Letters From Andy
Ladybug Letters
Mariquita Farm Pop Up Schedule for Tomato Season 2023
Hi Everybody: Tomatoes are ripening as I write these words to you. As our harvest permits, we will be selling our tomatoes at a series of pop ups around the Bay. The season arrived late this year, but the plants are sound, healthy, and we are hoping for good harvests. We have a rainbow of cherry tomatoes planted, plus dry-farmed Early Girls, Piennolo, San Marzano and Heirloom tomatoes We will announce each sale and post what we can confidently offer for pre-sale on the Friday morning eight days before the sale date to give everybody (including ourselves) time to plan. We intend to bring extra crops to the pop-up for walk-by sales and time, labor and harvests allow, as well as a range of dried herbs, fresh flowers, citrus preserves, and other farm goodies. We may add dates if time and harvests allow. Keep an eye on our website and on your “in box.” If you don’t hear from us check your filters in case the algorithms think that we’re selling spam instead flavorful tomatoes, herbs, and flowers. Subsequent notices will give updates and additional information as to times of day, quantities and varieties of tomatoes, but here’s the schedule as we see it now:
August 19 Corralitos at Alladin’s Nursery at Freedom Blvd and Corralitos Road
August 26 Piccino Restaurant in San Francisco’s Dogpatch
September 2 Palo Alto off of Oregon Expressway on Ross Road
Thank you, and we hope to see you soon! Andy & Starr
And don’t forget, Starr is at the Corralitos Farm and Garden Market which is held each Sunday from 11 to 3 in the parking lot of the Corralitos Cultural Center on Hames Road. We look forward to seeing you.
Check this link if you’re interested in volunteering. https://www.mariquita.com/friends-of-ladybugs-labyrinth/
Glamping With The Ladybugs
“Albert Einstein slept here,” Albert Straus said, as he showed me to my room.
“Albert Einstein came to Marshall?” I was incredulous.
“Talk to my father and he’ll tell you that, sooner or later, everyone comes to Marshall,” Albert said.
The Straus Ranch is perched on the shores of Tomales Bay, near the settlement of Marshall, halfway between the towns of Point Reyes Station and Tomales. A sloping drive lined with ancient, wind twisted, dark cypress trees led down from the old, white, Victorian ranch house down to Highway 1, with the cold, choppy, bay waters slapping at the shore just a few yards past the road. It’s the edge of the continent, the middle of nowhere, a windy rangeland populated mostly by dairy cows, and seagulls. Marshall is isolated, but beautiful, and in 1979 I had the fortune to spend a season living there and working for the Strauss family on their dairy.
Over time I learned the family’s story in more detail. Bill and Ellen, Albert’s parents, had come to America as Jewish refugees from the Nazi occupied Netherlands. They had a friend in common with Einstein, who had fled Germany when the Nazis came to power. To the racist ignorati, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was “Jewish Physics,” and they wanted to kill him for thinking creatively. Luckily, Einstein found a refuge at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies. He would continue to work on the puzzles of relativity the rest of his life and when he wanted to be alone with his thoughts he could decamp from academia and spend some quiet time in Marshall with the Straus family and their Holstein cattle.
I was hired because Bill Straus had “retired” and Albert needed help with the chores. Mr. Straus, “retired” though he was, still put in long days of work on the ranch. Besides their home ranch, the Straus Dairy rented a second ranch a few miles down the coast in Marshall called the Pauli Ranch, where they grazed the “open” heifers that they were waiting to breed once they reached maturity. On my day off, when I wasn’t available to go to Marshall and feed the heifers, Mr. Straus would do the work. Bill saw me one day when he returned from the Pauli Ranch.
“You’ll never guess who I saw in Marshall,” he said.
I couldn’t. A large, Victorian era hotel in Marshall had, until recently, been occupied by a drug and alcohol treatment organization called Synanon, but they’d gone cult and tried to kill the lawyer, Paul Morantz, who was checking into their affairs by putting rattlesnakes in his mailbox. Mr. Morantz didn’t die. Now Synanon was being sued, and their hotel in Marshall was up for sale. The real estate agent was showing the property to institutional buyers to see if he could sell the place as a potential spa, hotel, or spiritual retreat center. When the real estate agent saw Bill Straus pull out of the Pauli Ranch, he waved him over. If anyone in Marshall could be counted on to make a newcomer feel welcome, it would be Mr. Straus, who was always gracious and understanding.
“Bill,” he said, “allow me to introduce you to his Holiness, the Dalai Lama. Your Holiness, Mr. Bill Straus.” The two exiles shook hands and greeted each other warmly.
“That’s amazing,” I said.
“Sooner or later everyone comes to Marshall,” Bill replied.
I owe the Straus family a lot. Not only did they put up with me for a year, but after I’d left the ranch and gone back to college they were very helpful to me. Albert’s mother, Ellen, observed that I had taken a lot of interest and initiative in getting a vegetable garden going while I was living on the dairy.
“Maybe you should go into organic vegetable farming,” she told me. And she gave me the address and phone number of Warren Weber, her neighbor down the coast in Bolinas who owned and operated Star Route Farm. With Ellen’s good references I was able to get a job there and I’d spend five years in Bolinas learning the vegetable trade from “the ground up.”
Now, 43 years later, I’ve got my own farm in Corralitos and it’s as lovely in its own way as the Strauss Dairy in Marshall or Star Route Farm in Bolinas. For fun and as an outdoors art project my partner, Starr, and I have chosen to create an eleven circuit labyrinth that’s 110 feet wide and plant it out in lavender. The labyrinth is embraced by citrus orchards and the beds of herbs, vegetables, and flowers that we tend. In the redwood canyon we’ve created quiet walking trails that link the redwood fairy rings one to another. Our next project is the creation of a wildflower meadow to sustain the birds, the bees and the butterflies.
Our farm is a twenty acre refuge in a crazy world. Maybe, like Albert Einstein, you’d like a farm to hang out on when your thoughts get heavy. Maybe, like the Dalai Lama, you want a meditative environment for workshops and events. If you’re a “glamper,” we’ve got a big, big tent with a bed, a table, and an outdoor kitchen. If you’re a bird watcher, we’ve got a turtle pond full of ducks, egrets and geese. We’ve even seen a Bald Eagle on occasion although when the eagles show up the other birds clear out. If a stay on our farm looks attractive to you check out the “Amenities” section of our website for more details and photos. https://www.mariquita.com/venue-rental/
The work never stops here, and we welcome volunteers. We can especially use help weeding the labyrinth since we use no herbicides. During the rose season it’s great to have some help “Dead-heading” the roses. Here’s the link to our volunteer signup. https://www.mariquita.com/friends-of-ladybugs-labyrinth/
Thanks, and we hope to see you soon.
© 2023 Essay by Andy Griffin
Tomatoes
My feet are tapping. In my head, I can hear a vigorous horn section celebrating my every thought with a jazzy fanfare; it’s like I’m channeling Louis Prima today. If you don’t think you’ve heard of Louis Prima, he’s the hitmaker from back in the day who gained fame for his songs, “Yes! We have no Bananas” and “Just A Gigolo.” I’m in the fruit and vegetable business, not in the escort services, so it’s produce that’s got me jumpin’ and jivin’ with Louis. “Yes! We have no Tomatoes, Toot Toot!” “But we will soon. Toot Toot!”
Musicologists will tell you that “Yes! We Have No Bananas” was a novelty song in the jazz idiom from the first quarter of the 20th Century. Louis Prima didn’t write the piece, but he had a hit off it in 1923 and, later, other artists, like Benny Goodman and Spike Jones, made popular recordings of the song too. Boiled down to its essence, the song is a lark that finds fun in a Greek produce vendor’s reluctance to say “no” to his customers. “Just try these coconuts, ” Louis sings.” These walnuts and doughnuts, there aren’t nuts like they…But, Yes! We have no bananas, we have no bananas today.”
Agricultural historians who listen to old jazz records hear something deeper at work and speculate. Maybe the Greek produce vendor couldn’t get bananas because of the Fusarium oxysporum plague that destroyed the Costa Rican banana crop in 1919. Also called “Panama Disease,” the fusarium fungus causes a wilting disease that has dramatically affected the banana trade any number of times. But what about the tomatoes? Why are we still singing, “Yes! We have no tomatoes.”
It was a cold spring and, so far, it’s been a cool summer. We planted the tomatoes right on schedule in early April and crossed out fingers that the frost wouldn’t get them. It didn’t. But it never got very warm, either, so the tomatoes didn’t grow very fast. We had weird, late rainfalls, but the rain didn’t hurt the crops. The rain didn’t help either. The late rains meant that we had to weed more often than we’d like, but the precipitation didn’t harm the tomatoes. Still, with day after day of overcast weather, the tomato plants were slow in taking off and flowering. If the tomato plant is thought of as an engine, then the nutrients in the soil are the fuel and the water is the lubricant, but the sun is the foot on the gas pedal. Some people think that you can speed a slow crop up with extra fertilizer, but if the issue is not enough warm sun then all the fertility in the world can’t help.
So, yes, we have no tomatoes, but we will. I figure we’re about three weeks late this year. The cherry tomatoes will come first because they are the smallest fruits and ripen the quickest. The dry-farmed Early Girls are “Early,” too, and will start to color up a week or so after the cherries.The rainbow array of Heirloom tomatoes come a bit after the Early Girls.The Heirlooms vary from variety to variety when it comes to the speed with which they mature. Cherokee Purple is usually the first and the Marvel Striped Tomato is usually the latest with the others, like the Brandywines and the Persimmons and the Aunt Ruby’s German Green falling somewhere in the middle. The San Marzano canning tomatoes and the Piennolo drying tomatoes come last.
We will not be running our Mystery Box program this year, but we will be doing pop-ups around the Bay Area to sell our tomatoes, herbs, citrus, and flowers starting in August and running through the end of tomato season. We will be returning to Dogpatch in San Francisco, thanks to our hosts at Piccino restaurant. In the north of the City we will be back at our regular site in the Richmond District. Across the bay, we will be back in Berkeley on 9th street, and down the Peninsula we will be back at Ross Road in Palo Alto. The Pumpkin House is our hangout in Santa Cruz. Also, keep an eye on the newsletter for updates because we will be doing some open farm days with tomato and flower pickups. The sun is out now, the plants are in full flower, the green fruit is swelling, and it’s looking like we can get started in mid August. Yes, we will have tomatoes! Toot Toot!
Thank you, and we hope to see you soon! Andy & Starr
Check this link if you’re interested in volunteering. https://www.mariquita.com/friends-of-ladybugs-labyrinth/
© 2023 Essay by Andy Griffin
Just Ducky
One of the things some Yankees found barbarous about the Indians they met in the “new” lands they occupied, was that, for indigenous residents, cooking up some grub might mean cooking up some grubs. Grubs are beetle larvae. Scientists can tell you that, as a food, grubs are high in antioxidants, essential amino acids, and vitamins, and the Indigenous cooks could give you some recipes, but most contemporary consumers in the US would say that grubs are nauseating, like maggots. Scientists and Indians could tell you that maggots are good food too, but even the word “maggot” is enough to reliably summon forth a host of “food issues” for many folks.
The American pioneers saw the locals they were displacing using sharp sticks to scratch in the soil and unearth such grubs, and they called them “diggers,” using the term as a dehumanizing pejorative, like the “n word,” but with a “d.”
Over a hundred years later, in 1966, community-minded anarchists in The San Francisco Mime Troupe began to toy with the idea of leaving the urban psychedelia of Haight-Ashbury behind and going “back to the land.” They called themselves The Diggers.
These modern, countercultural “diggers” took inspiration, in part, from a group of 17th Century agrarian socialists in England who sought to create a subsistence farming movement on Common Lands and who had been called “Diggers” by both friend and foe. The new 60s “Diggers” also looked to California’s First Peoples as role models for a renewed ecological consciousness. The biggest food issue that the Diggers could see was the problematic role of Capitalism in the food system.
The old pejorative term “Digger” had a resonance for these activist hippies. They appropriated the old anti-Native American racist slur to define their own identity and contrast themselves with the corporate war machine. Can you dig it?
Grubs have always been too much of a challenge for me to eat, but that’s my social conditioning speaking, not my rational brain. There are many smart people advancing the idea that human consumption of insects, larval or otherwise, could be key to eliminating world hunger.
Even if you don’t want to eat grubs like popcorn, one after another, insects may become part of our food chain. The world’s resources of marine creatures have been devastated, for example, by overfishing— and a lot of fish are ground up to make organic fertilizers.
If insects, like flies and maggots, were raised on a vast scale to be processed into fertilizers, utilizing human food waste as a growing medium, we could reduce our dependence on already depleted fisheries even as we reduce the amount of waste going into our dumps. We could reduce the amount of methane escaping from the dumps and contaminating the atmosphere. Also, protein powders derived from farmed insects could be valuable as food additives for processed foods like breakfast cereals, by increasing the food value of these products even as we disguise the existentially-uncomfortable source of their nutrition.
A Triqi Indian labor crew from Oaxaca once schooled me in this matter of eating insects.
We were picking some fresh corn for the farmers market, and I asked three of the crew to pluck the nasty-looking corn ear-worms out of the corn ears so that our sensitive customers would only see the silky yellow ears. Corn ear-worms are the larval form of a moth. I was surprised to see the guys carefully collecting the ear-worms into a clean bucket.
“You don’t have to treat them like treasures,” I said.
They laughed at me. For lunch, they boiled some salted water over a camp stove and blanched their catch of plump worms for a few seconds. They removed the pot from the flame, drained off the excess water, and quickly pan-fried the worms to make them crispy. They folded the fried worms into warm corn tortillas, added a splash of tomatillo sauce, some chopped cilantro and onion, and finished off with a squeeze of lemon. “Voila!”— I was presented with a plate of traditional Oaxacan tacos.
“These are always popular during the corn harvest,” they told me.
But Native Americans don’t have a monopoly on eating agricultural pests. Example Deux: the French. One environmentally sophisticated response to an infestation of snails is to gather them from the field, cleanse and fatten them on cornmeal, and cook them up as “escargot.” Only an ancient, refined, and ironic culture can think to control pests by drowning them in butter, smothering them in chopped garlic and parsley, and serving them up to be eaten, with their minced and marinated flesh re-cupped into their very own shells and plated on china, right next to a serving of the vegetable that they once molested.
I could eat a length of garden hose if it was cooked with enough butter, parsley, and garlic, but eating agricultural pests as a control measure is not a solution that everyone can swallow. Observant Jews, for example, won’t eat mollusks, because they’re not kosher. Snails are mollusks, but so are their cousins, the slugs. Even the French won’t eat slugs.
It was taken as gospel among the hippie homesteaders I grew up around in the Bay Area, that ducks will eat all the slugs and snails they can find in a garden. I once worked on a farm with a patch of artichokes that was being obliterated by a snail plague. You could walk down one row with a 5-gallon bucket and strip enough fat, round snails to fill it.
I couldn’t stand to see a vast mess of snails destroy our crops. I had a vision of fattening a flock of ducks off of all the slugs and snails, and then selling the ducks to French restaurants for duck l’orange. It was a “kill two birds with one stone” idea, except that I’d be killing a million slugs and snails, plus any number of fattened birds.
I left the farm, drove around the shores of Bolinas Lagoon to Highway One, and north to Point Reyes Station, where I purchased two happy ducks for fifteen dollars: a drake and a hen.
Before she would release the birds into my custody, the duck dealer, a middle-aged woman who spoke of the ducks as her “feather children,” made me promise on all that was holy that I would not eat them.
I promised; so much for my savory, profitable, and elegant “circle of life” pesticide program!
I could’ve raised the ducks, slaughtered them, and sold them to somebody else, monetizing their ducky lives for a quick profit without breaking a promise. But lying seemed like bad karma. Plus, the young duck couple with their cute white plumage and iconic orange bills, their ridiculous quacking and their incessant butt-wiggling, endeared themselves to me. If the drive back home had been much longer, I might’ve ended up with two feather children myself.
Back at the farm I took the two white puddle ducks to the artichoke patch. I sat back to watch my ecologically-correct mollusk control program take off. The ducks stepped out of the confines of the carton they’d traveled in, took one look at the snail-infested artichoke patch, eyed the bright waters of the Bolinas Lagoon shimmering in the distance, and flew to freedom.
The duck lady wasn’t happy to see my return. She feared for the safety of her two backyard ducks once they had to face the cruelty of nature. Would the wild mallards on the lagoon welcome them into their flock? Or would the two cute white ducks be shunned as albino freaks and left to fend for themselves, surrounded by bald eagles, hawks, owls, coyotes, foxes, dogs, bobcats, mountain lions, skunks, raccoons, and snakes?
In the end she agreed to sell me two more birds. I prevailed upon her to teach me how to clip their wings. “We wouldn’t want them to fly off and get eaten by bobcats in the wild, would we?”
When I got back to the ranch I locked the two ducks up in a large, empty chicken coop. The ducks made such a cute couple, I caught myself counting my ducklings before my hen even got laid. We would probably have to hire a duck herder just to guide our flock from field to field!
I gathered up a five-gallon bucket full of snails, and dumped it into the coop so my new feathered helpers wouldn’t get hungry. I was hungry too, after my morning’s work, so I went to my cabin for lunch.
When I returned a half-hour later, I was surprised to see the ducks cowering in the corner of the cage, surrounded by a slobbering mob of snails.
Two ducks, thirty dollars, and a million snails added up to exactly zero. Apparently these ducks, like so many of us, had “food issues.”
Our lavender labyrinth and flower gardens are a labor of love and we can always a little help, especially with weeding in the lavender or dead heading in the roses. “Dead-headers” don’t have to be Dead Heads. Check this link if you’re interested in volunteering as a “Garden Gnome.” https://www.mariquita.com/friends-of-ladybugs-labyrinth/
© 2023 Essay by Andy Griffin
Good Clean Dirt
My theory on child raising was pretty simple- just throw them in the tub at the end of the day and call it good. My kids grew up on the farm, so they were surrounded by dirt. When they were little their mother, my late wife, Julia, was dealing with a first bout with breast cancer, so I had them with me a lot in the field when she was off at the hospital getting treatments or at home recuperating. I’d often be working with the crew for most of the day so the children would be more or less unsupervised, but we did have some rules: Stay out of the poison oak. Don’t drink from puddles. Don’t play with harvest knives or propane weed burners. No turning on the tractor. Don’t pick up anything dead. No throwing rocks, sticks, dirt clods, tomatoes or zucchinis at each other. Always walk down the rows in the wheel track, not on the raised bed where the crop plants are. And Don’t leave your clothes in the field. I know it seems like a pretty strict regimen, but they survived, and there weren’t too many problems. Until we had a tomato U-Pick on the farm and my son ended up mingling with the visiting children. Then I ended up facing down a posse of really unglued mothers. More on that in a minute….
People go to U-Picks for a lot of different reasons. Some people see a farm U-Pick as an opportunity for bonding with each other. When I worked at Star Route Farm in Bolinas in the early ’80s we had a pumpkin patch in what we called the “Lagoon Field,” alongside the Olema-Bolinas Road and we did a U-Pick. Two separate and unrelated fathers showed up at the same time and parked by the side of the road. Somehow, in that very large field with thousands of available pumpkins in every shape and size, their two boys ended up needing- REALLY NEEDING!- the exact same pumpkin. Neither child could be convinced to select another, different, but equally charming pumpkin to take home and carve. Long story short, as the autumn sun got low in the sky giving Mt Tamalpais a golden glow, and as waterfowl circled overhead and came in to land in the placid waters of the Bolinas Lagoon, two fathers could be seen beating the stuffing out of each other by the side of the highway. Over a pumpkin. The cute hippie girl with a background in retail who’d been hired to oversee the U-Pick was horrified. Maybe we should have hired a bouncer. Luckily, fights between customers were rare. U-Pick is actually a very nice way to sell pumpkins, since there’s always a kid who wants the biggest pumpkin, another kid who wants the smallest one, and somebody who feels sorry for the Charlie Brown pumpkin that the other kids overlooked.
We did a potato U-Pick on our farm once. Some people come to a U-Pick so that they can “get their hands in the soil,” “get close to the earth” or find some balance from their typical day jobs in the cubicle mines of Silicon Valley. Boy, did those people get their money’s worth. When you encounter a round, close to clean potato in the store display there is little evidence of the “earthy” environment the potato developed in. But when you put your shovel blade in the soil and start digging you turn up all kinds of stuff besides potatoes. Yes, there are plenty of colorful potatoes, so a potato “U-Dig” can be a bit like hunting for Easter Eggs. But there are also the rotted remains of the mother, or seed potato that was planted in the ground by the farmer for the new plant to sprout from. And there are sometimes big, fat, nasty looking potato bugs chewing on the potatoes that are developing. And there are ants, and centipedes, the occasional scorpion, caches of pearly snail eggs, weird worms, unidentified pupae and larval forms of scary insects. And it is dusty, heavy work. But our potato U-Dig was very successful. I’d taken the precaution of harvesting hundreds of pounds of potatoes before the U-Dig, and we’d washed, sorted, and weighed them out. It was a hot day, and after a half hour of digging all but the most adventurous diggers decided that they’d be happy to buy pre-dug potatoes. I heard the phrase, “I’ll never look at a potato the same way again,” again and again.
Some people go to a U-Pick to pick. We did a number of tomato U-Picks over the years and that’s where I ran afoul of the mothers. Even at age 8 my son, Graydon. had “leadership qualities.” As the visitors picked their way through the tomato patch some of the younger kids got bored and ended up doing a “farm tour” with Graydon, who was very familiar with the layout of the fields. But when nobody was paying attention he took his new friends to what he billed as the “Fun Puddle.” It was a hot summer day but along the edge of the field in a remote corner of the farm there was a large, shallow puddle that had formed where an irrigation pipe had leaked. At first the kids had fun stomping around in the mud with Graydon, but soon he showed them how much more fun it was to actually roll in the puddle. While their parents and older siblings were dutifully harvesting tomatoes, Graydon and his companions joyfully slopped around in the mud as though it were Woodstock ’69 and they were all tripping on acid. The $#iT hit the fan when the moms called it a day and loaded up their harvest and, for the first time in a couple of hours, got a load of what their “leaders of tomorrow” had been up to. “How could you let this happen?” they asked incredulously. But I’d been helping them learn how to pick tomatoes. My attention had strayed. It didn’t help much when I said, “It’s just good, clean dirt. It washes off.” I still feel a debt of gratitude to some Russian mothers from Mountain View. They’d been the most businesslike about picking tomatoes and when it came to their kids they dealt with the situation in a business-like fashion too. They weren’t thrilled with the mud, but they weren’t devastated either. I turned on the ag pump, got the irrigation sprinklers going, and they marched their kids into the spray to clean them up. Even some of the more delicate moms saw the wisdom in this maneuver, and soon everybody was on their way home to the cities and suburbs, tired but alive.
This Saturday, June 10th through June 23rd our farm will be open to make reservations for a series of dates to participate in a lavender U-Pick. I predict a successful experience for anyone who chooses to come and visit us. The lavender is planted in raised beds that make up a huge labyrinth. It’s a serene setting. The scent of lavender is calming and healing, and there’a a lot of it, so I don’t expect to see anybody coming to blows the way that can occur when two fathers choose to stand up for their sons’ “rights” to a particular pumpkin. There are creepy crawlies in the soil, the way there always is, but the nature that any visitors experience is likely limited to birds, butterflies, and bees. For their part, the bees will be minding their own “bees-nis,” working hard to collect pollen and nectar for their hive at the top of the hill. The high raised beds of the lavender patch make for relatively easy picking, but we will have some lavender bunches available for people who want extras and there will be some other herbs, citrus from our orchards, edible items and treasures available in the farm store.
This is a great time to see the farm. We are also looking for volunteers to help maintain the labyrinth or those interested in roses that want to admire and help deadhead the plants. Signup for U-Pick and check the website for all the ways to enjoy the farm. https://www.mariquita.com/features/lavender-u-pick/
The lavender field is our home and we have the well being of our neighbors to consider, so we are doing the U-Picks by reservation. Please don’t bring pets, even if they are in the car. The U-Pick is for Ages 8 and up only. A sun hat is highly recommended, as is a full water bottle. Thank you, and we hope to see you soon! Andy & Starr
Check this link if you’re interested in volunteering. https://www.mariquita.com/friends-of-ladybugs-labyrinth/
© 2023 Essay by Andy Griffin
Looking for a Few Good Gnomes
So what if I’m a vulgarian? Having bad taste isn’t like having no taste at all. Besides, we’re not talking “Pink Flamingos” level bad taste here. But enough apologizing….I first met Ziggy, the Gnome, at a Nursery in Saratoga. He had clearly been passed over by the public and demoted by the store manager to a dusty corner in the back, next to a half pallet of 30 lbs plastic sacks of composted steer manure that had started to split and spill their contents. Ziggy’s once prominent spot on the sales floor, right by a bright display of bedding plants, had been taken up by a rainbow tribe of colored, cherry faced, hollow, plastic garden gnomes that exuded a sugary, Disney vibe. Ziggy may have been placed in a dark, dusty corner, and one corner of his concrete pedestal was broken, but he maintained his erect poise and projected the stern but benevolent gravitas that the younger, lighter, brighter gnomes could only aspire to achieve. I hired Ziggy immediately and installed him near our garden gate, where he stands as our 24 hour sentinel, shaded from the sun and moon by a large Gallica rose and an arching Nopal cactus.
Garden gnomes weren’t always considered as kitsch by the sophisticated. The earliest Gnomes that we have records of date back to Central Europe in the 1600s, and they were like totems, carved from logs, painted, and situated by property owners to keep an eye on their lands. Some people say that the word “Gnome,” comes to us from Latin and they quote Paracelsus, the Medieval Swiss Alchemist, doctor, theologian, philosopher and wordsmith, who created the word “gnomus” as a synonym for “pygmy.” The ancient world had been populated by many magical, humanoid races like fairies and cherubs, but the Catholic Church had largely re-categorized these spirits as evil demons. In his magnum opus, “A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on Other Spirits,” Paracelsus redefined nature spirits to make them more compatible with Christianity and he wrote that gnomes were elemental creatures that moved through earth as a fish moves through water. Perhaps the word “gnomus” came to Paracelsus from the Greek “genomos,” meaning “from the earth.”
It’s worth noting that “Paracelsus” was not Paracelsus’s true name; by birth, the namer of the gnome was named Phillippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Von Hohenheim. That’s pretty German! Germany is where the first high volume manufacture of garden gnomes began too. In Dresden, the Baehr and Maresch Company began making ceramic gnomes for export as early as the 1840s. Some of these very expensive garden sculptures were imported to Great Britain by Sir Charles Isham to decorate the grounds of his mansion, Lamport Hall. For his time, Sir Charles was considered an eccentric; he was a socialist, vegetarian teetotaler who believed in gnomes and fairies. But he was rich, so a lot of people copied him. Sir Charles ignited a gnome trend among wealthy English landowners, and in time manufacturers began to produce more down-market gnomes for the masses too. Naturally, as more and more middle class gardens began to feature these newer “knock-off” gnomes lolling about the tulips in the suburbs, the fad came to be seen by the tastemakers as regrettable and vulgar, and people moved on to other motifs in garden art, like plastic flamingos or metal armadillos.
Tastes always change and styles must evolve and mutate just as viruses do, so ceramic garden gnomes could have completed a downward skid from the glare of popularity to the oblivion of the passe if it hadn’t of been for another wealthy eccentric, the English lawyer and microscopist, Sir Frank Crisp. In the late 19th century Sir Frank bought Friar Park, an expansive estate, and created a vast and spectacular garden with a scale model of the Matterhorn, and he populated the grounds with large, classic, ceramic garden gnomes from Baehr and Maresch. A new generation of gardeners copied him too, keeping the garden gnome culture back to life for another sales cycle. The two world wars were not kind to garden gnomes because they were perceived to be Germanic, like the Kaiser or the Fuhrer, and not so much benevolent and mysterious elemental creatures of the earth a la Paracelsus. Garden Gnomes could have been canceled again by the zeitgeist and the fashion fates except for….Meet The Beatles!
John, Paul, George, and Ringo- the Fab Four- made a lot of music and a lot of money for a lot of people in the 1960s. And as their roller-coaster ride of fabulosity came to an end, George Harrison, the Beatles’ lead guitar player, purchased and refurbished Sir Frank Crisp’s decaying Friar Park mansion with its expansive grounds and luxurious gardens. Harrison came to love gardening, and in time he came to think of himself as a gardener who played the guitar and “had a few hits” rather than as a rock and roll star. On his first solo album, All Things Must Pass, Sir George chose a photograph of himself on the lawn at Friar’s Park, surrounded by Crisp’s classic Maresch garden gnomes for the cover art. As a kid I was a Beatles freak, and Harrison’s record was how I first became aware of garden gnomes. In time I’d become a farmer and gardener who plays a little guitar, and it only seemed natural to give a nod to my musical hero by finding a home in the garden for a gnome. Ziggy is a concrete gnome, not an expensive ceramic medieval gnome, and we got him for half price because he had a cracked footing, but he still fulfills the traditional role of casting a protective eye over the garden. I have not achieved the alchemical perception that allows me to see gnomes moving through the earth as fish through water, like Paracelsus, but I do believe that soil is a magical medium full of organisms and symbiotic, alchemical and mysterious processes. We are only at the beginning of learning how complex and sophisticated the life of the soil is, and I suspect that as we become wiser about the earth’s ways, elemental creatures like gnomes are going to seem a lot less outrageous than they may now. Starr and I don’t have the resources of Sir Charles Isham, Sir Frank Crisp, or Sir George Harrison, but we are eccentric and we have been blessed with a gorgeous scrap of earth to care for. Our efforts to create a beautiful and diverse garden-scape above ground has already led to an increasingly active landscape, with birds and frogs, lizards, butterflies, bees and ladybugs abounding.We’re creating a large and lovely and meditative garden setting that we can share with others. If you’re sympathetic with this vision, or if you just want to get out in the fresh air and do some gardening to clear your mind please consider taking a shift as a volunteer “garden gnome.” We won’t make you stand guard all night by the cactus, like Ziggy, but he will be keeping an eye on you. We’re especially looking for help weeding in the lavender labyrinth to keep the labyrinthine passages clean and easy to walk, and we can use some help “deadheading” the roses and clipping the lavender too. If you would like to try your hand as a garden gnome, helping Ziggy to maintain the calm, beauty and order of a meditative garden, please reach out to us at https://www.mariquita.com/friends-of-ladybugs-labyrinth/ We ask that any volunteers be 18 or over and that they not bring any pets with them.It’s a farm, so expect a certain amount of dust or mud and dress accordingly with sturdy shoes.
Again, we do have bees, so “bee aware” please. The bees have a lot of work to do, flying about gathering nectar and distributing pollen, so they are typically too busy to bother with us and they have a peaceful spirit but “Bee-ware” and give them their space. Bring a hat, sunscreen, water, and snacks. Bring a jar too- you may want to take home some flowers too.
If you’ve got your own garden to care for you might be interested in our “Create A Garden Stepping Stone” event, with local crafter, Jewel Rogers. https://www.mariquita.com/product/create-a-garden-stepping-stone/
© 2023 Essay by Andy Griffin
Walk for Peace
His command of English was way better than my Japanese, and I respect that, so I hope he didn’t think I was laughing at him. But when Akira visited our farm last summer and looked out over the 110-foot diameter coil of raised beds of lavender dug into the middle of our field, one of his first questions was, “What for, plant in labyrinth?” I smiled and came up with a glib answer that amused me. “Because,” I replied, “after 40 years of commercial row crop farming I’m bored with planting in straight lines.” Akira was touring a range of farms in California and studying their operations as a way of preparing himself to start out his own farm back in Japan and he dutifully recorded my answer in his notebook. I laughed, but now I’m beginning to wonder if maybe the joke wasn’t on me. Months later, Akira is back in Japan starting his own farm and I’m still thinking about that moment, because his question was a good one, and it’s one I’m challenging myself today to answer in a more thoughtful way. Starr and I are inviting the public to come on May 6th and walk the labyrinth that we’ve created as part of “World Labyrinth Day” and I can expect any visitor to ask the same question. So why did I “plant in labyrinth?”
A labyrinth is different from a maze. A maze can be a puzzle path with false starts, dead ends, surprises, and ambiguities. You can get lost in a maze. A farmer might plant a corn maze and charge people a small fee to enter and have fun. You might even be lucky to get out of some mazes alive. Some people say that a maze is a metaphor for life and that we often stumble through our days confused and disoriented. A maze can provoke you to ask yourself, “Where am I going?” George Harrison once sang “If you don’t know where you’re going, any path will get you there.” So what path are you on? Where are you going?
By contrast to a maze, a labyrinth has one pathway that – if you follow it long enough- will lead to a center. The labyrinth’s path may appear at times to lead away from the heart or loop back on itself but, if you have the discipline to keep going, if you don’t get tired or bored and quit, you WILL reach the center. Some people say that a labyrinth is a metaphor for life. The labyrinth that Starr and I have made is modeled on the Chartres Cathedral labyrinth that was built in the Middle Ages. But labyrinths have been created by many religious traditions over millennia as meditation tools for spiritual development. Starr and I got started on building and planting our labyrinth when the Covid plague shut down the farm for a while, and the construction certainly kept us busy. Now, after three years, the digging is done, and young lavender plants are beginning to fill in the borders. We invite you to come and walk the labyrinth. Maybe you have questions about the path you’re on and the scent of lavender in the air and sound of the birds singing in the trees may provide some inspiration. Maybe you know where you’re going and you just want to detour down a curving country path and enjoy the roses, cacti and lemon trees that frame the labyrinth. Or maybe you just want to get off of 880 or 101 and sip some lavender lemonade and calm down.
When I was a child the field where Starr and I situated the labyrinth was my grandfather’s sheep pasture. My Grandpa Graydon was born in 1892 and he was a farm worker all his life. He was in that bridge generation from the past to the present and he could drive a team of mules, do basic blacksmithing, repair a gas powered engine, shoot to kill, butcher a sheep or a cow, and grow any vegetable, fruit tree or grain. He lived through two World Wars, several economic depressions, and the Spanish Flu epidemic. He kept going when his sisters died from tuberculosis and he didn’t lose hope when his own children got sick with TB or got sent off to war. My grandpa lived to see Neil Armstrong land on the moon, but he was a practical, “down-to-earth” man of his time, and he had an abiding faith in hard work, in Jesus, and in chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides brought to us by progress and Dow Chemical. I admired my grandfather immensely.
My father wouldn’t have played much in the field where the labyrinth is now planted because he was bedridden with TB when he lived here. When my dad was healthier, the family lived on other people’s ranches where his father worked as a ranch hand. This place was never enough of a farm to support them. Dad got lucky. He was a veteran of the Korean War and the GI Bill helped him get out of the fields and make his way through college all the way to a Ph.D in Botany. Dad was in that first generation of botanists that looked past the Victorian Era’s Imperialist obsession with “discovering” plants that had been known and utilized by “natives” for millennia and then naming them after themselves. My father thought of himself as a plant ecologist and he and his peers looked at the world holistically as an interrelated web of life where plants and animals and fungi were symbiotically dependent on each other. In an era where humankind could shoot itself into space and look down on the earth, the ecologists were here to echo the wisdom of the first peoples and remind us that we are never above or apart from our relationship and dependence on all other living things. I admired my father immensely.
Maybe I’m lucky. From the time I was 14 I had a sense of the pathway that I am on. Some people look for years to find a sense of direction. I grew up on a rural University research station for Cal Berkeley, surrounded by scientists of every stripe, as well as that crazy blend of hippies, cowboys, Indians, peaceniks, rednecks, Sikhs, and Buddhists that made up the social collage of upper Carmel Valley in the 60s. From my grandfather and my ranching neighbors I got a love of agriculture and a sense and acceptance of the uncertainty that depending on nature for a livelihood can mean. From my father and the liberal minded Berkeley ecology students that I was surrounded by I absorbed a love of untamed nature, a faith in the scientific method to deepen our appreciation for our place in creation as one organism among many, and a loathing for the smell of pesticides and the indiscriminate damage to the ecosystem posed by unrestrained commercial exploitation of natural resources. It took me a while to discover the appropriate vocabulary to describe the path I’m on, but I knew I wanted to do it all- to raise food and make an honest living off the land but in a way that honored both my father and my grandfather and respected the land we all love.
I’m 63 now, so I can look back with a sense of perspective about the path I’ve taken. Sometimes my life has seemed like a maze, but now, with the benefit of age and experience I can see that what seemed like dead ends or false starts turned out to be curves. I once worked for the Cargil Corporation as a field worker and got sprayed by an airplane in the sunflower fields. What could have been a good moment to quit agriculture became a catalytic event to move me further to the left. I found a summer job working on a little biodynamic garden that served Chez Panisse and I earned five dollars an hour. I also found my tribe of people who were working as a community to bring an environmental and social consciousness to the food system. My work gave me a chance to meet visionary and energetic people like Albert Straus, Ellen Straus, Warren Weber, Amigo Bob Cantisano, Mollie Katzen, Patty Unterman, Judy Rodgers, and Alice Waters. With the help of my late wife, Julia, I was able to buy this property from my family, and she built the community-centric business that allowed us to raise our own family here. She and I named our farm “La Mariquita,” meaning “The Ladybug” in Spanish, because our goal was to create a farm that was small and beautiful where the ladybugs were welcome partners.
Family farming in a healthy and life affirmative way has never been harder, but it has never been more important either. For me, constructing a huge labyrinth and planting it out with beds of lavender is a life affirming artistic statement, like a spiritually suggestive crop circle that you can see if you’re flying over the world’s problems in a jet on your way to your big conference in Silicon Valley. I’m not against high tech- I’m writing this on a computer- but it can be too easy for the innovators and policy makers to get lost in the seduction of virtual reality and forget the actual reality of earth, air, fire and water down here in flyover country. I think of our labyrinth as a beautiful hello emoji looking up from the land. “Hi Jet plane people. What path are you on? What path are you taking us down?” And besides being a symbol and an invitation, the labyrinth is also a crop producer. Starr has been gathering and drying the lavender flowers. We’ve planted beds of roses and lemons and culinary herbs to embrace the labyrinth, and these crops yield their harvests in their seasons. Plus, farming in straight rows WAS starting to get to me. I wasn’t lying when I told Akira I needed a change, and I feel better for making it.
Starr has her own reasons for working with me to create this gigantic earth art piece, and I’ll let her speak for herself. But I can tell you a few things about her that might put her energy into perspective. She’s the one in the family with an actual degree in Plant and Soil Science. Now she’s a farmer, but she was an organic activist and organizer back when the conventional agriculture crowd greeted those efforts with real hostility. These days, those same companies own the largest organic farms, but that’s a story for another day. And when Starr’s days as an organic farm inspector were in the rear view mirror she focused on event organizing and worked as an artist creating custom pocket shrines for people. Starr and I share a vision of the farm and labyrinth as a living, flowering, fruiting, buzzing, chirping, sweet-scented earth shrine to Mother Nature. When you enter through the front farm gate – or fly overhead- it’s our hope that your first reaction is “Holy Compost! This place is ALIVE!” And we hope it makes you feel more alive too, no matter the path you’re on.
Treat yourself to a special day on Saturday, May 6th when we walk with others around the world for “World Peace” in the Labyrinth. We will also tour the gardens and talk about roses; we have over two hundred rose plants now. And our friend Danielle, a local esthetician and owner of Wild Beauty Cosmetics, who has been buying and using our roses to make rose oil, will do a special rose oil tutorial. All that, and lunch will make for a memorable day at Mariquita Farm. Space is limited and you won’t want to miss out. Tickets available below at:
https://www.mariquita.com/.product/world-labyrinth-day./.
Here’s a link to Akira’s farm blog if you want to see what he’s up to blog: https://agri-step.info
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.
Andy and Starr
© 2023 Essay by Andy Griffin
Photos by Starling Linden & Andrew Griffin
Finally some sun!
My grandmother once had a cat who had three kittens on the 15th of April. Naturally, she named them “Taxine,” “IRiS,” and “Deadlina.” But April 15th means different things to different people. For those of us who farm along California’s Central Coast, April 15th is our “frost free” date. Obviously, there’s nobody to sue if Mother Nature chooses to send a frost our way on April 16th, and I do remember a hard frost on April 17th back in the late ’90s but, generally, we are out of the coldest weather by mid April.
Here is the crop of Austrian Winter peas that we planted as a cover crop. The ground has finally dried out enough to work so we turned the peas under on Monday. A legume cover crop has converted as much atmospheric nitrogen into a soluble form that plants can take up when it has started to flower, so when we see the blooms we get ready to disk the foliage under. Besides adding nitrogen to the soil a good cover crop adds lots of biomass, which breaks down into carbon particles, which aid in water retention. I managed to get a first row of seedlings transplanted too. Here are some baby sunflowers I got into the ground. Artichokes are next.
Next to the sunflowers you can see the wire mesh that the beans will climb up. I planted perennial runner beans last year, and as soon as the soil warms up we will see the underground tubers push up the shoots of this year’s bean crop, so there’s no need to plant them- I just have to weed the rows so that the slugs and snails don’t destroy the emergent stems and leaves.
Besides working the soil and getting the transplants out we’ve got a lot of winter related remedial damage control to get through. A big eucalyptus fell over, covering my rototiller, box scraper, and disk harrow, as well as crushing a harvest wagon. Also buried were beds of oregano, sage, sorrel, borage, mint, and fennel. Before it was chopped up the tree reached all the way from the leaves in the foreground to the trunk on our neighbor’s property. But we now have firewood for life!
The wind can be problematical, but all the rain has been good for our citrus orchards. Our lemon trees are so loaded down with fruit that the branches are at the point of breaking. Thanks to our friends at The Dream Inn, in Santa Cruz, we’ve been able to harvest a lot of lemons for their kitchen. Here Starr looks down on me, picking from above, as I lie on my back and pick from below. Each “dwarf” Meyer lemon tree has been yielding 100 lbs of lemons. We have many specialty varieties of young citrus trees that have appreciated the copious rain that came our way this winter and they’re growing like crazy.
Given all that has transpired over the last several years we are not in a position this year to deliver regular boxes of mixed veggies, fruits and herbs, as we have in the past, but we will resume a schedule of pop-ups when we have the crops to back them up, and we will be opening the farm for a series of events, u-picks, and workshops. Join us Saturday, May 6th, to celebrate World Labyrinth Day with a Labyrinth walk, a tour of the farm and rose gardens, and a presentation by Danielle Kingsley of Wild Beauty Cosmetics about the skin care products she makes from our rose petals. Keep an eye on the newsletter for details. Here I am in a shadow selfie waving “goodbye” to a long, hard, cold, wet winter and “hello” to you all and a fruitful, floral, and flavorful season.
Thank you for reading our newsletter. To keep current with the happenings on the farm please follow us on Facebook @ https://www.facebook.com/MariquitaFarm and https://www.facebook.com/LadybugsLabryrinth/ We manage our Instagram accounts so that they have different content from Facebook. Follow us on Insta @mariquitafarm and @ladybugslabyrinth
PS- The tomato plants are waiting until April 15th to go in the ground. No use taking chances with something so important.
Thanks, again. Andy and Starr
© 2023 Essay by Andy Griffin
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…
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.
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.
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.
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