Ladybug Letters
How Long Will Tomato Season Last?
Change is in the air! Starr took this lovely photo of a recent sunset seen through our gate. These clouds were from a tropical storm that snuck in from Baja. It rained, but only enough to still the dust for a minute.
This is the time of year that people start to ask me, “How long will the tomato season last?”
Look how many acorns there are underneath the oak tree! This oak clearly believes that there is going to be a lot of rain this coming winter, so it’s dumping a bumper crop of acorns on the ground in order to assure that at least one seed germinates and survives the squirrels, the deer, woodpeckers, and the weather and grow into another beautiful tree. It’s been years since I saw an acorn crop of this magnitude.
I laugh because that’s always a question I ask myself. And, if I could answer that question correctly, I’d be much better off focusing my crystal ball on a more remunerable trade, like sports betting or the stock market. I’m just as baffled as anybody else as to how long the tomato season could last. The bold outlines of October and November are drawn in black and white; every passing day brings a few less minutes of sunshine and the dawn always comes a few minutes later. True, some days in the fall it seems as though the sun burns brighter and hotter than ever, but it always retreats and, as it does, the plants slow their growth and their fruits ripen more slowly. The first rain may dry off the leaves of the tomatoes before the morning is over, but even a light rain will moisten the soil and speedup the rate of the cooling off process that has already begun. One good rain that soaks the earth in late October or early November sets the stage for the first frost. The clouds rain themselves dry and the sky clears. The moisture evaporates from the soil, driving down soil temperatures and three of four clear nights later we experience our first frost f the season. Any tomato plants that still have green foliage will be burned. The season is over.
We’re getting ready for the winter too. In this picture you can see the last of this year’s Otto File corn stalks being fed through the chipper so that they can go back to the earth. Next we will spread organic fertilizer on the ground and then plant a cover crop to protect the soil from winter rains and help enrich the land for crops to come.
But when we get the first rain or the first frost seems impossible to predict. Despite what the orange buffoon in the white house may say, climate change is real. A philosopher may tell you that the past can’t logically predict the future anyway, and my experience tells me that nature is full of surprises. Some years we’ve managed to harvest tomatoes through to Thanksgiving, and other years we’ve been shut down by the weather as early as the second week in October. The Pagan in me is reluctant to make bold predictions about the weather for fear of inciting the wrath of the gods with my greedy hubris. I know what I want, and that’s about it; I hope to be harvesting tomatoes thru November. The Mexicans I work with have a phrase that comes in useful in situations like this; “Ojala,” they’ll say, meaning ,’hopefully, or ‘may it be so,’ or “if only…'” “Ojala” comes to Spanish from the Arabic, “Inshallah,” meaning “God Willing.” So I feel confident leaving the length of the tomato season up to the whims of the divine. “But please make it thru November, Ojala!”
Another question we’ve gotten recently is, “How do I save tomato seeds?”
Now, that’s a question I feel more comfortable answering.
Take the Piennolo tomato, for example. The Piennolo tomato is an open-pollinated heirloom variety of tomato, which means that nobody owns the rights to the genetics of the plant. Heirloom genetics are our ancestors gifts from their past to our future. Heirloom crops are your inheritance: you can legally save the seeds from them to plant. Heirloom seeds will sprout true to type and you will not be violating Bayer/Monsanto , Dow/DuPont, or Syngenta’s patent rights. It’s fun to not pay a super-massive corporation for your tomato seeds and it’s not hard either.
Step 1. Slice the Piennolo tomato in half and squeeze out the seeds. No, there are not a lot of seeds. The Piennolo is a “paste tomato” and it has more flesh and fewer seeds than a cherry tomato or a Beefsteak type. We joke that you may want to buy two cases of Piennolos- one to eat and one to save the seed from.
Step 2. Put the seeds, along with the slippery, gelatinous goop that they come wrapped in into s shallow saucer and leave it someplace out of the way and out of direct sun so that it can begin to ferment naturally.
Step 3. Do not through the seedy goop our when it starts to develop mold and appear to rot. Decomposition of the goop around the tomato seeds is what you want. As the goop breaks down around the seeds, natural enzymes are released which prime the seed to germinate under the correct set of circumstances.
Step 4. When the goop seems good and rotten, then wash the decomposed stuff off of the seeds, using a very fine sieve and a gentle flow of water. When the seeds are clean, spread them out to dry on a paper towel.
Step 5. The seeds can be stored in paper envelope in a cool, dry, place free from rodents . You can even freeze them. Either way, You’ll be ready to plant Piennolo tomatoes in the spring!
Thanks for your interest and support of our farm Starr & I would like to invite you to join us in supporting a local, Santa Cruz County non-profit that will be hosting a benefit lunch on the farm. Come visit. Details below.
We look forward to participating in this fund-raiser for Roots Of Resilience. Chef Gus, of the Bernardus Lodge in Carmel Valley, is a big friend and supporter of the farm. Please join us. Tickets are limited so check in at the farm’s online store for availability. The weather will be perfect, Ojala!
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Tomatopalooza Pop Up Calendar
We Hey, that’s not a picture of a tomato!
Yes, we always feature a range of tomatoes at our tomatopalooza; dry-farm Early Girls, Piennolos, Heirlooms, San Marzanos, and cherry toms. And we also typically harvest a range of other crops that we like to grow. This year, for fun, for dessert, and as an experiment, we planted a long row of cantaloupes. Our melon experiment seems to be going well and the squirrels and gophers have not yet noticed the big, fat, aromatic fruits. We cut one open today at the edge of the field to try it out and it was great. This coming Sunday, August 30th, we will bring a pile of them to our pop-up down in the Dogpatch in front of Piccino Restaurant, 1001 Minnesota,. We’ll be there from 9:30 to 12:30, enjoying the scene and slinging tomatoes and basil. Also on the menu will be the season’s first red jalapeno peppers for the folks that make their own sriracha. Plus I’ll also pick a pile of Assadas citron for any cooks that want to play around with this interesting Middle Eastern fruit that doesn’t typically get much play here in the states. It’s even possible we’ll have a few ripe Nopal cactus fruits to harvest by Saturday; these would be the fruits the Sicilans know as “Fici de India,” that the Mexicans call “tunas,” and American English speakers think of as “Prickly Pears.” All told, I’ve got 15 different breeds of Nopal cacti that will be yielding more and more fruit as the plants mature. Perhaps later pop-ups will feature more cactus fruits as the green fruits turn color. And, speaking of “later pop-ups,” here’s the calendar list of the sales events that we have planned for the late summer and fall:
Assadas Citron hanging on the tree, waiting for you!
Prickly Pears; we remove the spines.
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What’s In A Name?
We grow herbs, tomatoes, citrus, and greens for you in the Pajaro Valley. “Pajaro” means “bird” in Spanish. More about the birds in a minute but, first, let me tell you a bit about the Valley.
The Pajaro River watershed starts in the hills to the south and east of San Jose. Driving down highway 101 by Morgan Hill you’ll likely never even notice when you leave the drainage of Coyote Creek, which drains to the north into the San Francisco Bay by Alviso, and enter the watershed of Llagas Creek, which drains south into the Pajaro River. There must be at least a foot of elevation between the two watersheds but, at 65 miles an hour, who can tell?
Pacheco Creek, which runs along highway 152 westwards from Pacheco Pass, is another “big” tributary of the Pajaro River. In the old days, a huge inland swamp that was home to vast flocks of waterfowl, spread out across the landscape where Pacheco Creek and Llagas Creek join forces and formed the Pajaro River. Today that area is known as “The Bolsa,” which means “The Bag” in Spanish. Mexican rancheros used to drive their cattle down from the uplands of the Diablo Range into the Bolsa’s wetlands to feed, and the surrounding hills acted as a “bag” to jug the herds up so that they didn’t wander and make them easier to manage as they fattened on the green grass.
f you’ve ever seen the Amazon, the Pajaro River is like a teardrop compared to a flood, but it’s OUR “rive,” our teardrop. The Pajaro flows south until it is joined by the San Benito “River” near San Juan Bautista, at the very tail end of the Santa Cruz Mountains. There, just after the confluence, the Pajaro turns west, and cuts through what we call the “Chittenden Gap,” which is a low point in the hills that divides the Santa Cruz Mountains from the Anzar Hills, before entering the ocean by Watsonville.
The San Benito River is typically dry since the Diablo Range that it drains is arid. During those rare years when we get any rain along the upper reaches of the San Benito River the watershed there doesn’t much vegetation out there to take the water up or hold it back, so we can experience floods here along the lower reaches of the Pajaro Valley.
Our home ranch is near the mouth of the Pajaro River, and only a few miles as the crow flies from the Pacific Ocean. Our proximity to the ocean gives us the mild, temperate climate that we need in order to grow frost sensitive crops like citrus and cut flowers. We grow our tomatoes on rented ground about 15 mile upstream along the middle reaches of the Pajaro, where the inland temperatures are warmer, yet still mild compared to the furnace of the San Joaquin Valley baking away on the other side of Pacheco Pass. It may be out of sight and out of mind, but the San Joaquin Valley defines our life. Every day, as the temperatures go up in the San Joaquin, their hot air rises, prompting an on-shore breeze of cool air off the Pacific, which blows across the lower reaches of the Pajaro Valley, through the Chittenden Gap, and over the Pacheco Pass.
When the first Spanish soldiers marched north under the command of Gaspar de Portola, out of Mexico into Alta California, they were accompanied on their expedition by a Catholic monk who chronicled their progress. The Spaniards named many of the places and features that they “discovered.” Today, we still have a few local sites that have kept an original indigenous place name that predates “discovery;” “Aptos,” our neighboring town to the west, for example, takes its name either from the Ohlone word for “The meeting of two creeks.”. Soquel, the next town over from Aptos, may take its name from the Ohlone word meaning “place of willows” or it may mean “the place of waters.”
Juan Crespi, the Catholic monk who accompanied the Portola expedition into Alta California, took his role as a priest and discoverer very seriously and he named many of our natural landmarks after saintly figures of Catholic history. So, naturally, you have the best bay in the world for ocean-going ships named after Saint Francis of Assisi, who loved animals. Llagas Creek, along the headwaters of the Pajaro, was named after “Las Llagas de nuestro Padre de San Francisco,” meaning “the wounds of Father Francisco.” Apparently Saint Francis experienced the spontaneous bodily eruption of bleeding ulcers, or stigmata, which mimicked the wounds that Jesus experienced from the nails through his body on the cross. That’s a miracle, for sure!
The Pajaro River enters the ocean in present day Santa Cruz County. “Santa Cruz,” means “Holy Cross.” The cross is not simply a design motif for jewelry; it was the torture device that the Romans nailed the Carpenter from Bethlehem to. If you flinch at blood, you should probably skip the Bible and read Winnie The Pooh or The Cat in The Hat. The “Diablo Range” means the “Devil’s Mountains,” and the name recalls the moment Spanish Padres found a shrine in the brush of the hills to the east of present day Walnut Creek that had been created to honor an un-Catholic divinity.
Spanish soldiers also awarded many place names for the lands they transversed but they were unburdened by religion and prone to fits of humor. For example, “Salsipuedes” is the name of a canyon near our farm . “Salsipuedes” means “get out if you can,” which was an apt name for a box canyon that was choked with poison oak, nettles and brambles as well as being liberally salted with Grizzly Bears, panthers, skunks, ticks, and rattlesnakes.
I’m always amused by “Atascadero,” a town down 101 south of “Saint Ardo” and “Saint Michael,” but north of “Saint Louis the Bishop.”. Ardo Smaragdus, aka San Ardo, was an author who became holy as a hagiographer, writing down (and perhaps propping up) accounts of the miracles performed by other saints. Saint Michael, aka “San Miguel,” was, technically, an archangel, not a regular human, but he was Holy. Saint Louis, of San Luis Obispo fame, fed the hungry and the homeless until he died at a young age. But “Atascadero,” a spot named by the Spanish soldiers, means “place where you get stuck.” Which brings us to “The Birds” of The Pajaro Valley, which is the place where I’m “stuck.”
“Pajaro” does mean “bird” in Spanish, but it is generally understood to mean a small or regular sized bird, like a robin or a quail or a Bluebird. When the Portola Expedition was advancing north through what would become California, the soldiers naturally followed the paths laid out by the locals that the Spaniards were “discovering.” When their procession reached the present day location of Watsonville they encountered an “Indian” village that announced itself with a dead, dried out condor stuffed with straw, mounted on a stake like a totem. The Spanish soldiers must have been vastly amused. In the Imperial Roman tradition that the Spaniards aspired to, advance parties of an army marched “under the aegis,” which is to say, “under the eagle.” The forward guard of any Roman army carried a tall pole with the form of a gilded eagle at the top. Once a territory was conquered, the staff with the eagle was stuck in the dirt, meaning that all the land around was now “under the aegis,” “under the eagle”, or “under the control” of Rome. Seeing a super-gargantuan vulture mounted on a stick at the edge of a native settlement must have read like a spoof on the Empire to the Spanish soldiers. With their genius for understatement, the Spanish soldiers named that settlement “Pajaro,” meaning “little bird” as a nod to the totem jammed into the earth and the huge carrion eating birds flying overhead.
The California Condor is coming back from a near extinction experience and their numbers are gradually increasing in the Santa Lucia Mountains south of here. (Lucia would be “Holy Lucy,” who was executed because her suitor was upset that she wanted to marry Jesus instead of him, and accused her of being a Christian. She was guilty as charged….) I once had the opportunity of seeing a California Condor floating in the sky right above the intersection of Corralitos Road and Freedom Boulevard, where we will be conducting a pop up on August 22nd. It was during the huge fires in Big Sur during Covid, and I imagine the huge bird was simply looking for a cleaner place to breathe for a moment. It was exhilarating to see such a huge “pajaro” overhead.
For my 67th birthday I decided to gift myself a condor sculpture which calls attention to the name of our valley. I engaged Scott, a polymath artist friend who is a metal worker, ceramicist, carpenter, graphic artist/rodeo cowboy to make me a condor who can always fly over our farm and lend us it’s carrion eating majesty. Here it is! (link) We mounted “Connie,” the Condor, at the entrance to our labyrinth like our own “aegis” as an homage to our valley and our native “bird.” My hope and ambition for this farm is always that we use this patch of soil and sun and water as an experiment in honoring all the people and creatures who have come before us and left us with this little patch of dirt and magic.
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“Twas Ever Thus.”
Poster by R Crumb, first published in 1969 as the back of an issue of Changes magazine, out of Oakland.
Nicholas Culpeper, an English botanist, doctor and astrologer active during the first half of the 1600s, said of comfrey that the herb was good for treating ailments related to “Spitting, pissing Blood, Inward Wounds & Bruises, Phtisick, Bloody Flux, Terms stops, Whites, Nervs cut, Muscles cut, sharp Humors, Wounds, Ruptures, broken Bones, Knotted Breasts, Hemorrhoids, Inflamation, Gout, Pained Joynts, and Gangreans.”
Wow! That’s quite a plant.
I’ve got some comfrey growing in my yard. We’re going to take a closer look at this herb in a bit but first let’s go back in time to the late 1970s and parachute out of the time machine into West Marin. That’s what I did. I landed in a cow pen on the Strauss Dairy, in Marshall, along the Tamales Bay. I worked there for a year and learned a lot about cattle, but it was Ellen Strauss, the matriarch of the farm, who noticed the interest I had in the cottage garden we maintained. “If you ever want to work on a vegetable farm,” she said, “I’ll give you a number to call.””
Comfrey really does look like the plant R Crumb portrays in his poster.
Comfrey has a lovely flower.
After a season on the Strauss Dairy I returned to college at UC Davis, The first thing I did was switch my major from Range Management to Western Philosophy. I’d fallen in love with West Marin, and when I needed absolute quiet and a lack of distractions in order to choke down 1000 pages of Hegel or Leibniz I’d retreat to Pt Reyes and read. When I finished the philosophy program I visited Ellen Strauss at her home in Tamales and asked about that phone number.
“Call Warren Weber,” Ellen said. “He has Star Route Farm down in Bolinas. He’s one of the most progressive farmers in the state.”
In 1981, when I graduated from UC Davis, organic farming was not considered “progressive” by many people in the mainstream farming community. Organic farmers were typically dismissed as dirty hippies; drug-addled losers who were looking backwards towards an idealized, pre-scientific past, instead of using the chemical crop management tools that God had blessed us with. The Strauss dairy was not yet an organic dairy when I worked there, but the Strauss’s had open minds. In fact, Ellen Strauss was one of the key people, being both a farmer AND environmentalist, who helped to found the Marin Agricultural Land Trust.
So I made the call to WarrenThe first day I stepped into the tool shed on Star Route Farm to grab a hoe I noticed a tattered copy of R Crumb’s poster of Mr. Natural pinned to the wall. “Twas Ever Thus,” proclaims Mr. Natural as he drives a stylized 1940’s era tractor down the row of a cultivated field. I had never seen that particular poster before but I was quite familiar with R Crumb, who was the artist/cartoonist responsible for a number of popular “underground comix.” R Crumb did the artwork for Janis Joplin’s album “Cheap Thrills.” I had to smile; if there was ever a “poster child” for “dirty hippies” who could fulfill every conventional farmer’s worst fantasy/nightmare of hippies farming it would be “Mr Natural.”
When I’d worked at Star Route Farm for a while and gotten to know Warren Weber I asked him about the poster. He laughed. “Don’t those plants in the poster that Mr Natural is cultivating look like comfrey?
Comfrey was one of the worst weeds we had on the farm and we were endlessly hoeing it out of our tidy rows of lettuce, chard, and kale. Warren went on to explain that when he’d first started farming organically in the late ’60s comfrey had an outsized reputation among the hippies for being almost a miracle herb, capable of curing everything from halitosis to parking tickets. He’d planted a row of comfrey, only to discover that
a. There was no meaningful market for comfrey and…
b. Comfrey is toxic to your liver and kidneys if consumed in quantity, and it may even provoke abortion.
So Warren turned the comfrey crop under with a disk harrow, only to discover that comfrey spreads a lot quicker from root cuttings than it does from seed. By attempting to destroy the crop, Warren succeeded in creating a new “weed” all around the whole field. He had just reaffirmed the Law Of Unintended Consequences. “Twas Ever Thus,” Mr Natural says, but he’s looking back in time. We are all of us, always, reconfirming the Law Of Unintended Consequences. Once you have a comfrey problem in your field it may “Always be thus,” unless you use chemical crop protection products that open the doors to their own unintended consequences.
I worked on Star Route Farm for almost 5 years and I learned a lot from Warren. He’s a very educated man, who is funny, smart, disciplined and progressive. Without his mentorship I never could have gone on to have my own farm. Besides the myriad of details about plants and cultivation that he shared, he taught me a lot about marketing. “Know your market BEFORE you plant!” He learned that lesson from comfrey, and I learned it from him.
I also planted some comfrey; not a lot, but just a little, because it does make a good feed for chickens, and we keep a tiny flock. When I walk past my little bed of comfrey it makes me think back fondly of my “salad days” back in West Marin and the cool people I got to know there. Recently, when I saw the Mr Natural poster on line I had to buy it and hang it in my room as an homage to Star Route Farm.
Another thing Warren taught me was that the crops don’t sell themselves. You’ve got to get out there and hustle; tell the people what you have, tell them why they need it, and then get the crops picked, packed, cooled and delivered. That’s why I’m writing to you now. It’s full-on tomato season RIGHT NOW. We’ve got lovely tomatoes, herbs, citrus crops and cut flowers that have been grown with care for you.
We’ll be in San Francisco this coming Sunday, August 16th, down in the Dogpatch at Piccino Restaurant ,1001 Minnesota Street, from 9:30 to 12:30. We’re taking pre-orders and we will also have plenty of things on hand for casual sale. We happily accept cash, but we can take Venmo or Zelle too.
Saturday, August 22nd finds us in our own home town Corralitos at Jett & Rose, on Freedom Blvd at Corralitos Road, from 10 am to 4 pm. On Sunday, August 23rd, we’ll be at Brocc Cellars in Berkeley, details tba, and we’ll be back in Berkeley on Saturday, September 5th, down on 9th street between Virginia & Cedar, from 9:30 to 12:30 We hope to see you.
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Mariquita Farm Pop-Up Calendar Summer ’26
Genovese basil, widely regarded as “the best” basil for pesto.
Basil can be used for more than just pesto. Our friend, Eliza, made this lovely focaccia and garnished it with basil leaves, as well as using dried basil in the dough.
Hi Folks: Since otherwise rational people can argue over whether the best pesto is made from Genovese basil, or Napolitano basil, or Basilico Piccolo Fino Verde, the casual citizen can be excused for supposing that basil is somehow an “Italian” herb. But it’s not. Basil originally came from Southeast Asia or, as they called that region back during the time of Columbus, “The Indies.”
Here is one of our successions of Piccolo Fino Verde. This basil is finding favor on menus as a garnish green because it has such a sweet and spicy scent as well as a fine and filigree shape.
Basil’s ‘s Asian family roots are perhaps easier to understand in Spanish than in Italian or English. In Spanish basil is called “albahaca.” Almost all of the Iberian peninsula was conquered by Arabic speaking armies in the 8th century, and most of what we think of as contemporary Spain and Portugal spent hundreds of years under the rule of various Muslim administrations and the peninsula was known as Al Andaluz. Naturally, during the period of the Caliphate lots of Arabic words were absorbed into the various Latin dialects spoken across the former Roman colonies of Hispania.
The letters “al” spell out the definite article in Arabic. “Albahaca” is one of the thousands of words in Spanish that trace their roots back to Arabic and it is derived from “al habaqah,” meaning “the sweet smelling herb.” English picked up some words from Arabic too, as early scholars looked to the Muslim world for the most advanced studies in science, magic, and agriculture; think “algebra”, “alchemy,” or “almond” for example.
Basil is a heat loving tropical plant that feels sad and dies when the temperatures drop. If you are a gardener your basil will almost always be happiest if you can convince the plant that it is still back home in India, Thailand, or thereabouts. Here along the Central Coast of California around the 38th parallel we can grow nice basil once the soil is warm and the days are long. Basil’s optimum growing conditions here in California overlap with the tomato’s happiest time, which is convenient since they do so well on the plate together.
In the mid 1990’s I had the opportunity to help a friend and business partner start a farm in the Mexican State of Baja California Del Sur, near Todos Santos, along the 23rd parallel. The basil grew like a weed there. Some of the Genovese basil that we planted weren’t turned under at the end of the season when we turned the field under and planted a cover crop. The following spring when I went back to Mexico to check in on the progress on the farm I was surprised to see “Genovese” basil plants that stood 4 feet tall with woody trunks as thick as my arm. I’ll bet you anything Genovese basil doesn’t grow like that in Genoa, way up north along the 44th paralle.
lIf we can’t give the Italians credit for inventing basil, at least we can appreciate that they cleverly foreign married basil with their domestic olive oil and pine nuts. It’s not a contest- we’re all winners when basil is in season. And pesto? The best pesto is made with love and shared with friends.
We will be bringing lots of cut flowers to our pop-ups. These are zinnias, but we grow many other kinds of flowers too.
Don’t get between this gentleman and his Dry-Farmed Early Girl tomatoes!
We’ll be popping up around the Bay Area with lots of basil and tomatoes, citrus, and cut flowers. Look for us in front of Jett & Rose in Corralitos on August 15th, from 10 am to 4 pm. On the 16th of August we’ll be back in SF in front of Piccino in Dogpatch, 1001 Minnesota Street, from 9:30 to 12:30. On August 23rd we’ll be in Berkeley at Brocc Cellars with our friends from Linger Longer, details TBA. All kinds of wines pair well with basil! We’ll be back in Berkeley for Labor Day Weekend at 9th between Cedar and Virginia. We happily take cash, but Venmo and Zelle work too. We can’t take credit cards, I’m sorry. Thank you, Andy & Starr.
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A Basil Family Reunion
Basilico Piccolo Fino Verde is a variable plant by nature. “Piccolo Fino Verde” means “little, fine, & green,” and, as you can see, all these leaves are little, fine, and green, but there are 3 separate plants in this photo and each of them looks somewhat different from its siblings. They all smell great.
From left to right; Tuscan basil, Genovese basil, Purple basil, Greek basil, and finally 3 tiny leaves of Piccolo Fino Verde
Greek basil; a smallish leaf that delivers a BIG scent. In my experience, this plant is more resistant to disease than many larger-leaved Italian basils.
A quick sweep though the tomato patch catches the first pick of a number of varietals.
Hi Folks: It looks like a Basil family reunion in the field below our house. Like any vast, rich family that lives sprawled across 6 continents, not every basil family member could make it, but we at Mariquita Farm are playing host to at least seven of their “biggest names.”
Two rows of young Genovese basil. Once the soil is warm enough the seeds will sprout with the vigor of weeds.
Here is one of our successions of Piccolo Fino Verde. This basil is finding favor on menus as a garnish green because it has such a sweet and spicy scent as well as a fine and filigree shape.
“Basil,” in Greek, means “King.” So-called “Holy Basil” is considered a manifestation of the Goddess Tulsi. Basils come to us with a lot of attitude. Basilico Piccolo Fino Verde has the tiniest of leaves but she arrives with one of the strongest, sweetest scents of any basil. The plant makes a tiny, tidy, fashion forward little pom-pom of a plant. There is a lot of variety in this clan with plenty of variation in leaf color, size and shape.
Greek basil – “Greco a palla”- presents a larger leaf than the Piccolo types, and it hits with much more of a clove spice than does its smaller and sweeter leafed cousin. The plant will form a compact ball, somewhat a bit taller and more erect than the Piccolo types. In my experience both the Piccolo and Greek basils are quite resistant to disease. It’s just an opinion, but Greek basil is my favorite for pesto.
Genovese basil is the market’s choice to be the most popular basil. The broader leaves make stripping the plants easier and the flavor is a rich mix of both sweet and spice. I’m a farmer, so I’m going to have a more nuanced appreciation for a plant than some consumers. Genovese basil IS GREAT, and I love it, and so do the bugs. Genovese basil also seems sensitive to airborn mildews and other fungal attacks. For a while it seemed as though we couldn’t hardly ever get a good, disease-free Genovese basil crop, so I began experimenting with other varieties, but so far, this year, things in Genoa seem great. The Purple basil that we grow is a purple Genovese type.
Tuscan basil has the largest leaf of any of our basils, with one of the mildest flavors. As a grower I have to say that it is one of the most difficult basils to grow easily because its wide leaves are easily damaged by the sun, the wind, the birds, the bugs, the snails, etc. When they’re nice the big leaves make nice wrapper leaves for hors d’oeuvres.
There are many branches of the Basil family in Thailand. This year I grew the Thai Sweet basil. Our Lemon basil is another form of Thai basil. In the past I’ve grown Thai Anise basil and Thai Cinnamon basil.
Tulsi is an Avatar of Lakshmi, consort to Vishnu, and the Tulsi basil is a manifestation of her presence. Tulsi is “Holy basil” but , as with Thai basil, there are many forms. I’m growing 2 kinds and I have been informed that they are both “Ram Tulsi” plants, not “Krishna Tulsi.” I will be bringing a few bunches of each kind to the pop-up in case you want to pop in and give the herbs a look.
Besides the basils, we’ll be coming to SF with Dry-Farmed Early Girl tomatoes, Sungold cherry tomatoes, a rainbow mix of cherry toms, Heirlooms, tomatillos, Piennolos, jalapeños, limes, lemons, and cut flowers. We are not pre-selling yet, as we’re not 100% sure on yields, but we’ll have plenty of stuff on a first come-first serve basis. We take cash, but Venmo and Zelle work too. We can’t take credit cards, I’m sorry. I hope we see you in front of Piccino at 1001 Minnesota Street, San Francisco, Sunday morning, July 26th, from 9:30 am to 12:30. Thank you, Andy & Starr.
Purple Genovese basil on the right, and a tall stand of Thai sweet basil on its left.
One variety of “Holy basil,” or “Tulsi”- there are many kinds of Tulsi! The plant is very aromatic and is considered a manifestation of the Goddess Tulsi.
Our cat, Samson, in the middle of his lavender field. Lavender is an aromatic cousin to basil in the bigger mint family of herbs.
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This Coming Sunday’s Pop-Up Menu
There are so many fewer butterflies flitting about the world than I remember as a child, so it’s fun to see them enjoying the flower gardens on the farm.
The farm swarms with bees, but they’re too busy to notice us. My favorites are the Bumble Bees. This one is diving into a yellow zinnia.
Hi Folks: We’re looking forward to seeing you at our first pop-up of the 2026 summer season this coming Sunday in Dogpatch across the street from Piccino Restaurant @ 1001 Minnesota Street , SF, from 9:30 am to 12:30 in the afternoon. We will be showing up with our friends from Farm Cat Marmalade too. As I write this note to you I’m not quite sure of the amount of tomatoes that we’ll be able to harvest so we will present our initial harvest on a first come, first serve basis, but I imagine we’ll come with plenty of Dry-Farmed Early Girls and Sungold Cherry Tomatoes, and possibly our first heirlooms and Piennolos too! We will be offering the tomatoes “mix and match” in pint baskets and by 10 & 20 pound cases as well. And I know we’ll have plenty of tomatillos. Also on the menu are fragrant bags of Genovese, Greek, Tuscan, and Thai basils, as well as Basilico Piccolo Fino Verde, some Tulsi, and some Purple Basil as well. Our Austrailian Finger Limes are getting ready to pick, and I’ll also harvest Persian limes, Meyer Lemons, Lisbon lemons, Assadas Citron (Etrog) and Buddha’s Hand citrons. We’ve been growing an interesting cooking green for our local Oaxacan community called “Alache,” so I’ll bring some of that for any curious cooks who want to do a deep dive into the foodways of Southern Mexico. Our cut flower program is doing well this year, so we’ll prepare a feast for the eyes too. When you walk down 22nd Street and turn onto Minnesota you will not miss seeing our market stall because the colors are going to pop!
Frogs are under a lot of pressure from habitat loss so it’s comforting to see them every day on the farm. Starr surprised this one when she moved a potted plant, but the frog settled back down again in the Aloe bush once the drama passed to await a tasty mosquito. Frogs are so much better for the environment than chemical pesticides.
Everybody made flower garlands at our previous “5 Senses” workshop that focused on the sense of smell.
Flowers and bouquets will be the focus of our 5th and final “Five Senses” workshops. We’re billing this August 8th tour of the flower gardens and bouquet building workshop as “Seeing,” but flowers are all about “smelling” too, and some of them are about tasting. Besides a tour of the flower gardens, a walk in the Lavender Labyrinth and a bouquet workshop our friend and Collaborator, Wild Beauty Cosmetics, from Soquel, will be on hand to give mini-facials that focus on the eyes. You can sign up for this workshop on the “Events” page of this web page. Thanks, Starr & Andy
This photo of last year’s Piennolo crop has me looking forward to this year’s fruit.
The roses were leaking some color into the sky the other day, or is it the other way around?
Our cat, Samson, putting the Ellagance Purple Lavender in context. Starr will have some of her lavender products available in the farm store.
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Knock On Wood
Our head cat, Samson, reviewing the work we did planting out a rainbow of different basil varieties.
Hi Folks: I’m happy to say that the 2026 season tomato crop is looking good. Knock on wood. We expect the first harvests to take place in the first week of July. All told, we have several successive waves of each kind of tomato planted out in the field now so we’re hoping to be in production from early July through late October.
The tomato crop is looking great! These are the Dry Farmed Early Girls
Here’s the first handful of 2026 tomatoes. A big field only yielded these 6 fruits but a big crop is coming.
One of the first hurdles for a successful crop to clear is always the winter greenhouse stage of production. We always aim to get the first tomato seeds sowed into the transplant trays in early February. February can be a hard time of year for the birds, so if they can figure out a way to get into the warm greenhouse they may peck the seeds right out of the little cells in the trays where they’ve been sown before they even germinate and later on they can eat the tiny plants. The same goes for field mice. But this year none of those disasters befell us. Plus, the neighbor’s old, scruffy cat found the greenhouse to be a warm and inviting environment to relax in and he kept a watchful eye on production when he wasn’t snoozing.
Greenhouses are warm and humid, which encourages rapid plant growth but that same damp heat can foster mildews and other fungal problems. From day to night fungus can wipe out a crop in an enclosed space, like a greenhouse. We used to book our transplants with a large organic greenhouse operation, figuring that they could do a better job than us, and we’d pick up the plants all ready to go. We figured that the expense was worth the security of knowing that trained professionals were overseeing our crop when it was at its most vulnerable stage. But even the pros have problems and one year they lost- not just our crop, but thousands of trays of other farms’ tomato transplants in an outbreak of blight. We had some trays planted in our own greenhouse and didn’t have a problem, so now I figure I’ll live with the worry and count on dumb luck and an old cat to guide our tender transplants through their first months of life.
This photo of last year’s Piennolo crop has me looking forward to this year’s fruit.
You’ll recall that this past March was unseasonably warm. While warm winter temps can create havoc for farms that grow crops that have a chill requirement like cherries which need 800 to 1200 hours below 40 degrees Fahrenheit during dormancy for an adequate bloom to set, tomatoes are a tropical plant by nature and they resent being cold. Our neighbors who grow cherries have problems this year with the bloom set, but our tomatoes grew fast and healthy in the greenhouse. The warmer winter also helped us prepare the fields well. We got rain when we needed it this year and we got dry spells when we needed them. Dumb luck again, but dumb luck is better than no luck, and we got the cover crop worked under and spread compost on the fields six weeks earlier than usual.
We used to figure that April 15th was the frost-free date here on the Central Coast. By “We” I mean the farmers in the area who, by necessity, pay close attention to frost patterns. I can remember planting tomatoes out on April 15th back in the 1990s, only to have a damaging frost on the night of April 17th, so the “frost free date” was only a practical guideline, not a law of nature. But this year the fields were ready early, the tomatoes were ready to plant early, so we gambled that our luck would hold and we got the plants in the ground in late March. Our luck held. I’m not a gambler, which is to say I don’t go to Vegas and play the slots, and I don’t even buy lottery cards, but I have no right to criticize gamblers on moral grounds since so much of farming boils down to luck and every planting is a gamble. Maybe after all the risks I take farming I simply have no appetite for more risk when I’m on vacation.
So our plants were set out early and then a series of gentle rains helped nurture the little seedlings as they established their footing in their new home. The summer weeds all sprouted just when the soil temperature rose to the point that they were waiting for, just like they always do, but we were ready with our tractors. True, the war against Iran and the subsequent rise in diesel fuel prices is making farming more costly than ever, but you’re feeling that pain too. We bought the $7 dollar a gallon diesel for our tractors and got the cultivation done on time. With dry-farmed tomatoes cultivation is really key. We bank on the water in the soil to sustain our crop through production, and cultivation helps that happen. It’s not just that removing the weeds keeps them from drinking up the water our tomatoes will need. As soil dries out under the sun and wind the mechanics of evaporation create little capillary-like structure in the soil. Cultivating the soil surface shatters those capillaries where they meet the air and acts to help retain residual moisture in the soil. This is called a “dust mulch.”
If March was warmer than usual then April and May were often cooler than typical, but the tomatoes did well anyway and they created big canopies of greens. The plants flowered well. Because we farm in that region we call “The Bolsa,” east of Gilroy and north of San Juan, near where Pacheco Creek meets the Pajaro River, we can count on a strong breeze every afternoon as warm air rising in the San Joaquin Valley pulls in cool marine air over the Pacheco Pass. Tomatoes are wind pollinated, so we’ve got that angle covered. The tomato plants in the first of our three successive plantings are loaded with green fruit. The Cherry Tomatoes and Early Girls will come first, followed by the Heirloom varieties, then the San Marzanos and finally the Piennolo.
There’s still plenty of time for complications and drama but like the gambler on a lucky streak I know it will all work out. Yes, carton costs are way up. Yes, the availability of labor is way down. And yes, the weather forecast is calling for a Godzilla El Nino effect, with whatever that entails, but I feel like we’re on a lucky streak too and I look forward to sharing a great crop with you this summer and fall. Can you hear me knocking?
Meanwhile, back on the ranch….We’ve got the last two of our “Five Senses Workshops” that will be happening on the Farm. Saturday, July 11th, our workshop will be about our sense of smell – our “sense of scents,” if you will, focusing on lavender and other aromatic herbs. Have you ever smelled Huacatay? Nepitella? Lovage?
Then on Saturday, August 8th, our last workshop that focuses on seeing. It’ll be a beautiful day and Starr will be making bouquets with people from the flowers we grow. Also, she informs me that there will be “mini facials” offered. Lastly, now that I can see our harvest taking shape I’ll be reaching out to our past pop-up hosts to see if we can “pop up” again to offer this year’s harvest of tomatoes, herbs, flowers, citrus, and other veggies. Keep an eye on the newsletter and we hope to see you soon. Thanks, Andy & Starr.
A rainbow of cherry tomatoes
This is a fun experiment; here’s a foot-selfie (for scale( to show you a Mexican pot herb or “quelite” called Alache that we are growing for the local Oaxacan shoppers. It’s used to thicken soups and stews and acts the way that okra does to gumbo. Both okra and alache are in the Malvaceae.
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Mariquita Farm Update/Five Senses Series
The sky above the farm really looked like this- for three minutes- earlier this spring. It’s important to realize that things can be “heavenly” even in the midst of all of the world’s problems.
Hearing: Here’s Starr arranging her sound bowls in the labyrinth and trying out the stands to make sure the bowls are stable for her first of the 5 Senses workshops she’ll be hosting with Amber Michele on May 16th.
Here’s our growing crop of Otto File polenta corn at the end of April. Due to the convenient vagaries of the weather we have never been so far ahead with all of our farm work as we are this year. The tomato crop is already in the ground and we’re working our way towards having a whole spectrum of veggies this year. Pop-ups will be coming soon.
Hi Folks: Starr & I are excited to announce the farm’s “5 Senses” workshops that we’ll be hosting over the spring and summer; “Hearing, Tasting, Touching, Smelling, and Seeing” in our beautiful gardens. We’re thinking of it as an opportunity to turn away from the craziness of the world for a moment and return to a sense of oneself in a beautiful world. Starr has assembled a posse of friendly and skilledpractitioners to make the workshops welcoming and positive. The details are all on our website @ https://www.mariquita.com/features/5-senses-series-coming-home-to-self-bundle-of-all-5-workshops/ We hope you’ll join us for one or all of the events.
Where does “media crisis” fit in your action plan?
But you know me…. It’s spring and I’m in the middle of planting, so I’m often caught up in the drama of day to day issues like weeding, watering, tractors and fertilizer. Especially fertilizer. You’ll recall that Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City back in 1995 using a bomb made from a mix of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and diesel fuel. His attack was the single most nauseating act of domestic terrorism since the Army’s massacre of the Lakota people at Wounded Knee….unless you count the 1921 Tulsa Race massacre….or the mass internment of Japanese American citizens in concentration camps during the Second World War. And the tab is still open and counting for ICE agents shooting people who peacefully protest their leadership, their mission or their tactics. For “One nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all,” we sure have some stuff to work out. But if we can’t or won’t learn from our past experiences in South Dakota, Oklahoma, California, and Michigan at least McVeigh’s example reminds us that conventional fertilizers can be highly explosive, and that fertilizer factories are especially vulnerable to accidents, disasters, or mischief. Which is why, when I visited my local fertilizer company earlier this spring, the “Crisis Action Plan” they had posted on the wall in their office caught my eye.
I took the liberty of removing the company’s name from the photo because I like and respect the people who work there, I need their products- or at least some of them- and I have no wish to cause any drama for them. But look! The information pages for various crises that can befall a fertilizer company have not been arranged from top to bottom alphabetically but instead according to a more existential logic. “Evacuation” comes first, obviously, because if you are working at a place that can violently explode if prompted by an electric spark, a cigarette butt, an earthquake, a lightning strike, a workplace-related live shooting incident, etc. then you’re not going to want to be flipping through a lot of pages before you run. And I love how, right after “Evacuation” comes “Media Crisis,” well ahead of “Natural Disaster,” “Medical Emergency,” “Spill and Release,” “Fire.” Priorities, priorities!” We live in a post-factual world where media agents both real and artificial are deployed to put a cyclonic spin on “information” so that we’re all awhirl and don’t know what to think. Meanwhile, the world is blowing up, or at least our President is threatening to blow up “a whole civilization.” Which takes us to the Strait of Hormuz, that narrow stretch of sea which serves as a conduit for a spectacular amount of chemical fertilizer and fuel to flow out from the oil fields to their markets in the wider world. Hormuz is a place where fertilizer and fuel can be mixed together with missles to explosive effect! McVeigh was a poor Gulf War veteran who became embittered with the government while Donald Trump is a rich draft dodger and President who sends people like Timothy McVeigh off to die in places like the Persian Gulf, but that’s where their similarities end. So why was I buying fertilizer in a building that could blow up?
Tasting: Kelly Marie at her shop, ARTNZEN. Kelly will be guiding the Tea ceremony and workshop on infusions on June 6th.
Smelling: Here are some lavender oils from the farm’s lavender labyrinth.
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Seeing: Here’s Starr coming out of the cutting garden with an armload of wild lilac. Bouquet making will be the focus of this workshop, but it will smell great too.
Part of a morning’s haul of cut flowers
Conventional chemical fertilizers are elaborated from petroleum and its byproducts, and especially from natural gas, which is why there is so much fertilizer being produced around the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. Fertilizer companies are just like most other companies; they want to make money and they’ll change their business practices to keep up with the times and maintain or expand their market share. All across Central California there have been farms transitioning from chemical farming into more sustainable farming practices for years now, and the big ag companies have noticed and are adapting. Many conventional fertilizer companies are hedging their bets on the future and now sell organic fertilizers that have been manufactured from composts, manures, kelps, minerals, fish, and other biological sources. I was down at my neighborhood fertilizer plant picking up a ton of 8-5-1 “TRUE” brand pelletized compost to spread in my fields ahead of planting to supplement the added natural inputs from my cover crops. If “TRUE” sounds like a cynical name for a fertilizer brand then think for a minute about the branding for fake president’s “TRUTH SOCIAL” platform; at least TRUE brand fertilizer doesn’t pretend to be more than conveniently packaged bullshit. Anyway, here’s a “pro tip” for my fertilizer supplier; if you think that the presence of the press is a crisis then you ought not post any material that is sensitive where “the Press” could see it because in this day and age any clown with a phone and a social media account- like me- can post their version of alternative facts. Lucky me, I don’t use chemical fertilizer so I’m not experiencing the cost surge with those products, but I can’t pretend that I’m “pure.” I use plenty of diesel and those prices are through the roof. It’s a weird world out there right now….and a good time to take a step back from time to time and reflect on how much beauty there is to enjoy seeing, smelling, hearing, touching and tasting.
We’ve planted over 250 different rose bushes on the farm
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I Helped Them Buy The Building
Jordan, the Happy Girl, on the left, with a happy customer on the right. Our marigolds frame the doorway.
Looking from the main shop and dining area through the garland doorway to the grocery section. Happy Girl likes to deck the hall with garlands of marigold in honor of Dia de Los Muertos and Diwali
Hi Folks: I met Jordan Champagne in the late 1990s when she and her husband, Todd, literally pitched their tent along the edge of a field I was farming near Aromas. Today, I am happy to lend my support to Jordan and the team at Happy Girl Kitchen as they make a serious effort to purchase the building in Pacific Grove that houses their restaurant and cannery. There are a lot of sad stories out there about the dashed hopes of idealistic kids, the lost years of misspent youth, and the brutal realities of bad luck, but this is not one of them. Let me tell you Happy Girl Kitchen’s “Happy” story from my perspective, and let’s see if together we can help them write another happy chapter.
Jordan with one of her cows. The cows provide milk and cream for the cafe. They have a tiny but very professional dairy in upper Carmel Valley
Todd & Jordan’s Son, Rye, at Mariquita Farm, hauling a harvest of marigolds up the hill to their van to take back to the cafe.
I had been a founding partner of Happy Boy Farm, and when I left that partnership to start Mariquita Farm with my late wife, Julia, she and I chose to focus our efforts on building a “CSA program.” “CSA” is just a fancy acronym for “Community Supported Agriculture.” The idea wasn’t new, but it was exciting to us. We’d learned that in Japan there was a movement among frustrated consumers who wanted more choices of organically grown food available in their stores so that they didn’t have to rely on conventionally grown produce imported from abroad. Instead of merely complaining about how big corporations rule the world, some Japanese consumers chose to band together and support their remaining local farms by stepping in where big banks fear to lend. The people joined together with their neighbors to pay the few remaining small-scale local farmers in their communities to grow the traditional, heirloom vegetables in the natural way that they wanted – Community Supported Agriculture! Of course, the truth is that all farms are supported by some community or other; it could be a “community” of bankers, lobbyists, petrochemical companies, major chain retailers, and the politicians that do the bidding of their corporate sponsors, or it could be a community of you and I and our friends who want to preserve a local food system that works for our local interests. As we grew our little CSA farm Jordan was our first delivery driver. She was passionate about building community around food, she was excited to work with organic farms, and she had a valid driver’s license. As a former employer I KNOW how hard she works.
Meanwhile, over at Happy Boy Farms, Jordan worked with my former partner and managed his growing farmers market operation. When she noticed how much food waste seems inevitable on farms she thought to take advantage of all the cull produce and unsold veggies by preserving and canning the produce as pickles and sauces. So she and Todd learned how to do all that. And they learned about the permitting and the legal ramifications of preserving and selling food. Soon the jars of preserved foods were available to sell at Happy Boy Farm’s market stalls and a separate entity emerged- Happy Girl Kitchen. It was nice to see Jordan’s idea develop and take off. When she and Todd were able to successfully spin the Happy Boy kitchen effort off as their own company, Happy Girl Kitchen, I was happy to be able to turn to them and have them can the tomatoes that I grew, or make marmalades from the citrus I was growing.
The Mariquita Farm cats, Casha & Tassa, arriving as kittens from the Happy Girl Dairy in Cachagua. “Casha” is short for “Cachagua” and “Tassa” is short for “Tassajara.” I too grew up in that neighborhood. These two are my homies!
Besides running a CSA program, Julia and I sold produce in San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. When Happy Girl Kitchen got their own stall there, so we were “neighbors” again and we would each pitch our tents near to each other. It was fun to watch their progress. Eventually, as our children got older, it was difficult to always be busy on a Saturday morning, so after 18 years in the farmers market we dropped out to create a more amenable family schedule. In the meantime Todd and Jordan had started a family. I wasn’t surprised when, years later, they too eventually chose to drop out of regular attendance at the farmers market to better manage their family life. I was happy to learn that they had opted to move away from a life on the road serving farmers markets to open up a little cannery and cafe in the nearby town of Pacific Grove. I was worried a bit about the challenge they’d face running a restaurant as well as managing a cannery, but they did it! That was 15 years ago now< And they’ve done it well. Happy Girl Kitchen has become a hub for farms all around our area. Not only have they preserved produce for a wide range of our local growers, they have taught classes, organized events, served as a venue, and cooked a million great meals. I’m so proud of them and it’s fun to have a “I knew them when” story.
Besides operating a Community Supported AG program for many years and working in farmers markets I’ve served the restaurant trade, especially in San Francisco and Berkeley. In fact, the first vegetable farm I ever worked on back in 1980 was a garden that was in the service of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse and at this point in my life the ups and downs of the restaurant industry are in my DNA. With over 45 years in the service of kitchens I’ve learned a thing or two.
I can think back on so many warm, inviting restaurants with great food that I worked with over the years and that are no longer with us. I know that running a restaurant is a hard and demanding task. I have respect for any restaurant that can survive the initial period of being the exciting new place in town and mature into being a timeless destination. It’s not enough to serve good food in a warm and inviting environment. It’s not always even enough to be a really WELL RUN place with happy, dedicated employees, dishing out thoughtful service along with the great food! What I observe is that it’s the restaurants that can do all of that and who OWN THEIR BUILDINGS that thrive over the long haul.
Happy Girl Kitchen has survived the ups and downs of the economy because they do a good job, they assiduously court and support local growers in the service of their community and their customers, and they work hard. I trust them.
As a farmer I want places like Happy Girl Kitchen in the neighborhood to buy the herbs, veggies, fruits and flowers that I grow.As a food producer with too much to do already I depend on canneries like Happy Girl Kitchen because I need a licensed, permitted facility with a skilled staff to preserve the tomatoes I grow or make marmalade from the citrus I’ve produced.
As a consumer and resident of the Monterey Bay Area I enjoy restaurants like Happy Girl Kitchen. When I find myself on the Monterey Peninsula and I want a great sandwich or a savory hot soup, or a cup aromatic chai, HGK is always inviting, dependable and satisfying and I always direct all my friends who are checking out the Monterey Bay Aquarium to drop in there after visiting the otters and octopi.
And as a hopeful person I need places like Happy Girl Kitchen to thrive; their success validates my own dreams about the healing effects of warm, positive, flavorful community spirit. Join me, and let’s all say, “We helped them buy the building!”
Links Below
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