Ladybug Letters
Mariquita 2.0
Have you noticed that God didn’t create “The Farm of Eden?” It’s one thing to imagine walking in a garden naked with your lover like Adam & Eve did, innocently sharing ribs, sharing fruit, caught up in the enchantment of nature. But a farm? It’s not the same vibe to wander around an alfalfa field in your birthday suit, or a cattle feedlot, or a cabbage patch. Besides, if we are to take the Book of Genesis literally, farms are “cursed ground.” By the end of Chapter Three, God has kicked the first couple out of Eden and we’ve all had to live in exile, “by the sweat of the brow,” ever since. Farms are work. Farms are all about production, harvest, sales, shipping, payables, receivables, payroll, regulations, taxes and either avoiding, surviving, or ameliorating the vagaries of weather.
I don’t buy into the notion that my career in agriculture has been a curse but, like Adam’s first son, Cain, I am a farmer, and sometimes agriculture can feel punishing. The last several years have been an especially challenging rollercoaster ride for many businesses, with all of the disruptions provoked or aggravated by the Covid 19 virus, and life on our little farm has been no exception. But there has been one benefit to all the plague drama; Starr & I got to devote a lot more time to our home garden. With every other distraction closed down or restricted, there wasn’t much else to do but garden when we weren’t working on the farm. And now, after three years, as the pandemic slowly morphs into a “new normal,” the gardens on our home ranch shine like they never did before and our work is beginning to pay off in blossoms and fruit. Our place can’t be The Garden of Eden, but we can aim towards planting a paradise, and we’ve even found homes for a couple of colorful, decorative, little talavera pottery snakes amongst our flowers, just for fun.
Over the last three years we have planted over a hundred citrus trees, and set out at least one hundred rose bushes. We’ve set out beds of ornamental and culinary herbs, we’ve created floral walkways, planted redwood trees, and erected frames for heirloom Mexican crops like Hoja Santa, chayote, and perennial beans. We’ve tucked a kaleidoscope of ornamental sages and succulents into the corners and crannies of the garden, and established hedges of fruiting cacti. Our most sustained effort at gardening has probably been the construction of a raised bed Eleven Circuit Medieval Labyrinth, modeled after the labyrinth at the Chartres Cathedral in France, but we have planted ours out with several thousand aromatic lavender plants. And now, after all our work and the passage of time, the garden is really starting to come together. We’re calling this project “The Ladybug’s Labyrinth and Secret Garden.” It’s our goal to share our creation with the hummingbirds, butterflies, bees and ladybugs that are so much at home here in this quiet and beautiful setting…. and with you!
The pestilence of Covid aside, agriculture is never a stroll through the garden, and it never has been. Farmers who persist at their occupation learn to change their operations and adapt to the economic environment as marketing conditions change around them, just as they have to react to the weather. The now typically and predictably insane weekday traffic across the Bay Area has made our old delivery model of business problematic, so one of the adaptations we’ve made at Mariquita Farm has been to move towards a garden scale operation that is more of a destination for people to come to us. I’m thinking of this new effort at serving the people as Mariquita 2.0. Yes, we will continue to offer our produce to consumers through a series of pop-ups around the Bay Area, as we have in the past, but we will be focusing those outreach efforts on the summer and fall months when we can count on your favorite harvests of dry-farmed Early Girl tomatoes, and colorful heirloom and cherry tomatoes to go along with the herbs and flowers.
New on the farm this last year was an addition of the onsite Ladybug Gift Shop where we feature all of our dried herbs, heirloom beans, corn and flowers, along with a collection of gifts, plus a variety of plant starts that we have grown, including both edible and ornamental plants. For those folks who are further away, or for mailing our farm products and gifts to friends and family out of the area, look for our new mail order possibilities on the website this spring. Also, on the farm for the 2023 season, we will host a series of exciting workshops on a range of activities-everything from ice-dyed clothing, amazing copper stone and gem wand making, to stepping into your garden with your very own hand-made stepping-stones. Flowers will be abundant on the farm this summer and you will be able to come and make a variety of flower bouquets. Visit us and walk the Labyrinth on World Labyrinth day, May 6th when we will host a labyrinth tour. And… if you have your own party ideas, anything from company staff parties to bridal or bachelorette parties, or if you want a place to host your workshop, our farm can be your farm for a day! Look for all the new exciting details on how to host an amazing farm event with your family and friends.
All of the details on our events and farm day-use will be presented on our newly designed website coming out later in March. You can also keep an eye on what’s coming up via our two Facebook accounts, Mariquita Farm and Ladybug’s Labyrinth and Secret Garden and you can find us on Instagram @mariquitafarm or @ladybugslabyrinth.
We are very excited about these changes and we hope you will be too!
We want to thank each and every one of you for your loyal support as hosts and customers over the many years in our CSA. Our hope is to continue the relationship by offering you an opportunity to visit us here on the farm and to come out when we have pop-ups in your area.
Here’s to a wonderful 2023
Andy and Starr
© 2023 Essay by Andy Griffin
Photos by Starling Linden
Hope Springs Eternal
I’ve got a counterintuitive tale for you. Several years ago, during the driest, dustiest, saddest period of the last drought, I was gazing out the kitchen window to the north, across the fields and towards the Santa Cruz Mountains. From the valley floor to the top of Loma Prieta and Mount Madonna the land was faded, tired, and sad. But the lone Live Oak in the middle of the field just below my house seemed particularly droopy, as if it were losing leaves. I wondered if maybe the Oak Moths were getting to it so I wandered down the hill to check it out. I drew close to the weeping oak and I was looking up into the branches, expecting to see a cloud of Oak moths fluttering about or a swarm of their caterpillar larvae eating at the leaves, when I suddenly sank in mud up to my ankles. The ground under the dying Live oak was sopping wet. In the middle of the drought we had a puddle in our field. I looked back up the slope towards our house and my gaze settled on our windmill that stood still and quiet…
Oak tree (before).
We got electric power here on the ranch back in 1956 and my grandfather chose, at that time, to switch from wind power to an electric pump to draw our water from the spring box. The old windmill had worked fine to bring water to the surface and maintain an animal trough, but it couldn’t push the water up the hill to the house, and at any rate our field is sheltered and we don’t have a lot of wind. The old well isn’t deep either. My great grandfather, Marius Jorgensen, built it by digging a deep hole. He was a mason by trade, schooled in Denmark, and he did his work “Old School” style by laying a ring of brick around himself as he dug the hole until he had excavated a cavity 10 feet wide and 20 feet deep and lined it with bricks. Water seeped between the bricks and rained into the cavity until the well was filled. Of course, there were snails in there, and salamanders and god-knows-what-else swimming in the water, but we drank it. When I got married my wife, Julia, took one look at the well and said, “No Way. I’m Modern!” So we had a domestic well dug next to the house that was 250 feet deep, with a concrete collar around the well shaft to eliminate the danger of any surface water contaminating the deep aquifer.
Oak Tree (after)
The water seeping into our old spring box down the hill from the modern well is surface water- it seeps out from springs from a local and shallow Santa Cruz Mountain aquifer that rides on top of the deeper Sierra Nevada aquifer. If you look out across the valley from our place you can see stands of willow trees growing along the hills, all at the same elevation above the valley floor, marking where the land drops from this surface aquifer so that the native water bearing layer is exposed and shows itself as a series of springs and seeps. When Jack Edsberg drilled a new well for me in 1994, the tailings from under the bore hole showed us that the drill bit chewed through 200 feet of pure clay to reach the gravel beds and underground rivers of the second, deeper aquifer. Since we first started pumping from the new, deep, well for domestic use our water table has fallen at a rate of about a foot a year. This is not good news. We still have a standing column of water 100 feet deep to draw from, but at this rate we are game-over for water in a hundred years. But, paradoxically, our local watershed that overlays it is releasing more water through the springs on our property than it did in the recent past. The ailing oak tree was drowning in a drought.
Once we had our new, domestic pump to serve the house, I was free to use all the spring box water on my farming projects. I installed a 5000-gallon water storage tank at the top of the hill, to hold the spring water for fire protection and light irrigation. And for years I did grow a modest few beds of herbs at the home farm and I began planting citrus, roses, and cacti. Maybe it was one of our local earthquakes that moved some subterranean rock around and opened up some new springs to flow on our land. Since I clearly now have enough new water to drown an old oak tree I figured I could use another storage tank. We got the new tank installed this past summer. Now, with 10,000 gallons of water storage, I feel comfortable that I can maintain a much more serious effort at farming this land than I have in the past, and for the past year we’ve been gearing up our efforts at production here This year we were able to finish the labyrinth that we dug by hand and planted out with lavender. And in 2023 we get to see the first mature bloom set. And the remarkable thing is that the lavender, a drought tolerant crop, uses very little water.
Around the edge of the field with the labyrinth I planted a hedge of nopal cacti, interspersed with roses. I was fortunate, a few years back, to be gifted cuttings for 15 different kinds of prickly pear cacti by a member of the Rare Fruit Society. As they mature and begin to produce their fruits the range of colors of the fruits will become obvious. There are “prickly pears,” or “tunas,” in Spanish, that are purple, red, rose, orange, yellow, white, and green. The different varieties of nopal cacti yield their crops at different times of the year, and their fruits taste different and lend themselves to different uses. The purple cactus fruits are known to the Italians as “Fico d’Indio,” or “Indian Figs,” and they are much appreciated for their use in flavoring and coloring lovely granitas and sherbets. Purple cactus syrups are great for coloring drinks too.
Starr harvesting rose petals.
There’s a logic to planting roses too. I’ve come to appreciate how hardy roses are. I like plants that can survive the sometimes-long stretches of time when I’m too preoccupied to pay much attention. Roses respond well to care, and sometimes they can benefit from a period of benign neglect. At present we’ve got about a 100 roses planted and It’s been nice to see these plants start to flourish. Starr has been harvesting fresh petals for a local aesthetician, Wild Beauty Cosmetics, in Soquel, and dried petals for the Dream Inn Romantic Room Package, in Santa Cruz. The fun thing about harvesting petals is that we get to enjoy the roses before we need to harvest them. Against the western edge of the field, which I feel is too shady for good cacti habitat, I switched from interspersing cacti with roses to planting a row of solid roses. But these are all climbing roses that can scale the young live oaks that border the field and, in time, provide a dramatic backdrop of color to embrace the labyrinth and milpa that take up the flat ground.
The lemons and other citrus that we’ve planted on the slope behind the labyrinth are greedier for water. Citrus trees are usually grafted trees; there’s a sturdy rootstock of a citrus variety that is valued for vitality and disease resistance, upon which are grafted the valuable commercial varieties of fruit bearing variety. When a citrus tree is stressed for water it has seemed to me that the vulgar, spiny rootstock responds by sending up new shoots and overwhelming the scion that’s been grafted to it. After three years in the ground I see the most recent citrus plantings starting to really thrive and it makes me feel good. We’re already getting lots of lemons, and now the limes are beginning to kick in, and there are Buddha’s Hands from time to time. Next year will be the year that the other varieties of citrus catch up and begin producing meaningful harvests. We’ve got yuzu, limequats, finger limes, Rangpur limes, and blood oranges planted- and flowering.
Looking into a bucket of cover crop seed.
It’s raining as I write this note, and it makes me glad that we got our cover crop in just before the storm hit. Thanks to our hardworking volunteers Arnie & Linda for helping us scatter the seed across the tilled field, just ahead of the raindrops. Next year I plan to flip the planting scheme around so that the ground that had marigolds on it this year will have the milpa, and vice-versa. The milpa was a lot of fun, and productive. We harvested a lot of corn and squash. Next year I plan on milpa that uses Otto File corn, Rugosa squash, and Italian runner bean for a fun Italian spin on the traditional Mexican planting scheme- as though the garden were planted along the Oaxacan-Sicilian border.
We built a small greenhouse to grow seedlings in, and sowing trays of vegetables along with a larger focus on flowers in 2023. For now, the last crops of 2022 are getting harvested and the fields are getting put to sleep for the winter.
We hope you will enjoy the last of the fruit and vegetable harvest along with our great stocking stuffers of dried herbs, herbal “tea” infusions, lavender and rose gifts, herbal cooking salts, jars of marmalades, beets and curried cauliflower and all the other delightful items we have left to offer. And don’t forget you can send some of these wonderful items to friends all over the country with our gift packages or order them for pickup at your site making it a happy holiday filled with farm gifts for everyone.
Thanks,
Andy, Starr and the Crew at Mariquita Farm
© 2022 Essay by Andy Griffin
Photos by Andy Griffin and Starling Linden
There’s More to the Story
“Every picture tells a story” they’ll tell you. And it’s probably “a thousand words” long, too, if the clichés are to be believed. But I wonder if maybe it isn’t the frame that’s the most important part of any picture? How you choose to frame an image both limits and focuses any intended expression. Another person, finding themselves in the same circumstances with the same camera as you, might react with a snapshot that tells an almost entirely different tale simply by framing the moment from a different perspective. One of my favorite pictures that I took this year was of Kelly waving up at me from inside the marigold patch. The image captured a moment of joy and color for me, and it confirmed all the choices I’d made about what kind of marigolds to plant and when to plant them. We were inspired to plant a marigold crop to coincide with Diwali and Dia de los Muertos festivities and, with some friendly mentoring from our friends at Arnosky Family Farm in Wimberly, Texas, we got the right seed, planted it at the right time, and totally nailed the moment. The flowers were fun to grow, beautiful, aromatic, and catalytic too, because they prompted us to meet some new people and engage with new communities.
A different perspective of the labyrinth.
A different photographer visiting the farm might have focused on an entirely different scenario. If you choose to employ a wide angle setting, you can paint an entirely different picture than that of a young woman smiling in a field of gold. A wider perspective can take in the labyrinthine pattern of garden bends dug into the field just beyond the marigolds and planted out in lavender. From above, looking down on the field from a bird’s eye view it might look for a moment that there was a crop circle carved into the land. But there’s nothing alien about this labyrinth; Starr and I created it ourselves as our homegrown Covid project to broadcast some positive energy back at the world around us. Labyrinths are mysterious. We chose to model our homegrown labyrinth on the eleven circuit labyrinthine mosaic that was set into the floor of the Chartres Cathedral in France back in the Middle Ages. We bordered our labyrinth’s path in lavender because lavender is a very hardy, drought tolerant, healing herb. This earth-art project has been a couple of years in development and execution and it felt good to get it finished this year. One of the fun things about the labyrinth is that our cats often come down to join us when we’re working on it. Here’s a picture of Samson, our apricot-blond dreamboat of a cat, watching us weed the lavender beds on a mild, fall afternoon. We look forward to inviting you down in the spring to walk the labyrinth when it’s grown out more fully and in full bloom.
Samson in the Lavender beds.
Corn silk in the milpa.
Sometimes I’ll go on Google Earth to get a satellite’s super-wide view down on the farm. The last time I checked NASA had not yet swept overhead to record the milpa that we planted to embrace our labyrinth garden. A milpa is a classic indigenous Mexican planting scheme where the “holy trinity” of corn, squashes, and beans that are planted out together. In the dream world of a perfect milpa, the squash spread out across the earth, with their broad leaves choking out any malignant weeds. The corn stalks poke up through the canopy of squash foliage and the beans twine up the corn stalks. Corn, squash, and beans make a well-rounded diet for the human body and the plants are complementary in the field too. In a perfect milpa the weeds are succulent purslanes, glaucous quantities, and purple, wild tomatillos, each a nutritious complement to field and body, and weedy only in the sense that these plants defy any attempt to discipline them. The milpa worked out well this year and I have plans for next year’s milpa already. We will switch out the marigolds and plant them where the milpa was this year, and vice versa. Marigolds make an excellent rotation crop for food crops as they tend to suppress soil pathogens. We will put the corn, squash, and beans where the marigolds grew this year. We’re putting a nitrogen fixing cover crop on this ground next week, before the next rain hits. For a fun twist on the classic Mesoamerican milpa logic we will use an Italian heirloom polenta corn called “Otto File” for the corn part of the equation, and an heirloom Italian hard squash, the Rugosa butternut, to stand in for the squash component, and Japanese runner beans to be the legumes that will complete the trinity. Think of next year’s milpa as a fantasy garden planted somewhere along the Oaxacan/Italian/Japanese frontier. We had a fun farm tour this year when we participated in the Open Farm tour, and we plan to repeat and improve upon that experience.
Greg and Gus from the Dream Inn.
In 2023 we are focusing on welcoming visitors to the farm for events and workshops. Opportunities for small groups of 60 or less people can rent the gardens for staff parties and meetings, workshops, weddings, divorce parties and much more. Starr and I were happy to host The Dream Inn, from Santa Cruz, early this fall when the kitchen put on a special meal for their partners and associates in the media. It was fun to break out my heirloom cauldron that my Grandma used to cook beans in, back when she was a ranch cook in the 1930s and 40s. Keep an eye on our newsletter for updates about upcoming events and workshops that we will host in the spring and summer. The rose gardens are a sight to see and we hope to showcase them in April and May. In the short term, after we return from a brief Thanksgiving break, we plan to have a few popups in December before the winter holidays.
The table is set!
Wishing you all a full table of bounty!
Andy, Starr and the Crew at Mariquita Farm
© 2022 Essay by Andy Griffin
Photos by Andy Griffin and Starling Linden
Giving Thanks!
Turkeys roaming in the labyrinth.
Every day is “Turkey Day” at Mariquita Farm….but Thanksgiving only comes once a year. We have resident flocks of wild turkeys that roost in the pines in the forest at the edge of our field. It’s funny to see them hopping from bed to bed as they traverse the hand-dug 11 circuit medieval labyrinth that we’ve created in the middle of the field. When Starr created a farm store by our front gate one of the hens was captured by her reflection in the glass until I chased her off and broke the spell. When the turkey chicks hatch in the spring we see the hens lead long trains of little, fluffy, golf-balls through the grass on their daily hunt for the bugs, seeds, sprouts and greens that make up their daily diet. At first, we might see over twenty chicks trailing behind the hens. Then we’ll see 18, then 15, then 9, or fewer. The woods here are populated with fierce creatures that love to eat turkey every day of the year. Wild turkeys may seem silly and stupid, but somehow they survive the Bobcats, coyotes, mountain lions, and foxes as a tribe to raise up another brood of turkeys for the following spring.
Turkey reflecting…
Thanksgiving has been positioned by America’s promotional wizards as “Turkey Day” because gratitude is harder to monetize than dead fowl. I appreciate Thanksgiving because, besides being a moment to gather for a meal with friends and family, it also marks the end of the year’s growing season on the farm and I know that I’ll have a couple of more restful months ahead of me before the merry-go-round speeds up again. We’re almost to Thanksgiving again and I’m thankful that we’ve had a year on the farm with lots of work, but no accidents or unseemly drama. It’s been another weird year’s ride through the Covid pandemic, with uncertainties abounding, but thanks to your support we’ve made it through the season, and we’ve got a fall harvest basket full of wonder to share with you for your Thanksgiving meal. We wish you a peaceful Thanksgiving.
Here’s our schedule:
Following Thanksgiving we will step away from our regular delivery schedule but we will do some December pop-ups as we approach the winter holidays. Here’s our tentative schedule for December.
Saturday, December 10, 2022 in Palo Alto
Thursday, December 15, 2022 in Berkeley
Saturday, December 17, 2022 at Piccino Restaurant in SF.
Tuesday, December 20, 2022 in Santa Cruz County and Los Gatos
Turkeys roosting…
The holidays are here and we hope that you will consider sharing our gift boxes of dried herbs and herbal infusions, heirloom beans and jarred beets, curried cauliflower, tomato juice, crushed tomatoes and marmalades with your friends and and family. We ship or we will drop off at a pickup location. We also have lots of lavender, rose petals and lavender florets to share before the year is over.
Thanks for support this year!
Your friends at Mariquita Farm!
Andy, Starr, Shelley, Kelly, Gayle, Gildardo, Rebeca, Fidel and Federico, Hose, Abisai, Claudia, Neftali, Ramone and Maria
© 2022 Essay and Photos by Andy Griffin
Chayote
A few of you might find the fierce looking chayote that I’ve put in your harvest share box to be somewhat alarming. Fear not! Beneath it’s seemingly hostile exterior the chayote is actually a mild-mannered, healthy, economical and tasty friend in the kitchen with a worldwide fan-base. In case you don’t already know the chayote plant by reputation or from personal experience, let me make a formal introduction:
Every plant’s leaf is essentially a solar panel, erected and unfolded with the express purpose of gathering the sun’s energy in order to power the growth, maintenance, and eventual reproduction of the organism. The chayote’s broad, flat, and soft, pliable leaf is a clue that it might be a fast growing plant, and indeed it is. Not only do broad, flat leaves capture lots of sunshine and provide the power for rapid growth in high light environments, they’re also useful for plants that are growing in lower light situations to capture any and all of the available photons, and we see that the chayote employs both strategies for survival. Chayotes evolved in the area we now know as Central America, especially southern Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. The Chayote is a sprawling creature, spreading out over any available ground while sending long, tendriled vines high into and through the canopy of nearby trees, emerging from the tangled branches that make up the roof of the jungle into the bright light just that much closer to the sun.
If leaves are “solar panels,” then tubers are “batteries.” A chayote vine may trail 50 feet up a tree to chase the sun but it is sending the energy it gathers down the tangle of its stems into a tuber buried under the ground. The tuber stores the sun’s energy in the form of sugar and starch. A tuberous growth habit is a typical survival mechanism for tropical plants that can experience sudden, unexpected frosts that will burn up tender, exposed foliage. Yes, the Central American ecosystem where chayote evolved is usually warm, humid, and sunny, but mountains are mountains, and every once in a while there’s a sudden, hard frost that stings the higher elevations. The chayote that gets burned to the ground by the cold can always stage a comeback by sending up new shoots from the buried tuber that was insulated by the protective embrace of the earth. Potatoes do this too; they’re from the tropical Andes where the inconsistency of the weather is the only “constant.”
Oaxacan Chayote
A wild chayote’s fruit is spiny, which tells us that there’s something tasty there to be protected. The chayote is in the squash family, the Cucurbitaceae, and the flesh of its fruit is dense and mild flavored. A mouse or wild boar might want to eat the chayote but the gourd’s stiff spines are not very inviting. The indigenous people who lived across the natural range of the chayote learned to peel the spines off and enjoy the flesh of the fruit either raw, sliced thin and made tender with lime juice or salt, or steamed, boiled, baked or grilled.Like its cousin, the zucchini, the chayote has a mild flavor that can serve as a “delivery vehicle” for any number of more emphatic and unctuous sauces like mole. Our modern name for the crop, “Chayote,” comes from the Nahuatle word, “chayotli,” but as the crop gained popularity and spread south into what’s now South America it picked up other names, like “Chuchu,” or “Cahiote.” The fruits were harvested and used like squash, the tendrils and leaves were used as greens and added to soups and stews, and the tubers were dug up and cooked like potatoes.
When the Spanish voyagers came to the “New World” the chayotes jumped aboard their sailing boats. Despite its many uses, the chayote was not initially welcomed back in Europe. Like other indigenous American crops that feature in the “Columbian Exchange,” like the potatoes, tomatoes, and chili peppers, the chayote was suspect because it was not mentioned in the Bible. Since it didn’t get a specific name drop in Genesis, doesn’t that mean that the chayote might not have been created by God, but rather by Satan?
Once their colonies were established the Spaniards gathered up once a year, the immense piles of silver, gold, and jewels that they robbed from their new American subjects, or dug with slave labor from American mines and loaded up their ships with the booty, setting sail for Asian ports where they would trade. The treasure fleet that left from the port of San Blas, in Nyarit, was called the Manila Galleon, because its first port of call was in the Philippines. Filipino cooks were unconcerned with chayote’s suspected Satanic origins and they took to crop fast. Tagalog for chayote is “Sayote.” From Manila the culture and appreciation of the chayote spread out across Asia. You know that little chunk of something white and unknown that was covered in sauce in your Chinese takeout and you ate it without worrying? Chances are strong that was chayote.
I’ve started growing chayote under the influence of my foreman, Fidel, and the Oaxacans I’ve been working with. It’s been a fun crop to learn about. The trick for success in growing any plant is to learn where and under what conditions it evolved, and to mimic that setting as much as possible. If a plant germinates and feels “at home,” the chances are very high that it will grow successfully. We bury each chayote that we intend to grow in a gopher basket so that the pesky rodents can’t harvest before we do. We erect a frame of 4×4 posts cloaked in chicken wire to give the vines something to climb on, like the thickets of sticks that natural chayotes would encounter in a natural setting, and then we give the plantation a thorough, gentle soak every once in a while, just like the rains they would experience in their Oaxacan or Honduran mountain homes. The chayote plants seem very happy here.
I had a couple of Oaxacan women visit the farm the other day and do a chayote “U-Pick.” They prefer the spiny chayotes, which is the variety that they know from back home. We have several different kinds of chayote growing, including the smooth forms that are preferred in Asian markets. What I’ve noticed is that the spiny chayotes come first, and the spineless, smooth chayotes tend to take a couple of weeks longer to develop, even though they were all planted at the same time. Maybe I’m just dull and insensitive, but the several kinds all taste pretty much the same.
I hope you enjoy eating the chayote as much as I have enjoyed growing them. You can use them almost anyway you would any other summer squash. I’ve enjoyed them in saute and dressed with lemon or lime juice. You can keep them in the fridge, but you don’t need to. They’re perfectly able to hang out at room temperature on the counter and you can enjoy them as weird vegetal sculptures before you cook them.
Andy and the Crew at Mariquita Farm
© 2022 Essay by Andy Griffin
Photos by Andy Griffin and Starling Linden
Something to Crow About
Starr with a few crows in Palo Alto.
I’m booted up, caffeinated, mouse in hand, and ready to hammer out a petulant screed concerning the general carelessness in the fashion industry as concerns “seasonality.” But first, we need to address some scurrilous allegations and imputations that have been passed around about the genus Corvus.
Cattle form a “herd.” Bees “swarm.” “Geese flock.” Even Alligators only “congregate.” But when three or more crows gather together it’s a “Murder?” This terminology isn’t fair to crows. Yes, some crows can be naughty. And maybe crows poke their beaks into places they’ve not been invited, but Corvus family members are not straight-up killers like the hawks and eagles of the Falconidae. Maybe it’s because of their curiosity and willingness to go where they don’t belong that Crows, Magpies, and their cousins, the Ravens, ended up serving the mythic world as “spies for Odin,” and “messengers” for other Norse gods. Crows worked for Yahweh too; when Noah wanted to see if the world flood that God had let loose was receding, he let loose the raven to fly over the waters the way a modern day General might send forth a drone. Of course, Noah’s raven didn’t come back. Religious scholars may differ on why a free bird didn’t return to the fetid, crowded ship full of bawling, mooing, barking, howling, braying, hissing creatures, but suffice it to say that the Corvus family doesn’t need humankind to survive. After the glow of our man-made Apocalypse has faded, and the radioactive ashes have settled, the crows will still be here, along with the seagulls, cockroaches, coyotes, and raccoons. Corvids are smart birds.
I’ve seen the damage crows can cause but their crime was greed and not malice, the way a murder is. In the early 1980s, when I worked at Star Route Farm, in Bolinas, we planted out the lagoon field in pumpkins and gave the land a light sprinkling. We were confident that once the pumpkin seeds germinated their roots would soon penetrate the rich soil and reach the abundant groundwater. We speculated that we’d be able to essentially dry-farm the pumpkin patch to a successful harvest. The pumpkins germinated. As each seed sent down the radical, or first root, into the soil, the two fat, green cotyledons of the sprout pushed out of the soil into the sunlight, still wearing the now empty husk of the pumpkin seeds like little hats. A “murder” of crows passed by and saw the fresh sprouts. They wanted to fatten up on some tasty, rich pumpkin seeds so they tugged at the husk. The crows succeeded in pulling the tiny plants from the ground but each sprout was a disappointment because the oily seeds had burned up all their nutritious oil and rich flavor. The crows hopped from sprout to sprout, tugging at the seed husks until the entire crop was uprooted. The day after the crop germinated the field was bald of any pumpkin spots. Luckily, it was early enough in the season so that we could re-plant the crop. When we set out the second crop of pumpkins we used transplants instead of directly sowing the seeds, and we carefully pulled any seed husks that still clung to the cotyledons before we popped the little plants in the soil. And we put out scarecrows.
It’s not clear to me that scarecrows actually “scare” any crows, but putting them in the field like sentries does help a farmer feel like they’re doing everything they can to produce a good crop. Once the early, cold, hungry months of spring are past, there’s generally enough food around for crows to survive without worrying a garden to death. Crows are opportunistic; they’ll eat bugs, worms, insect eggs, seeds, and carrion. They’re like coyotes in that respect, always on the lookout for an opportunity. But crows are not malevolent by nature; they just fulfill a niche that awards them for being nosy, indelicate, and persistent. And, like the coyote, crows can be loud. To call a group of crows a “murder,” is to devalue the role they play in a healthy, balanced natural ecology. I suggest that we “re-brand” the crows that flock together as a “caw-cawphony” of Corvids.
I also call upon the fashion industry to rethink their tired efforts at dressing our nation’s scare crows as a gesture of respect for nature. Why, if the point of putting a scarecrow into a field is to scare off the crows from the recently sprouted crops in the spring, or from the first ripe berries and fruits of the early summer, are scare crows only given attention in the fashion press in the fall? And why are the scare crows so typically draped in dreary rags? The crows that these scarecrows are supposed to be scaring always look their best in shiny, iridescent, black plumage. Maybe the designers that plot the fall fashion lines for scarecrows want the crows to actually die laughing at the hideous overalls and straw hats that the scarecrows must typically wear. Wouldn’t it be more fun and effective to dress the scarecrows in the neon outfits that bicyclists favor? Or how about those insane golf pants that old guys wear on the links- those are scary as hell….Wedding dresses could be repurposed for scarecrows too, once the lifetime union of two souls has been torn asunder by infidelity or dishonesty and the dress simply hangs in the closet as a reminder of disappointment. Crows aren’t use to seeing these kinds of garments on the scarecrows and maybe they would find the novelty of new outfits alarming. Each winter the fashion world could have their models walk the runways festooned in the newest, most lurid and alarming styles that will soon be seen in the nation’s gardens and farms.
Andy and the Crew at Mariquita Farm
© 2022 Essay and Photos by Andy Griffin
And, something to crow about…check out this article in Edible Monterey Bay, “Cactus, Citrus and Cauldrons at Mariquita Farm” by Laura Ness.
A Wise Recipe
Ripe fruit from the vine!
Joel is my “cousin in law” from the Midwestern side of my family. He’s a gifted artist who works in a number of different mediums, and I really appreciate the decorative tile work that he did for us that we have set in the walls of our kitchen; one tile showing a carrot, another a green onion. Joel lives in rural Minnesota and I am pretty much pinned down to my plot of ground here on the left coast, but I follow his progress on social media. Sometimes, besides posting photos or updates about his artwork or family he will re-post memes of a social or political nature, and I am usually amused by them or share the sentiment that they seek to convey. But sometimes Joel will take his taste for socialist inspired messages entirely too far. Recently he posted a meme about the differences between knowledge, wisdom and philosophy that really grated on me and I thought I might reach out and contact him personally, but then I decided that since these distinctions are important and affect us all I would address all of you with my concerns and cc Joel. The offending meme runs as follows:
“Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit.
Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
Philosophy is wondering if putting it in a Bloody Mary counts as a smoothie.”
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!. I’m a tomato farmer, so I have a dog in this fight. Plus, once-upon-a-time in a previous life I got a degree in Western Philosophy. True, a philosophy degree does not convey any privileged insights into the value or meaning of ultimate reality, but if a student pays attention in class and reads the material they’ve been assigned they can learn how to act as though they have witnessed the mysteries revealed. I did my homework, so I feel confident “laying it on thick,” and here’s what I know about truth, knowledge, wisdom and tomatoes.
It’s true that the tomato is a fruit. If you have a hard time with that fact then you probably won’t accept that the palm tree is a grass or that the pumpkin is a berry, or that climate change is real. In that case, this essay isn’t for you.
It’s not true that “Wisdom is NOT putting a tomato in a fruit salad,” At one time in life I would have agreed with that sentiment, but time and experience have taught me that the tomato can be a fantastic component in a fruit salad, and that having “wisdom” is having the willingness to learn from experience and accept facts as real, even when they contradict dearly held prejudices. Opening oneself up to the potential validity of tomatoes in a fruit salad can be an example of living philosophically. Better yet, MAKE a fruit salad with tomatoes and learn. The Spanish language can be revealing in this instance. In Spanish the verb “saber,” meaning “to know,” is the same word as the verb “to taste.” The word “savory” in English is cognate with “saber” in Spanish. The old frontier/cowboy expression- “you savvy?” is a degraded, anglicized version of the Spanish phrase “Sabe Usted?” meaning, “do you get it?” Fruit salad can be savory, as well as cloyingly sweet. Here’s a recipe for a savory fruit salad that celebrates the tomato as a fruit.
1: Split open a watermelon and cut the flesh into bite-sized cubes and dump them in a large bowl.
2. Lightly salt the watermelon cubes. I use our Mariquita herb salt to give the salad some extra kick.
3. Slice up a bunch of tomatoes and toss them in with the watermelon.
4. Mince up a red onion and stir that in too.
5. Juice several limes or lemons and pour the juice in with the fruit.
6. Chop up several cucumbers too and add them.
7. Drizzle in some olive oil to taste and stir it around,
8. Cube up some Feta cheese and mix that in too.
9. Taste the juice that has collected in the bowl as the salt and citrus juice provokes the tomatoes melons and cucumbers release liquid and adjust for flavor, If the juice is too bland add more lime juice.
10. Chill the watermelon/tomato fruit salad and serve. Your guests will agree you are a smart cook and if they’re wise they’ll be able to make this salad themselves in the privacy of their own homes.
Dry Farmed Early Girl juice Bloody Marys!
Oh…. and yeah, the Bloody Mary is a smoothie. And we have jars of delicious Dry Farmed Early Girl Tomato Juice for sale on our website. Don’t miss it, it really is the Platonic Ideal of tomato juices.
Enjoy!
Andy and the Crew at Mariquita Farm
© 2022 Essay by Andy Griffin
Photos by Andy Griffin and Starling Linden
Tomato Season
As I sit down to write this note to you I can hear the rain hitting the roof. This is as early in the season as I can ever remember of us getting a meaningful amount of rain, so the question on everybody’s mind is, “How long into the fall do you think we’ll have tomatoes?”
If I could answer that question accurately, reliably, and consistently, I’d be a billionaire-shaman figure, not a puzzled dirt farmer.
I CAN tell you when we will plant the tomatoes; it’s always on April 15th, give or take a few days. By April 15th the danger of frost will have largely passed and the soil will have warmed enough to welcome tomato plants. Often, we will see tiny tomato weeds born from the seeds of last years’ ground fall fruit sprout on their own around this time of year. After we plant the first crop, we will usually follow up with several sequential plantings so that we can enjoy a harvest spread out of the whole season.
Dry Farmed Early Girl Tomatoes
I can tell you when we’re likely to have our first fruit of the season. True, the weather being relatively cooler or hotter can push the date of the first harvest or retard it, but we always see the cherries first in late June, we see the first Early Girls in mid-July, as well as the first Heirlooms. By late August we see the San Marzanos. All of these crops are “indeterminate,” meaning that they can continue to flower and fruit over a long season. Tomatoes are tropical in origin, having first evolved as a food crop in Ecuador around 7,000 years ago. As long as the weather stays “tropical,” the tomatoes stay happy, but they succumb quickly to the elements when conditions become cold, damp, and wet. We have a tomato plant in our greenhouse that is several years old and at least 10 feet high, because the nighttime lows in the greenhouse never drop into the 30s.
We count on having good conditions for tomato production from April thru October. Sometimes a late frost or an early rain will set the crop back or stall it out early. I remember an April 16th frost that zapped our planting pretty badly, but the roots and stems survived and re-sprouted and it turned out to be an ok year. And one year we had a pretty major rainstorm on October 3rd. Later in the season, when the nights are longer and there’s less time for the plants to dry out, a drenching rain can give rise to leaf rot in the middle of the dense canopy of foliage, and the tomatoes will soon sicken and die.
A rain that falls earlier in the year, like the one we are experiencing right now, may not have a lethal consequence. If the days are still long enough or breezy enough for a tomato plant to dry out promptly a rain can be a good thing. Pest mites like the Two Spotted mite that happily chew on tomato plants thrive in dry, dusty conditions. Clean and humid environments favor their enemy, the Persimilis mite, which feeds on the Two Spotted mite. A quick, cleansing rain can encourage the beneficial, predatory mites, even as it discourages their prey.
If this year’s crop is not adversely affected by this passing rainstorm, then I’ll hope that we will be able to harvest thru October, and maybe even into November. As October deepens, anything can happen. And if the bounty is grand then we might even see a tomato on the Thanksgiving table, which can be a real joy.
Dry Farmed Early Girl juice Bloody Marys!
If you aren’t a canner and you want to enjoy the Dry Farm Early Girls into the winter we have a limited supply — which is going fast — of already canned crushed dry farmed early girl tomatoes. And because one never knows, you should get your boxes and jars of tomatoes today! The Dry Farmed Early Girl Tomato Juice is also the perfect choice for the end of summer Gazpacho soup or a Bloody Mary during brunch next weekend.
Enjoy!
Andy and the Crew at Mariquita Farm
© 2022 Essay by Andy Griffin
Photos by Andy Griffin and Starling Linden
Striking Gold
“Give me two reasons why anybody would want to live in Texas,” I said to cousin Weldon. I was probably nine at the time and I’d only passed through the Lone Star State once on a cross-country trip my family had taken three years before in the summer of 1966. We had a Volkswagon bus, and I’d been stuck in the back seat, sweltering, so I wouldn’t bug my sister, for the last 1,500 miles. Looking out the window of that VW, Texas had looked to me a whole lot like Bakersfield CA, except that it was a whole lot bigger- indeed, it seemed to go on forever. I wasn’t in love with it. But Weldon was, having had the good fortune to have been born there, and at 12 years of age, he had the maturity and confidence to answer me boldly and unequivocally.
Drive up window for a liquor store somewhere in Texas.
“Dallas Cowboys, Houston Oilers,” Weldon said, without a moment’s hesitation, before reciting the litany of Texas’s endless charms and marvels; the coldest beer, the hottest women etc. etc. And while I’ve remained amused by the average Texan’s oversized pride of place, even into adulthood, I’ve gained a more nuanced appreciation for Texas. Bottom line; despite the state’s insane politics, Texas really IS big, and it’s big enough to embrace a kaleidoscope of characters that defies any attempt to simplify or pigeonhole it. There’s Willie, of course, who I think is a truly great American, but there are a growing number of my own family members there, and I’ve had an opportunity to make some friends there over the course of a number of trips. Last winter, Starr and I passed through “miles and miles of Texas” on our way to visit my cousin, Elizabeth, in Houston, and we had an opportunity to visit my friends, the Arnoskys, at their flower farm near Blanco, up in the Hill Country.
I met Pamela and Frank Arnosky years ago at the Texas Organic Farmers and Gardeners Convention, that was held that year down on South Padre Island on the gulf coast. Later, after a subsequent conference held up in Kerrville in the Hill Country, I had an opportunity to visit their farm. No farmer anywhere would ever suggest that the interior of Texas is the easiest place in the world to grow organic cut flowers, but they’ve done a magnificent job. I could write a whole essay about how systematically and generously they’ve gone about the task of growing flowers and the mission of creating community, but today I want to talk about just one flower; the marigold.
Andy and Starr inside the Big Blue Barn at the Arnosky’s Flower Farm.
Frank and Pamela are not just good growers- they’re very thoughtful and innovative about marketing. They’d always grown marigolds and over time they developed a reputation for having beautiful, clean, sturdy, and affordable marigolds at exactly the right time for the Dia de Los Muertos celebrations that are a yearly tradition in the Hispanic community. The Arnosky’s flower farm is out in the boonies, but it’s more or less equidistant between San Antonio and Austin. So it wasn’t too long before the Southern Asian communities that have sprung up around Austin found out about them and began arriving in the fall to get their marigolds for Diwalli, the festival of lights.
When farmers get together we usually seize the moment to bitch and moan about the weather, the prices, the regulations, the cost of fuel, packaging and labor, but we will usually trade tips on what crops have been working. As we listened to Frank and Pamela talk about their experiences growing marigolds it occurred to Starr and I that we ought to give the flower a try. Our farm is in the middle of a very vibrant Hispanic community and there are large populations of South East Asians nearby and, besides, who doesn’t think marigolds aren’t beautiful. Plus, from an organic perspective, marigolds make a good rotation crop, since their roots create natural chemicals that tend to depress the populations of pathogenic nematodes.
There are any number of marigold varieties available, but Frank hooked me up with a seed company out of Thailand that has the best marigolds for sacramental purposes. The type I chose to grow- which he recommended- is called Chedi, and the orange color is exactly the hue of the orange robes you’ll see Vietnamese Buddhist monks wearing. He also gave me suggestions for the best dates to drop seed in order to make the Diwalli/Dia de los Muertos harvest a bullseye. Conversations our foreman, Fidel, had with local Oaxacan growers confirmed the dates that work best at this latitude and we made plans. But because I’d never grown Chedi before, I planted a series of small crops to have an opportunity to learn the crop. I ended up learning a whole lot more.
Our friend, Jordan, who owns and operates Happy Girl Kitchen in Pacific Grove, came by the farm to pick up a quantity of dry farmed early girls to can and she saw one of my experimental rows of marigolds. She was stoked. I didn’t know it, but one of my test plantings of Chedi was blooming just in time for two important celebrations; Balarm’s Presentation, and Krishna’s Birthday. She asked to get a large quantity of blooms for the temple she’s a member of up in Mountain View. It was a lot of fun getting all the blooms picked, and she sent us some great pictures of the garlands that the people in the temple created.
If you want to check out the farm in early October, come on out to see a handful of farms on the central coast, ours included, during the Open Farm Tours on October 8th.
Thanks again for all your support!
Andy and the Crew at Mariquita Farm
© 2022 Essay by Andy Griffin
Photos of locations in Texas and of Starr harvesting Marigolds at Mariquita by Andy Griffin.
Photos of Marigolds and Andy harvesting them by Starling Linden.
Photos of Marigolds at Temple by Jordan Champagne.
Step Right Up!
Our first Tomatopalooza of the season at Alladin Nursery in Watsonville.
A “lollapalooza” is like a “humdinger” or a “doozy,” but different! And a “tomatopalooza” starts out as mild as a vegan humdinger, but soon rips and snorts like the bee’s knees. I jest, but not much. Here’s the lowdown:
Sometime back in the 1890’s the word, “lollapalooza,” was first recorded in print in the United States, and it meant something along the lines of “the best of its kind,” or “unusually impressive.” This “lollapalooza” rose up, dripping with excitement, out of our collective, cacophonic, verbal swamp, like a swaggering, bragging, carny barker of a monster. Nobody had patent rights to the “lollapalooza” and we have no such thing as an official “American Academy” that certifies the English vocabulary that’s fit to pronounce, the way that the French keep their language pure by following the rigorous dictates of their Academie Francaise. But purity isn’t much of a core American value, so nobody noticed, and everybody just used the word the way they felt like. Lollapalooza was not a word that Queen Victoria would have used, but its splendid vagueness served the likes of P.T. Barnum and, later, The Three Stooges. The noted American “inventor,” Rube Goldberg, named a cartoon character “Lala Palooza,” and at one point there was an exceptionally large lollipop marketed as a “Lollipalooza.” The Egyptians invented mathematics, the Greeks invented philosophy, and the Mexicans invented tomatoes, chilies, corn, beans, squash, cotton and chocolate, but we Americans invented a successful approach to mass marketing through hyperbole that blurs the fine lines between freedom, fantasy and fraud. Whatever else it is, the Lollapalooza is an American.
A Tomatopalooza customer with a bounty of flowers for a wedding shower.
In roughly contemporary times the word lollapalooza became associated with a touring rock music festival of the same name. I have not attended any of the Lollapalooza festivals, but it was maybe during one of those shows that I was not attending because I was always picking and hustling tomatoes that I decided to do our first “Tomatopalooza.” Like the musical Lollapalooza, the tomatopalooza is a forum for diverse performers, so instead of a lineup of acts that go from metal to punk to pop, you’ve got tomatoes of every genre performing, from tomatillos, little sweet 100s and sungolds, up through the larger dry farmed Piennolo, and Early Girls, all the way through to the big, fat heirlooms. Next to hit the stage will be the headlining act, the “San Marzanos”. And there are always the side shows like the jalapeños, basils and herbs that go so well with tomatoes. We found out that our customers like flowers as much as they like tomatoes. We did our first “Tomatopalooza” of the year this past weekend in front of Alladin Nursery in Watsonville and it was a success. Starr and I want to thank Gustavo and his family and staff for hosting our event. We met a lot of neighbors, saw a lot of friends, and sent a lot of tomatoes and flowers out into the world. If you are ever passing by Alladin you will see our flower cart out front, it isn’t easy to miss the brightly “ice-dyed” roof and the cart that is filled this time of year with Dahlias and Zinnias. And definitely take a look inside Alladin, it is filled with many wonderful plants and gifts that you can enjoy.
Dry Farmed Early Girl Tomatoes, Marigolds and Tomatillos
Heirloom Tomatoes
As Starr was helping people gather up their purchases and I was bringing more boxes from the van to the booth I found myself thinking about my grandfather, my mom’s father. He had a little country store up in Applegate, in the gold country, and I remember the state building I-80 right through “town”, dividing what was already a tiny village into two, separate scraps of community. My Grandpa’s store was in the same building as the post office, and library, and it was down the only block from the bar and the “‘no-tell Motel,” so it served as a casual community center. Grandpa sold worms for bait, Wonderbread, beer, pipe fittings, toys, toilet seats, guns, milk, eggs, ammo- anything and everything you’d need to satisfy the wants of a rural life. And in his parking lot he hosted the Applegate Community Center’s Community Garden Market. Just past the bar was an old, red, one-roomed schoolhouse that mom had attended when she was a girl, and that was the OFFICIAL community center. They had a large garden that people volunteered in and grew veggies for the market wagon. It was a great big buckboard style wagon with rubber tread wheels that they’d pile high with corn and okra and zucchini and…..tomatoes! My first job in the produce industry was sitting up on the wagon, bagging people’s green beans and sweet corn and melons and….tomatoes! The smell of tomatoes in the summer is, for me, the smell of summer.
Sweet 100 and Sungold Cherry Tomatoes
Tomato season almost always starts around the same time of year, because we plant on or around April 15th, which is supposedly our average “frost free” date. But how long the season lasts is anybody’s guess; an extreme heatwave, like we had four years ago, or an unusually heavy and early rain, like we had six years ago, can bring things to an early end. In our dreams we have a steady flow of ripe fruit all the way until November, at which point we begin wishing it would please rain so that we know we will have the water for next year. Keep your eyes on the newsletter for a tomatopalooza near you. It’s “so far, so good” with this season, and it looks like we have a nice crop rolling in. Tomatopalooza 2022 is coming. I promise you it’ll be a rip-snorting humdinger.
Thanks again for all your support!
Andy and the Crew at Mariquita Farm
© 2022 Essay and photos by Andy Griffin