, and exited stage left, back astride her crest of self-confidence, riding towards her next purchase. The difficult ones are hard to forget.

© 2012 Article & Photos of Chioggia Radicchio and Red Cabbage Cornucopia by Andy Griffin.

2. We got to the old cabin and looked out at the meadow from the porch. You feel like you’ve gone back a hundred years here.

3. I started up the hill and looked back through the sycamore trees at the meadow. The hills are steep so as you ascend you go through different ecological zones quickly.

4. Sycamores like the wet canyon bottoms. After leaving them we came to the live oaks shrouded in Spanish moss. Spanish moss is a lichen and it’s very sensitive to air pollution. You can tell the air is clean here from all the lichen hanging from the branches.

5. When we got up higher we could look down on the hunting cabin tucked away in the redwoods.

6. On the south facing slopes there were early wildflowers; Indian paintbrush and wild iris.

7. Back into the oak forest on the north facing slope.

8. And voila! Up on top of the hill looking down on Point Lobos. Preserving this property is a significant step in preserving the integrity of a very sensitive and vulnerable ecosystem.

Photos by Andy Griffin.

I raise rosemary because the herb complements the potatoes I grow, both on the plate and in the field. Rosemary is a perennial. I need my farm-scape to display a patchwork of short term annual crops, like carrots, and longer term annuals, like tomatoes, mixed with permanent, perennial crops. That way, when our tractors are turning under one block of soil, the beneficial insects that live on the farm, like ladybugs, always have a place to take shelter that’s close by. If I turned all the soil over at once, or even if I turned it all over frequently, I’d break the life cycles of the beneficial insects and scare off the birds that I need as allies. Of course, no system is perfect. So the rosemary patch which theoretically gives cover to the quail that eat the ants that would otherwise carry aphids to the cabbages- well, crazy hares live there too. I could shoot Jack, I guess, but that would make Red sad. She loves the chase.

Jack scampered down the dirt road that runs along the levee at the edge of the farm. True, with two hops he could’ve cleared the levee, then dashed down into Pacheco Creek and lost the mutt in the riparian thicket, but where’s the fun in that? Besides, Red was doing well. It’s been a dry winter. The dirt road was hard-packed, without the dust that comes with the heat of summer. Red had muscle, drive…. and traction. Jack looked in his rear view mirror, saw the dog gaining ground, and eased into second gear. Red stretched her legs out. Jack laid his long ears back just a little and executed an instantaneous, 90 ̊ hard left turn into the fava bean patch. But this wasn’t Red’s first race down this track. She cut the corner off the right triangle with a vengeance and ripped a hellish hypotenuse through the beans.

Besides being a dry winter, it’s been cold. We got the fava beans in on time, but the persistent low temperatures throughout December and January stunted the crop’s growth. So now, at a time when our earliest sowing of fava beans are usually a good three to four feet tall, we’ve got long rows of plants that are only two feet tall. I couldn’t get too mad at Red for trashing some beans; I’ll probably turn them under for fertilizer rather than harvest them anyway. We’ll pick our fava beans from the plantings that were sown recently under warmer conditions.

The Jack rabbit passed through the favas and headed out into a large block of ground planted in a cover crop of oats. This was our last cover crop to go into the ground and the oats are only three inches tall. When they’re three feet tall in April we’ll turn them under to add carbon to the soil, then plant the piece out in tomatoes and sweet peppers, but right now the field looks as well-groomed as a golf course, the soil level, smooth and firm. It was a beautiful sight; the buff-colored hare, his long, black-tipped ears cocked back to 45 ̊ now, running smoothly, hitting on all eight cylinders across the manicured green; the fluffy, white dog racing at full speed under blue skies, running as if it were her life that depended on a first place finish.

Our field of young oats doesn’t go on forever, and the bunny knows this better than anyone. There’s a pond at the edge of the field. Jack doesn’t like to swim. So before he hit the water he hit the brakes and did an amazing 90 ̊ left, followed by another immediate 90 ̊ left– a perfect 180 ̊ keyhole turn– and passed Red at a terrific clip, going in the opposite direction. The dog took a frantic turn, went into a sloppy drift that sent turf flying, dug in anew and hit the gas. Jack was way ahead for the moment, but moving into broken ground, a spent patch of rapini, recently plowed, with lumpy clods that are rough on the paws. The dog, with her longer legs and bigger feet, did better on the blocky ground and was making up for lost time.

But wait! What’s this! All the hopped up kinetics and the “hare-pin” turns seem to have molested the gang of fleas that live behind Jack’s ears. The fleas are digging in and holding on for dear life, and the itching is driving Jack mad! He has to stop and scratch! But Red is protected from fleas by FRONTLINE PLUS for dogs©– she ought to have a decal on her bumper– and she’s catching up. She can almost see the checkered flag!

But Jack punches it out of the pit, floors it, gets to sixty in two seconds, makes an evasive maneuver under the picnic table where Nato, the tractor driver, eats his lunch, dodges a pile of sprinkler pipes and two trash cans, crosses the work area where Rogelio is scrubbing radishes, and makes a hard left on to the straightaway by the spring crop vegetables in the front field. Red is slowed by the obstacles. And her feet hurt now after scrambling over all those big clods. But Red reaches deep for one more burst of speed and flies past Rogelio, barking in rage. So Jack pops it into fourth gear, and pours on the coal. There are flames shooting out of his tail pipe now and his ears are flat back. He’s hot-rodding for the San Benito County line like a good ‘ol boy running white lightning, the rows of lettuces, cauliflower, broccoli, and beets all blurring together into a green mist.

Poor Red; she gave it all she had, but she gave up when she caught up with Jack’s sonic boom near the wash tank. Her feet were smoking, she was out of breath, and the crew was laughing. Red stood in a puddle to cool off her paws and sulked. I arrived and gave her a big hug; “It’s ok Girl,” I said. “There’s always tomorrow.”

© 2012 Article & Photos of Ladybug alighting and of Red by Andy Griffin.

Photo of Jack Rabbit by Jim Harper.

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Big Sur Land Trust Benefit Dinner: March 16th & 17th

Last year I joined the Board of Trustees of the Big Sur Land Trust. The organization is hoping I can add a farmer’s perspective to the board’s deliberations. I’m looking forward to an opportunity to give something back to this community that has supported me and I want to start with a benefit dinner March 16th and 17th at Happy Girl Kitchen in Pacific Grove. You’re invited. (Photo, left, of Glen Devon Ranch by Andy Griffin.)
I’m hoping to raise a thousand dollars for the Big Sur Land Trust to have on hand to help school districts and youth groups transport kids to visit these properties for outdoor education. It’s not enough for us to buy land for parks, or pay for scenic easements, or preserve our watersheds and farm lands through conservation easements. If future generations of kids coming up here don’t have a sense of connection to the lands that sustain them, if they don’t learn to feel a sense of community with the plants and animals of the land, if they feel no kinship or interdependence with the farmers and ranchers and foresters that maintain the land, then our future is in jeopardy. There are a lot of children who don’t have an opportunity to visit parks and farms and ranches. Schools are in trouble and they can’t afford field trips. The Big Sur Land Trust is acting to span that gap between our social needs and our public resources. Help be a bridge.

Besides, it’ll be a good meal. Here are the details:

1. The vegetarian meal will be prepared at Happy Girl Kitchen in Pacific Grove by John Madriaga. John is a Manresa alum, who has worked at the world-renown Noma, in Copenhagen, and he is currently sous chef at Spruce in San Francisco.
2. Happy Girl Kitchen is charging $55 dollars for the meal. I’m asking for an extra $20 per plate as the benefit contribution to the Big Sur Land Trust. I’m donating all the produce from my farm for the event. Carmel Valley’s Heller Estate winery will be pairing wines for each course for an extra $20 dollars.

3. You can sign up for the meal at Happy Girl Kitchen. Dinner dates are Friday, March 16th OR Saturday, March 17th.

4. Inform yourself about the Big Sur Land Trust and its mission.

5. Here’s a link to a story about one of the youth groups the BSLT has hosted on the land at Glen Deven Ranch.

6. Take a look at some of the pictures I’ve taken on the Big Sur Land Trust properties at the I-Heart-Big-Sur-Land-Trust Facebook page.

7. If you can’t make the meal, consider making a contribution anyway and write a check to the Big Sur Land Trust and send it to Shelley at Mariquita Farm, P.O. Box 2065, Watsonville CA, 95076, and we’ll see that it gets bundled with all the other donations from the meal and delivered to the Trust.

We look forward to seeing you there!

It wasn’t until 1933 that the State of California bought the land and made a park at Natural Bridges so that future generations, like mine, could enjoy the beauty of the scenery there. Today Santa Cruz has grown up around Natural Bridges and the park is no longer “outside” of Santa Cruz. But even without all of its iconic, wave-washed arches the park means more now to the community than it ever has; not only as a refuge for us from the noise and bustle of town, but as a Monarch Butterfly sanctuary and wetlands for frogs and waterfowl.

When I was growing up my parents took me camping and hiking all over the Monterey Bay Area and I learned to love this whole region as my home. Today my horizon is still framed by the mountains that surround the Monterey Bay. This is where I’m raising my children and where I farm my vegetables. I’ve enjoyed taking my kids to the beaches and forests that I enjoyed getting to know when I was young. It came as a pleasant surprise when I looked up from my work and realized that there are actually more lands set aside for recreation than there were when I was their age.

As I thought about it I realized a deeper transformation is at work than an incremental spread of a few parks. Society used to be enchanted with the “Monumental.” Beautiful, dramatic spots like Natural Bridges were once seen worthy of preservation for their scenic value. But now, as a society, we’re beginning to see the inter-connectivity and interdependence of all life- and to act on it. We now understand that landscapes and watersheds must be protected even where they’re not obviously “Monumental” in nature.

We humans are not the only players on this stage. We depend on a web of relationships to sustain us. The landscape we inhabit here on the central coast may be dramatic, but the less obvious relationship between healthy soil, clean water, biodiversity, unpolluted air, and open space is what makes our lives here sustainable and enjoyable. So I chose to support the Big Sur Land Trust.

The Big Sur Land Trust (BSLT) buys or helps other groups to buy lands that serve as critical habitat for plants and animals and parklands and watersheds for people. Palo Corona Regional Park in Carmel and the Marks Ranch (photo right) addition to Toro Regional Park near Salinas are two examples of the BSLT’s work. But our local, state and Federal Governments can’t afford to buy or maintain the whole landscape in parks. And I’m a farmer; I know we need to produce food somewhere. My family has lived in this area for over a hundred years; I know we need to build houses somewhere. Besides, the Government is hard pressed right now to care for the land it already controls.

The Big Sur Land Trust also buys or creates conservation and scenic easements that act to preserve the scenic integrity of the landscape, conserve resources, and maintain the agricultural economy for all of us while sustaining the working character of the lands. The Dorrance Ranch atop Mt. Toro and the Violini Ranch on Tularcitos Ridge are two salient examples of conservation easements at work that everybody who lives in view of these mountains enjoys, even if they don’t know about the BSLT. All totaled, in an arc that stretches from the southern Big Sur Coast down by Lucia all the way to Monterey Bay and then down the Salinas Valley all the way the way to Arroyo Seco, the BSLT has created over 50 conservation easements.

To complement these conservation easements and to encourage our economy towards a more environmentally sustainable path, the Big Sur Land Trust has taken on the goal of encouraging the public to support the local farms and businesses that manage the land and depend on it. I can get behind that! Last year I joined the Board of Trustees of the Big Sur Land Trust. The organization is hoping I can add a farmer’s perspective to the board’s deliberations. I’m looking forward to an opportunity to give something back to this community that has supported me and I want to start with a benefit dinner March 16th and 17th at Happy Girl Kitchen in Pacific Grove. You’re invited.

Why Happy Girl Kitchen? Well, Todd and Jordan asked me to help them host a dinner there, for one thing. Then too, Todd and Jordan are once-upon-a time employees (Jordan was our first CSA driver) and they’re good friends of ours. I have enjoyed watching their business grow. The Happy Girl Kitchen is precisely the type of sustainable, locally-based business that the farmers and consumers in this area need. Plus Todd and Jordan and their staff at Happy Girl Kitchen have created a great little restaurant.

So what’s the benefit for? I’m hoping to raise a thousand dollars for the Big Sur Land Trust to have on hand to help school districts and youth groups transport kids to visit these properties for outdoor education. It’s not enough for us to buy land for parks, or pay for scenic easements, or preserve our watersheds and farm lands through conservation easements. If future generations of kids coming up here don’t have a sense of connection to the lands that sustain them, if they don’t learn to feel a sense of community with the plants and animals of the land, if they feel no kinship or interdependence with the farmers and ranchers and foresters that maintain the land, then our future is in jeopardy. There are a lot of children who don’t have an opportunity to visit parks and farms and ranches. Schools are in trouble and they can’t afford field trips. The Big Sur Land Trust is acting to span that gap between our social needs and our public resources. Help be a bridge.

Besides, it’ll be a good meal. Here are the details:

1. The vegetarian meal will be prepared at Happy Girl Kitchen in Pacific Grove by John Madriaga. John is a Manresa alum, who has worked at the world-renown Noma, in Copenhagen, and he is currently sous chef at Spruce in San Francisco.
2. Happy Girl Kitchen is charging $55 dollars for the meal. I’m asking for an extra $20 per plate as the benefit contribution to the Big Sur Land Trust. I’m donating all the produce from my farm for the event. Carmel Valley’s Heller Estate winery will be pairing wines for each course for an extra $20 dollars.

3. You can sign up for the meal at Happy Girl Kitchen. Dinner dates are Friday, March 16th OR Saturday, March 17th.

4. Inform yourself about the Big Sur Land Trust and its mission.

5. Here’s a link to a story about one of the youth groups the BSLT has hosted on the land at Glen Deven Ranch.

6. Take a look at some of the pictures I’ve taken on the Big Sur Land Trust properties at the I-Heart-Big-Sur-Land-Trust Facebook page.

7. If you can’t make the meal, consider making a contribution anyway and write a check to the Big Sur Land Trust and send it Shelley at Mariquita Farm, P.O. Box 2065, Watsonville CA, 95076, and we’ll see that it gets bundled with all the other donations from the meal and delivered to the Trust.

Thanks, Andy.

© 2012 Article & Photos by Andy Griffin. 

I can hear the logs burning in the fireplace too. I’m glad I spent time last week cutting up dead, fallen branches in the forest. Now I’ve got a couple of months’ worth of dry wood cut, split, and stacked in the shed. The house won’t be damp and cold and my family won’t be crabby. That’s a plus!

Our cat, Sarah, is in the living room, in front of the fire, “toughing it out” on her tuffet. She’s happy. Rain tests all the preparations I’ve made to care for the animals. How have I done?  My dog, Red, is happy; she’s in my room sleeping on her fleece by my bed. She snores. Blue, our other Pyrenees Mountain dog, is asleep in the shed outside. He’s so fluffy he may not even be aware that it’s raining. My two donkeys, Prima and Sweet Pea, have noticed the precipitation and they’ve retreated to their dry shed. The goats are in the barn. Only my cows are out in the wet night, but they’ve taken shelter down in the oak trees. Besides, my cows are Dexters; fat, little, heirloom Irish cows, and a light California rain doesn’t alarm them.

I do hope the rain gets heavier. For the past month I’ve kept the cattle in the pasture next to our house so that I can more easily feed them hay. There’s been so little rain this winter that the grass hasn’t grown like I need it to. I plan on keeping the cattle off of their regular pasture for another month or so. With the nights getting a little shorter and a little warmer the grass will soon get a little longer— if there’s enough rain. I can’t afford to feed the cattle hay all summer, so if it doesn’t rain I’ll have to sell them.

The rain is good for the vegetables too. Crops always grow faster after a rain than they do after an irrigation. The water’s cleaner, I guess. Rain is certainly cheaper than irrigation. I’m short on irrigation pipes right now, so a rain means I don’t have to spend money to move pipes. It doesn’t cost me anything to move clouds! The rain means lower power bills too. If the rain is going to do the irrigation for us we can spend our money to harvest crops. I’ve got cauliflower, carrots, yukina, cabbage, spring garlic, nettles, escarole, and lettuce planned for harvests this week, plus some potatoes out of the cooler. It’ll be a muddy day in the fields, but do-able.

Of course the rain slows some things down. We got ½ of our last winter cover crop planted yesterday before we ran out of seed. Now it will be too wet to plant for a while, which gives me time to get down to King City and buy more cover crop seed. I’d better take more seeds in to Headstart Nursery too. They grow my vegetable transplants. If I can’t sow directly into the field I have them start seedlings for me for transplant out later so that I don’t get off schedule.

It’s awfully early in the year to know how we’re doing, but so far things seem good. We’re on time with our plantings, things are growing, it’s finally raining, the house is warm, and the cat is in front of the fire. It all adds up. Time to go to sleep.

© 2012 Article and all photos by Andy Griffin.

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My Christmas cactus is a prickly pear that I have pruned and shaped for 25 years. I’d been on a hiatus from farming, doing some ornamental gardening in Santa Barbara, and I’d learned to appreciate xerophytic landscaping. The last thing I did before I moved to Watsonville was cut a cactus paddle from a favorite plant near the Mission to plant at my new home. Now the plant dominates our yard.

My intentions were ornamental but the Mexicans I lived with gave me a working vocabulary for my cactus; the plant itself is called a nopal, the paddles are called pencas, the fruits are tunas, and nopalitos are the tender, young pencas that are harvested and cooked. Nopalitos taste not unlike green beans. I like them. In Old Mexico they are traditionally served with eggs or beans at breakfast. Considering how nutritious nopalitos are, how economical the plants are with water, and how hardy they are, the Nopal cactus may be the most under-appreciated vegetable resource in the world.

My family is not always as enamored with the cactus tree as I am; it does have spines and its long branches threaten visitors as they approach the house, but no one ever said I was easy to live with either. Last Saturday, as dusk darkened into night, I stepped outside to try and photograph my Yule Nopal. I was charmed to see Julia working away at her computer in the kitchen, framed by a halo of reflected Christmas lights. It was a quiet, “reflective” moment in the hectic life of our family and farm and I’m happy with how the picture came out. (pictured below)

My photo of the Christmas cactus is a “seasonal” picture for us, because not only are colored lights “seasonal,” so is the reflective mood the lens captured. December is one of the quietest months on the farm. We don’t do much planting now, although I will put in some lettuces this week for March harvest. Mornings can be frosty, so we often start the harvest late, so as not to damage our crops by handling them. Night comes early, so we stop work early. December is a good time of year to slow down, look back on the things that worked, ruminate on the things that didn’t, and catch up with all the undone tasks.

For her part, Julia has been plugging away at the computer, revising the recipe files for the website, linking photos to recipes, and in general trying to make the “web support” we can offer our CSA subscribers as useful as possible. She’s giving me a list of vegetables we need photos (or better photos) for so that I can remember to “capture them on pixel” the next time I have the opportunity. I’m giving her all my nopal pictures now.

We wish you all a reflective and peaceful holiday season too.

© 2011 Article and all photos by Andy Griffin.

Nopalito Recipes || Vegetable Recipes A-Z

** Julia’s note: the Nopalito recipe page has a couple of recipes from a thorough cookbook I got from my grandmother: The Cactus Cookbook: Succulent Cookery International, published 1971 by Joyce L. Tate and the Cactus and Succulent Society of America. It has hundreds of recipes: many of which would pass any slow food test, many others that are bizarre concoctions that include jello and other canned vegetables/fruits. I looked on ABE books and there are many copies available for those of you interested in making your own Opuntia Jelly, Cactus Pear Harvest Relish, Nopalitos Souffle, Stuffed Cactus Stems with Cheese, Prickly Pear Beer, Barrel Cactus Pudding… you get the idea!

There are so many varieties of love; romantic love, unrequited love, lost love, maternal love, and the love we have for our pets, just to name just a few. The writer who takes on love as a subject has an endless amount of material to work with. I’m not saying that love is easy to write about. We all experience love, even when we only feel it as a hunger, so every reader is potentially as much an expert as any author. Writers who choose to explore more technical subjects, like cigars, face a different challenge. I don’t smoke, but I have found myself reading Cigar Aficionado Magazine from time to time. “Cedar notes? With accents of autumn leaves?”  I like to see how the editors labor to present cigars anew, month after month. I look for the rhetorical tricks that are employed to get readers like me to smell the cedar. Writing for an annual seed catalog with over 30 pages of glossy photos and mini essays dedicated almost entirely Solanum lycopersicum, must be a difficult task.

In catalog world, novelty sells. “New and Improved!”  But tomatoes, like their close cousins, the tobaccos, were first cultivated by Pre-Columbian Native Americans, so what can possibly be new? For 2012 Totally Tomatoes presents for the very first time “Tasti-Lee™ Hybrid tomato with up to 40% more lycopene than other leading varieties of tomato.” Lycopene is a red pigment with antioxidant properties. According to some preliminary scientific findings there is an inverse relationship between eating a lot of tomatoes and cancer risk, especially prostate cancer. As a tomato grower I’d like this to be true, but I’m not “sold.”

Before I put any credence in any scientific claim any catalog makes I read it from cover to cover and look for the most egregiously manipulative and fraudulent claim. “Aha!” I say when I find it. “This is how low they’ll go!”  On page 25 Totally Tomatoes presents the “Peron” tomato, billed as “The world’s only sprayless tomato, requiring no pesticides.” I never use any pesticides on any of my tomatoes. Just for good measure Totally Tomatoes also says that Peron has 2.5% more vitamin C than the other leading breeds. I suspect that catalog writers twist “recent studies” into creative ad copy whenever the variety that they’re writing up doesn’t give them anything more concrete to work with.

Names count for a lot in catalog literature. A good product name evokes the values that the buyer treasures. For a gardener the size of fruit may be important, as well as the earliness of the harvest, and the potential profitability quotient. Throw in an appeal to ethnic identity and timeless family values and a catalog writer has all the bases are covered. Totally Tomatoes doesn’t disappoint; the reader gets “Goliath,” “Early Goliath,” “Goldrush Goliath,” “Italian Goliath,” and – I kid you not- “Old Fashioned Goliath ™ Hybrid VF.” Don’t you hunger for the “good old days” when peasants named the hybrid fruits of their labors after their Biblical heroes, then trademarked their creations and used their profits to hire lawyers?

But let’s not forget color. Getting paid to write for a catalog where you need to say something unique and appealing about hundreds of different kinds of red ball-shaped is enough to make a poet out of a person; in Totally Tomatoes there are descriptions of fruits with “red,” “deep red,” “bright red,” “shiny red,” and “intense red.” It must be a relief for the writers that there is so much contemporary consumer interest in heirloom tomatoes with their oranges, greens, purples, yellows, and stripes. I give Totally Tomatoes credit for carrying many heirloom varieties. Crafting the story lines behind these antique, open pollinated breeds of tomato that have been passed down through the generations gives the catalog’s writers some room to stretch out and tell a good tale. One quibble with the storyline though; “Old-Fashioned” is not a flavor, it’s a rhetorical crutch, a phonetic catalyst designed to evoke sepia toned nostalgia for better times that probably never existed. But that’s ok. I’m not looking for Steinbeck in the seed catalog. The appeal to “Old-Fashion Values” is only the flip side of “New and Improved” which plays to our utopian hopes of a shiny, bright future.

So what do I look for?

As a grower I want to know if the tomato variety is determinate or indeterminate. Determinate tomatoes set almost all their fruit at once. This is a convenient trait for large-scale growers who harvest their crop with machines. I prefer to harvest more modest amounts of fruit by hand every week over a long season, so I look for indeterminate varieties. Growing indeterminate tomatoes allows me to find markets for my harvest, even out my cash flow, and keep my crew gainfully employed for months.

I’m always curious to know what the disease resistance of the plant is. I don’t use fungicide, so I’m always looking for crops which are resistant to pathogens. That’s been the problem I’ve had with some Italian heirloom tomatoes I’ve trialed with disappointing results. Each heirloom tomato evolved under different conditions with different amounts of humidity to contend with, different soils, and different pests. Some varieties work here, some don’t. I don’t expect a catalog like Totally Tomatoes with ambitions of a continental reach to be able to tell me what will grow well on my farm in San Benito County. Trial and error is my best guide.

Flavor is important. “Old-Fashioned” may not mean anything, but before I try a new variety I do want to know what the acid/sweet balance of the fruits is. I like to know what the texture of the fruit is like too and how uniform the fruit size is too. Size is important, but bigger is not necessarily better. Huge fruit can be hard to pack, and if a crow takes one peck out of a huge tomato I lose a lot. I prefer a plant that gives me a lot of smaller fruit, so Mr. & Mrs. Crow can wet their beaks without leaving me broke.

Flavor has a lot to do with cultural practices, so I like to know if a particular variety of tomato tolerates “dry-farming.” By not watering the tomatoes the plants are forced to reach deep into the mineral earth for their water, and in so doing they gain access to all the trace elements and micro-nutrients that make for good flavor. Nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, or NPK, might be the most important fertilizers for vegetative growth, but it’s all the trace elements that give character to flavor. Some tomatoes will tolerate dry farming conditions and some won’t. Because successful dry-farming is so dependent on local conditions national catalogs can’t really honestly address the issue. Most, like Totally Tomatoes, don’t even bring it up.

So, will I buy anything from Totally Tomatoes?

Yes, I will. “Early Girl” is a hybrid tomato offered by Totally Tomatoes that is indeterminate, disease resistant, flavorful, and adapted to dry-farm culture and I will buy 15,000 seeds. The rest of my tomato seeds I will either save from my own crop, like Principe Borghese, or buy from Johnny’s Seeds. Johnny’s Seeds doesn’t carry Early Girl but they are sensitive to the needs of small-scale organic and specialty growers and they offer many varieties of tomato. For the record, the Johnny’s catalog is the clearest, most informative one out there. I keep it by my bed.

copyright 2011 Andy Griffin ||  all photos by Andy Griffin ||  Tomato Recipes, of course!

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