Ladybug Letters
What Kind of Pea?
The girl was SO insanely sensitive, and yet her morbid fragility was somehow proof positive of her nobility? I was confused. Do you remember the Princess and the Pea? As a youth, I puzzled over her story. The poor thing couldn’t sleep. She complained that she’d tossed and turned all night because of a stone in her bed, and after the palace staff pulled the bedding from the frame, seven feather comforters in all, they found that it was a single, tiny dried pea seed at the bottom that had provoked all the distress. Why were we supposed to validate this girl’s hyper-sensitivity by crowning her? Compare the Princess of the pea to Tanya Tucker, the reigning “princess” of Country Music when I was a young. “Would you lay with me in a field of stone?” Tanya sang. She was 14 at the time, a year older than I was. Now that I’m an old fart with a snail mail box full of cremation insurance offers and AARP fliers I’m not so worried about figuring women out. I find myself wondering more about the pea that caused the Princess so much discomfort. “What kind of pea was it ?” I ask myself. The answer is not obvious.
Pea Soup Andersen’s, a popular restaurant chain for travelers with locations along California’s Highway 101 as well as on I-5, bases its menu around “split-pea” soup. The pea that Andersen’s uses would be a modern variety of Pisum sativum that has been selected by plant scientists for its utility in producing dried peas. A “Split pea” is not a
Snow pea flowers
specific variety of pea.The pea plant is a “dicotyledon,” meaning that the seed is an embryonic plant that will germinate to present a pair (“di”) of infant leaves (cotyledons). A dried pea seed can be “split” into two halves, each part being a half of the starchy dicot pair that is enveloped by the hull of the seed. The Snow pea, the Sugar Snap pea, and the English pea are also varieties of Pisum sativum developed for use as fresh vegetables, but you could let their seeds mature on the vine until dry, then “split” them and make them into soup too, if you wanted or needed to.
So the controversy can’t be resolved at the moment. For the last couple of weeks we’ve been enjoying snap peas. This week we begin the English Pea harvest. We even have planted a crop of Chickpeas, and we’ll see how they do. Peas of any kind are an important crop for the farm because they are legumes. Legume species have the important ability to capture unusable atmospheric nitrogen and convert it into a form that plants can use as fertilizer. Legumes have a symbiotic relationship with a bacteria that infect the roots of the host plants and pay for their stay taking in and digesting nitrogen gas, then excreting it in a form that is available to the plant. That’s pretty “magical,” if you ask me. We grow peas to feed you, but we also plant peas in our cover crops to feed the soil so that we can keep farming the land happily ever after.—© 2021 Essay and Photos by Andy Griffin.
~Special Note~
As the weather is getting warmer, the sun is rising earlier and the harvesting begins with the sunrise, we will be closing our East Bay/Peninsula shop by 6 PM on the Wednesday evenings before the Friday delivery. We close our San Francisco & Mystery Thursday shops on Wednesday mornings by 8 AM and our Santa Cruz/Los Gatos shop by 8 AM, on Monday mornings. Please get your orders in early so you don’t miss out on the harvest! Thank you all again for being such a part of our bountiful farm!
If you haven’t ordered a Mystery Box recently, now is a great time to get in on spring deliciousness! LadybugBuyingClub
A Different Type of Sting!
Garden nettles “belong” in the garden; they’re only weeds when or where I don’t want them growing. Sometimes when I have a nice patch of tender, garden nettles I’ll harvest and sell them to the folks that know these “weeds” were brought to California by Italian immigrants who grew them as cooking greens. Garden nettles are excellent used, like spinach, to make savory green sauces or winter-time ravioli fillings. Steep a pinch of garden nettles in hot water and you’ll have a soothing glass of herbal tea in minutes.One day at the Farmers Market a frequent market shopper breezed past the sign I’d
posted at the back of my stall that read “BEWARE- STINGING NETTLES. USE TONGS TO HANDLE!” She thrust her hands into the fresh nettles and then let out a little squeak of pain. I stepped over to point to the sign and hand her the tongs. “They’re not called ‘stinging nettles’ for nothing,” I said.
—© 2021 Essay by Andy Griffin.
~Special Note~
As the weather is getting warmer, the sun is rising earlier and the harvesting begins with the sunrise, we will be closing our East Bay/Peninsula shop by 6 PM on the Wednesday evenings before the Friday delivery. We close our San Francisco & Mystery Thursday shops on Wednesday mornings by 8 AM and our Santa Cruz/Los Gatos shop by 8 AM, on Monday mornings. Please get your orders in early so you don’t miss out on the harvest! Thank you all again for being such a part of our bountiful farm!
If you haven’t ordered a Mystery Box recently, now is a great time to get in on spring deliciousness! LadybugBuyingClub
From Oaxaca to Watsonville
a number of different chayote plants of different varieties; smooth skinned, spiny, white-fruited, yellow fruited, green fruited. He told me how to protect the tubers from the gophers by putting them in wire baskets so that the plants could sprout back from underground every year as soon as the soil warmed up. And Fidel encouraged me to top off the frame with a rigid and strong mesh so that the squash can hang down to be picked easily by reaching up into the foliage with a pair of clippers. So far, so good. As the weather has warmed the young chayote plants are picking up speed, and this weekend, as cold as it was, the first vines still managed to grab onto the wire mesh and start their ascent. In the fields our summer squash are just flowering, but our chayotes won’t be ready until early fall. That should work out perfectly. I planted 20 plus chayote seedlings, and this planting will likely provide us with many, many pounds of harvest. At the very least we’ll be able to select out the varieties that perform the best here in Watsonville.—© 2021 Essay and Photos by Andy Griffin.
Top photo is the Growing Chayote Vines.
If you haven’t ordered a mystery box recently, now is a great time to get in on spring deliciousness! LadybugBuyingClub
A Tale of Avocados
The Hass avocado is so ubiquitous in the contemporary American marketplace that for many consumers it is almost the only avocado that they know, the ne plus ultra of avocados, but the variety was only discovered in the late 1920s by a Mr. Rudolph Hass, postman and rare fruit enthusiast, who lived in Southern California near Whittier. (His children actually deserve the credit for discovering the variety because it was the kids who noticed how rich and unctuous the fruit was compared to other avocados and they drew his attention to the first tree from which all other trees were cloned.) But the avocado is a tree native to the Americas, probably originating in what is now Southern Mexico and Guatemala. Our English word, “avocado” is derived from the Nahual word “ahuacatl,” meaning “testicle.” But that’s not the only fun fact about the avocado plant.
proportions by eating plants. One theory has it that avocados developed their oil-rich, flavorful fruit in order to appeal to the appetites of giant sloths, who would eat the fruits and then “disperse” the avocados’ big, round seeds around the jungle when they defecated. An avocado’s seed, or pit, is so big that you’d have to be a megafauna to “pass” one. Today, we not-so-mega mammals cultivate and disperse the avocado agriculturally and our attentions have changed the plant.
Avocados are often self-sterile, which means they will not self-pollinate. A Hass avocado tree will set some fruit after it gets older but it can’t be a really productive commercial crop unless it is cross pollinated with another variety of avocado. As avocados became popular in the United States beyond Southern California the Hass won the popularity contest in the marketplace. But you can’t have a viable Hass industry if you don’t also cultivate the pollinizer trees. Here in Central California I’ve seen growers use Zutano and Fuerte avocados as pollinators, but most farmers around here look to Bacons to get the job done. I like Bacons; I made a guacamole the other day using Rangpur Limes and Bacon avocados that came out very nicely. (I’ve planted a bunch of Rangpur limes, but at present only one tree is bearing. The Rangpur lime is actually a very tart type of mandarin orange, with a loose, thin skin and a bright scent. We should have a small harvest to pick and sell next year.)—© 2021 Essay and Photos by Andy Griffin.
Top photo is a Bacon Avocado on a Marsalisi Brothers Farm tree.
If you haven’t ordered a mystery box recently, now is a great time to get in on spring deliciousness! LadybugBuyingClub
Feed the Soil
The organic mantra is “feed the soil.” Feed the soil, and the soil will feed you back. The plants that we harvest are the alchemists that can transmute the base elements of the earth into our food by spinning minerals together with light and water to make leaves, fruits, and seeds. When the soil is rich our crops can thrive. Sometimes we think of the earth poetically as a giving mother who feeds us, but it’s also clarifying to think of the soil as a bank account; every harvest is a “withdrawal” of nutrients and if we don’t make deposits then, sooner or later, we run out of funds. So we try to care for the soil by putting at least as much back into the soil as we take out. But really, to only replace what we have withdrawn is a bare minimum concept of soil care; in a better world we improve the soils we depend on, and cover crops are one very basic way to do this.
“soil builder” blend of cover crop seed. The idea is to “make a deposit of seeds” which then germinate and “accrue interest,” growing into a valuable crop of carbon and nutrients that can be “reinvested” by getting plowed under. There are grasses in the mix, like barley, oats, and rye. The grains germinate fast and first. And there are legumes in the mix; fava beans, vetch, and peas. The legumes sprout later than the grasses, and as the grasses grow taller the vining vetches and peas can lean on them in support. While the fava beans don’t need the grasses for support, they do benefit from the way the grasses act to break the winds that might beat them down.
and favas were killed by frost and the cover crop was almost pure rye, because rye is tough in the face of cold weather. This year, Starr and I tossed out the cover crop seed by hand, counting on the dark clouds overhead to rain our seed into the newly turned soil. But after we planted our cover crop the clouds left without raining and a flock of birds came out of the sky and pecked up most of the grass seeds we’d just sown. The birds moved on when they’d mined out most of the oats and rye but they didn’t care for the peas, vetches or fava beans, so our cover crop is mostly made up of legumes. We didn’t have a “wet” winter, but we got rain enough to support a flourishing cover crop. There’s a sweet scent in the air from all the blossoms. I’ll almost be sad to turn this crop under.
© 2021 Essay and Photos by Andy Griffin.
Top photo is the cover crop on the farm. And below, are a few things we’re planning for this week’s mystery box! If you haven’t ordered a mystery box recently, now is a great time to get in on spring deliciousness! LadybugBuyingClub
Living on the Central Coast
His supporters say it was a “heart condition” but opposition politicians claimed that the late John Magafuli, then President of Tanzania, was being treated in Kenya for Covid 19 when he died last month. Mr. Magafuli’s death provoked more conversation on our farm than you might have expected, given that Tanzania is a long way away and there are plenty of people closer to home- and closer to us wherever they are- who have been affected by this disease. But Starr’s daughter, Yarrow, had been stationed in Tanzania as a Peace Corps volunteer until just before the pandemic started. Yarrow’s projects in Tanzania included helping HIV/AIDs survivors set up poultry projects for egg production so that they could help support themselves and their families. But the late Tanzanian president had a misunderstanding with a foreign NGO and chose to strike a politically expedient “Tanzanian First” stance by denying work visas to aid workers, effectively kicking all foreign aid organizations out of the country. At first, we were sad that Yarrow couldn’t stay in Africa until the end of her service term to see all of her projects through to successful completion. But the Covid 19 pandemic erupted almost immediately upon her return to the US from East Africa and our dismay turned to relief that she wasn’t stranded in Tanzania while a loud Covid-denying leader was in charge.
Yarrow and her friend, Trent, another Peace Corp veteran, showed up at our farm coincidentally just in time to get the Covid vaccination from the farm worker outreach program that was sponsored by the Farm Bureau/ Strawberry Commission. They’ve been helping us here since then and their efforts have been a “god/goddess-send.” Covid has been fatal to many small businesses, like some of the restaurant kitchens I used to serve, and it’s been difficult and awkward and stressful for most of the rest. For us, the dilemma has been that our packing shed and cooler and office are at our home. One of the most successful health protocols that a person can follow to minimize the spread of this highly infectious disease is to create a secure and virus-free place to retreat to. We decided that having workers show up at our home on a daily basis was not in our best interests–we’re 61 after all, the same age as President Magafuli was when he didn’t die from Covid. So Starr and I have been making up all the boxes ourselves, “sheltering in place,” you could say, and “working from home.” But those are heavy, wet boxes full of produce that we are schlepping, not weightless mouse clicks, so we’ve been feeling it. I’m not complaining. It is obvious to me that the ability for an average citizen here to enjoy or afford any degree of “social isolation” is entirely dependent on being affluent to some degree. Being stuck on a farm during a pandemic is a blessing, not a curse.
Looking at Pico Blanco in the distance.
Covid isn’t anywhere near over, I know, but we had an almost normal day this past Sunday. Trent is from Florida and Yarrow had arrived from Colorado, so we wanted to show them a little bit of California besides the shed and field here at home. So we took them to Big Sur for a hike up Serra Hill in the Los Padres National Forest, just south of the Bixby Creek Bridge. It’s a beautiful drive any time of year, but we were treated to a gorgeous sunny spring day with green grass, wildflowers and wild strawberries. Heading south of Carmel I always make a game of calling out the names of the creeks to myself before I cross the bridges and culverts, just for fun; “Rio Carmelo, Wildcat, Malpaso, Garrapata, Rocky, Granite, Bixby, Little Sur, Big Sur….Bixby Creek has a fame all out of proportion to the amount of water it conveys to the Pacific due to the graceful and photogenic arch of the bridge that spans its gorge. But for me, especially now during this pandemic, it’s Garrapata Creek that means the most to me.
When I was kid I spent a lot of time with my neighbor, Jimmy, a cattle rancher in upper Carmel Valley. Jimmy was a real old-timer, and he’d had a job as a mule driver on the grading teams that carved Highway One down the Big Sur Coast back in the 1930s. But as a child he’d grown up in a fisherman’s shack just off Monterey’s Cannery Row. When the 1918 flu pandemic hit Monterey Jimmy’s mother feared for his life, so she dispatched him to live in a healthier atmosphere with his Uncle Harvey. Talk about “social isolation!” Uncle Harvey had a remote homestead/ranch way up Garrapata Creek, accessible only on foot or horseback. Harvey was a near hermit, just minding his own business and cattle, choosing only to work as a cowboy on neighboring ranches when he needed a little cash. Jimmy spent several years growing up there in the redwood forests of upper Garrapata and he had a lot of crazy stories to tell about his experiences. When the pandemic ended he returned to Monterey and got schooled, but it’s fair to say he got his education in the Santa Lucia Mountains. Standing on top of Serra Hill with Starr, Yarrow and Trent, and looking into the interior of the Little Sur backcountry, I was thinking about Jimmy and his stories with an understanding that I didn’t have when I was a kid and didn’t know the contours of a pandemic.
So where to go from here?
I don’t think anyone can really know what’s going to happen next. We’re still taking the pandemic seriously, but we’re also planting as though life will open up. Farming always demands lots of forethought, because crops take “real” time to germinate and grow. We’ve picked the first handful of artichokes and the sun will bring the crop on fast now. The first basil has sprouted in the greenhouse, the tomatoes will get planted out this week, and the potato crop is already a few inches high. The squash crop goes into the ground as soon as the field is worked up and the beans and corn follow as soon as the soil warms up. Thank you for your support; we appreciate it.
© 2021 Essay by Andy Griffin.
Photos by Starling Linden. Top photo is looking back at the Santa Lucia Mountains.
The Colors of Cauliflower
When I was a kid here in California cauliflower was white. Nowadays consumers can find many different forms and colors of cauliflower in the marketplace. At one extreme we have the green Fibonacci extravaganza that is the so-called “Broccoli Romanesco.” There’s another green cauliflower that has a more “typical,” rounded form to the head that’s marketed as “Broccoflower,” and then there are yellow cauliflower varieties and even purple cauliflower types. It’s been interesting to see these different breeds of cauliflower become available, but today I want to talk about the old-fashioned white cauliflower and the efforts growers took (and still take) to keep the face of this iconic vegetable as white as consumers demand.
Cauliflower is a form of Brassica oleracea, along with seemingly disparate and different crops like cabbage, kale, collards, kohlrabi, and Brussels Sprouts. And just as there is an amazing diversity of forms among the members of the Brassica oleracea family, there is a very wide range of traits to be discovered just among the cauliflowers. I’ve walked a lot of miles down rows of cauliflower, looking down, peering into their faces, judging when we ought to pick the crop, and I’ve seen plenty of so-called white cauliflowers that had hints of pink or purple, green, orange, or even brown showing in the face. Sometimes, I’ve seen cauliflowers that showed all these colors at once which was curious, if not appealing. Sometimes these colors are expressions of latent traits in the plants’ DNA. Plant scientists have seized the hidden potential locked up in the genetics to select and breed for a rainbow of varieties that express clear, bright colors. Other times the “off-brand” colors in white cauliflower betrays some environmental stress that the plant has endured, like too much sun, heat, or drought.
For a commodity crop available on almost any supermarket shelf, cauliflower is fussy to grow. The plant likes very rich soil, lots of water and a cool climate. Most of the US does not enjoy these conditions, or at least not for much of the year, so large-scale commercial production for the whole nation is centered along California’s central coast, where summers are cool. It may be typically foggy in the Salinas or Pajaro Valleys but if we have an extended period of sunny hot weather cauliflower crops can be prompted to mature so fast that the plants are stressed, and this stress can show as “discoloration” in the face. In an effort to keep the cauliflower white growers sometimes gather the big, floppy leaves of the cauliflower plant together and bind them up tight with a rubber band. Of course, this added step in cauliflower production adds costs. Another measure a grower can take to blanch cauliflower is to simply have a farmworker break or fold a big leaf over the open face of the plant to shade it.
Does the world end if a cauliflower face isn’t as white as snow?
No.
Left to its own devices, a cauliflower head will mature under the sun, with each of the so-called “curds” lengthening into a longer stem. Eventually, these stems morph into long flower stalks, each topped with a little broccoli-like flower bud. When the flowers open, they show off clusters of the typical 4 petaled propeller shaped blooms common to all members of the Brassica oleracea. If you discount the cosmetic demands that the American consumer makes on the presentation of the crop, cauliflower is edible- and indeed delicious- at every stage of development. The store wants uniformly sized, tight, white heads to display so that the vegetable can be sold by the piece and cauliflower heads that are opening in different sizes, shapes, and colors are not desired. But the looser heads of opening cauliflowers taste good, even if they seem discolored to an eye that expects white. I’ve found that the little, broccolli-like florettes that develop right before the plant bursts into bloom can be sweeter than the tight cauliflower head that they sprang from ever was.
Plant scientists developed many different forms of cauliflower to appeal to different consumers, but also to different growers. The yellow cauliflowers show off their best color when the developing crop does get some sun to bring out and deepen the gold color, and these varieties do well for inland growers who can’t expect to have consistently overcast conditions. Purple cauliflower doesn’t seem to mind the sun so much either. I’ve grown all the different kinds of cauliflower at one time or another, and I’ve found the green “Brocco-flower” types to be the fussiest and most difficult. For me, the green cauliflower types work best as an early fall-plant crop for midwinter harvest, when we can be more sure that the weather will be cool and moist.
The Romanesco types have been changed the most in my experience. In the past the Romanesco seed we bought gave us wildly different plants, some huge with tiny heads, and they took a long time to develop, but now Romanesco varieties are very uniform- so uniform, in fact, that the crops all seem to mature at once. Having a whole crop come off at once is a boon to a large scale grower who is machine harvesting whole fields in a day but it can be a problem for small growers, like myself, who would like to harvest more modest amounts out of the same patch over a longer time period to satisfy a smaller, local market with a consistent supply. With the old fashioned white cauliflower we were able to plant a big block all at once and harvest out of it for a while. With the improved types we have to plant more numerous small blocks that are harvested clean and turned over. This can be cumbersome and hard to manage.
The different colored cauliflowers all have their advantages and positive traits but the seed is awfully expensive. As an economical crop to grow, the white cauliflowers are usually the best bet. If we want smaller sized heads we’ll crowd more plants in the row. You can space cauliflowers out and give them lots of fertilizer and they’ll grow as big as car tires, but what’s the point? I like to have smaller cauliflower and I like to leave more of the wrapper leaves on the head than you see in the supermarket because the leaves help to protect the tender face from bruising. Then too, the wrapper leaves are edible- no different really than kale or collards; the consumers in the know cut the leaves up and cook them.
Spring is a nice time to harvest cauliflower, but we’re still planting more crops that will mature in early summer. We’re getting the tomatoes and basil into the ground right now, but a person can’t live off of tomatoes and basil alone, even if it’s tempting to try. And the warming weather we’re experiencing right now should bring on the artichoke crop too.
© 2021 Essay and Photos by Andy Griffin.
Your Dollars Can Count Supporting Farms in Your Backyard
Askelon is a port city along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Today Askelon is in Israel, but it’s an ancient city, and people have inhabited the site for at least 8000 years. It’s one of the biggest ports in the Eastern Mediterranean and the root meaning of the name, Askelon, may have something to do with business or mercantile activity. Whatever the name originally meant, the settlement served as a shipping point for onions that were exported by sea. That name of that sea, the Mediterranean, comes from the words “medi,” or “in the middle of” and “Terra” “of the Earth,” or “Terra” —the sea at the middle of the world. Askelon’s aromatic bulbs made for happy customers “all around the world,” and the port city became synonymous with the onion. In fact, our modern word “scallion” comes from Askelon, as does the word “shallot.” Recently we were asked by our friend, Colleen Logan, from Savor the Local based in Carmel, to write a piece on “why people should support local family farms. This week we’re picking scallions for your harvest box. Why should you want to get your onions from a local farm instead of buying a more famous or cheaper brand from “across the sea,” like they did in the good old days?
The food supply is a transnational dynamic these days, as indeed it has been for ages. We need to have the ability to move food around the planet if we’re going to guarantee food security to everybody and keep regional famine at bay. Also, it’s just nice to live in the Northern hemisphere yet be able to enjoy tropical fruits all year long. Food prices in the US are also often cheaper than they otherwise would be, were it not for foreign imports. Farm workers in Ecuador make as much in a day’s labor as a farm worker in the United States makes in an hour, so it’s no surprise that they can ship frozen strawberries from Guayaquil to processors much more cheaply than growers in California can. If produce from far away is not only sometimes more exotic and often cheaper than local produce is, why support local farms? I’m a local farmer; why support me?
Your local farmer is a neighbor, a member of your community. When you support a local farmer the money you spend on the farmer goes back into our local economy and builds our community. That’s true even when you live in San Francisco or Oakland and the farmer lives in Watsonville. Where does “community” begin and end? When I get on the freeway and listen to “the traffic and weather together every fifteen minutes,” the reports cover all the territory from 17 in the south to Petaluma and 101 in the north – that’s one big bowl of asphalt and concrete spaghetti we all share in common and have to deal with. Some of that traffic comes as local farms and farm workers spend money in your cities and buy your goods and services. It’s good for the community for the money it generates to travel from home to home in circles and keep more locals employed.
But farmers are more than just neighbors and consumers. The farmers around you are the custodians for the natural resources in your local area. Farmers and ranchers make their living from the soil and water and how they treat those resources directly affects you, whether you buy their produce or not. If you don’t want agricultural chemicals in the water you drink, then support the local organic farms that are producing food without recourse to the noxious chemicals that would contaminate your water or foul your air. If you enjoy the rural character of the hills on the horizon of your community then support the ranchers whose work it is to manage those rangelands. If restaurants and markets in your community make a point of supporting local farmers, ranchers, and fishers, then support them so that they can play their role in creating and maintaining a vital, viable foodshed.- Maybe not every local agricultural producer is doing a good job of caring for the environment that we all share; but support the farms that are good stewards of our environment and encourage them. And supporting local farms is good for the environment because they can have a smaller carbon footprint than larger companies. If you like having cleaner air, then don’t buy food that has to come into the Bay Area on a jet, cargo ship or long haul truck. Put your money where your mouth- and lungs- are. And cleaner air isn’t just about us; we have to breathe the air that blows in from Asia and someone else will have to breathe the smog we create. When there’s less air pollution anywhere in the world everybody wins.
Sometimes local produce costs a bit more than produce purchased in chain stores. Local producers may not use as much energy as distant suppliers in getting their produce to market but they often have significantly higher labor costs or water costs. In some cases local growers may be using practices that are more labor intensive but less environmentally damaging. The local growers need you. When the Covid pandemic hit and all the supply chain disruptions occurred those that had a connection to local food outlets learned the value of supporting their local farms. This farm to table relationship has been mutually beneficial. As a community, we are all better off when the lowest price is not our highest value.
You can get an education of sorts from supporting a local farm too. It’s so easy to find anything from anywhere that a person can almost be excused for having no clue what’s “in season.” It’s always summer somewhere in the world so there’s almost always going to be fresh corn on the cob at some price. But eating locally means living through the seasons with all the ups and downs of the region we live in. Here in the Bay Area we’re blessed with an extraordinary range of local products. Eating seasonally doesn’t have to mean having to give up on things when they’re out of season; we can think of each season as an opportunity to enjoy the best of what our region, our climate, our season has to offer.
Supporting a local farm can provide a sense of pride in feeling a connection to the people that grow your food and that live in your neighborhood. I’d like to take a moment to thank Colleen Logan for all the support she and Savor The Local have given our farm over the years. Colleen wrote, “I am passionate about what I do. I love supporting chefs who cook with local ingredients that are in season and I enjoy the challenge of bringing interesting and unique items for daily cooking or special occasions,” she says. “I am proud of the fact that the produce is harvested to order and delivered just in time. 95% of what I deliver was harvested that day or the day before. I directly help small farms thrive, by letting them set the prices, the minimum for each item and working with their schedules and means of communication. I also really enjoy the personal relationships I have with each farm and some amazing local chefs.” Her words sure gave me a sense of pride. Thanks, Colleen.- If you care about your local environment and economy it makes sense to find a farmer in your area that has values you want to support. We want to thank all of you reading this because most of you have supported us for a long time through the purchase of our Mystery Boxes and farm products. We hope you will continue to support us and help us get the word out to others that might be interested in good ol’fashioned, locally sourced, farm fresh produce!
The seasons are marching forward. We plant basil this week, and the first summer squashes get sown in the trays. By popular convention our “frost-free” date here in Santa Cruz County is usually thought of as April 15th so we’ll have lots of transplants coming out of the greenhouse around that time. Life is about to get really busy and I’m optimistic about the outlook for the upcoming season.
Thanks, for your support!
Andy and the Crew at Mariquita Farm.
© 2021 Essay by Andy Griffin.
Photo of Gayle at a Piccino Mystery Thursday by Debra Baida.
Photo of Linda Ferrasci’s sheep by Linda Ferrasci.
Photo of pick up site with totes and mystery boxes by Gayle Ross.
Photo of Colleen Logan and the Savor the Local van by Michael Troutman.
All other photos by Andy Griffin.
Did You Say Chayote?
We’re still seeing rain and cold night temperatures, but spring planting is underway. The potatoes are in the ground, and the basil seed arrived yesterday. Along with corn, squash, tomatoes, chilies and beans, I’ll be trying some chayote this year. Maybe my 2nd time will be the charm.
Several years ago Don Gerardo brought me a chayote from his home in Michoacan and it already had a stem emerging. We planted the fruit at the foot of an Ash tree in my yard and it grew rampantly up into the crown. Eventually, there were some flowers, and then a single fruit formed, but then we had a frost and the whole plant died. This time, I’m thinking that if I plant the Chayote earlier in the year than I did last time it will have more time to set more flowers and create a bigger crop.
Chayotes are in the squash family, but they behave a little differently than the zucchini. Give it time to grow and the chayote plant will form a large underground potato-like tuber. When a frost kills the foliage, the chayote can always sprout back from the tuber and grow new vines. (I’m also growing the Scarlet runner bean this year, which shares the Chayote’s Central American origin, and it too, develops a tuberous habit. I’m betting the weather is unstable there and it serves the plants well to have a 2nd way of survival if the seed crop can sometimes be destroyed by unpredictable invasion of icy weather.) The habit of the chayote is rampant, clambering over everything in its path, climbing up trees, crawling over walls. It’s the custom in rural Mexico, where the chayote is at home, to let the chayote’s vines scramble into trees. But I don’t want to climb a tree to harvest a squash, so I’ve built some tall frames on the sunny, south side of our home garden for our chayote.
I’ve got several varieties of Chayote, about fifteen potted plants in all, growing in my greenhouse. When the danger of frost is over, I’ll transplant the chayotes under the frame. As the spring advances into summer the vines will cover the frames like a canopy, and the ripe fruit will hang down through the screen at the top so that it can be picked. Fidel, who manages the production in the greenhouse, gave me the fruits. When the season is over we’ll know if planting them on a larger scale is a good idea. I like the idea that the chayote is popular in South East Asian AND Latin American cooking. I’m going to enjoy getting to know the plant. I’m hoping we’ll have a crop to share by late summer.
Thanks! Andy
© 2021 Essay and photos by Andy Griffin.
The Mystery Behind the Lemon
“When life gives you lemons, make….” Yada, yada, yada, you know how the saying goes. As pithy quips go, this sour cliche is not without its wisdom, but I find it’s hint of disdain for this versatile fruit distasteful, as though there’s something wrong with a lemon. The lemon is a gift! Just imagine if you had the misfortune to be born in Europe before the lemon was introduced from Southeast Asia. To a modern botanist, the Latin name for lemon is Citrus medica, but that reflects a consensus in the scientific community to use a highly modified form of the Latin language for taxonomic nomenclature; there wasn’t a word in classical Latin for lemon. Not only did the Romans not have the tomato, the potato, the bean, the squash, the chile pepper, or the corn plant, they didn’t have the lemon. When life finally did gave the Romans the lemon- via the discovery of a direct sea route from the southern Red Sea to India- the produce distributors of the Empire made MONEY. Lemons are great.
For the last ten years or so I’ve been planting lemons at my house. I started with some Meyer lemons, because they’re very popular and I enjoy their balance of sweet and sour. But the Meyer lemon is not a “true” lemon. Meyer was the fellow who encountered the “Meyer” lemon in the hinterlands of China, but make no mistake, it was the Chinese who developed the fruit by crossing the citron with a Mandarine orange/pummelo hybrid. Indeed, if you let a Meyer lemon hang on the tree for a long time, the fruit begins to pick up an orange cast to the skin which betrays the Mandarin heritage. The extra sweetness that the fully mature Meyer possesses is another hint that the fruit is not a true lemon. When life gives you Meyers, make dessert.
But as popular as the Meyer has become, the true lemon still has its fans. There is a bitterness to a true lemon that adds an attractive element of complexity to many dishes that the Meyer can’t match. When I saw how well the Meyer lemons did on the south facing slope of the field below my house I decided to diversify my little grove with a number of different “true” lemons. I planted Eureka lemons, Lisbon lemons, Femminello lemons, and a Santa Teresa lemon or two. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep the names straight, so I have a small lemon zoo of unnamed varieties. I guess you could say that when life sold me lemons I paid for the young trees but I didn’t pay attention. At least I’m having fun trying to rediscover the names of the plants I’m cultivating and when I gave Happy Girl Kitchen 300 pounds of mixed up lemons they made Lemon Medley Marmalade.
Today I spent the morning watering my citrus since it appears like we’re not going to get enough rain. I was also weeding around the base of the trees and getting ready to fertilize the crop. I use a special OMRI approved organic fertilizer twice a year, and I also toss on a handful of seaweed meal. Seaweed has a rich blend of trace elements and minerals which help the plant create interesting flavors. As I dug around the trees I unfortunately unearthed a drowsy toad. He ( or she or they) did not look all that happy to be disturbed, but lucklily wasn’t harmed. I thanked the creature for eating flies and mosquitoes and let it go back to sleep in the mud. When life gave the toad a lemon tree it made a home.
Cuban Shaddock
The different lemon varieties differ in size, shape, flavor, and season of yield. One tree is a standout, the fruits are enormous with an extremely thick rind. I spoke with the nursery where I’d purchased the trees. It turns out that my “lemon” was actually a Cuban Shaddock. For many years the Cuban Shaddock was used as a rootstock because of its vigor and disease resistance, and then a lemon scion was grafted on. A freeze had killed the lemon tree but the rootstock survived and now is fruiting. I’ve kept the Shaddock tree because it’s so entertaining. The Shaddock fruit is good too, but there’s not much of it inside all the pith. I also learned that the use of the Shaddock as a rootstock can sometimes make for lemons which have unusually thick peels, so nowadays the nursery has switched to other types of rootstock. So what do you do if life gives you a lemon with a thick rind? Make lemonade? Most of the lemony flavor in a lemon comes from the essential oils in the skin, nit from the juice. Here’s how I make lemonade:
Eliza with a rather large lemon.
Use a vegetable peeler to slice off the colored part of the rind before you squeeze the lemons. I make a simple syrup by bringing two cups of water to a boil and then I add a cup of sugar and a generous handful of lemon peels. I let the lemon peels simmer in the sugar water for ten minutes of so, then I let the mixture cool before removing the skins. After I’ve juiced the lemons I add water and the lemony simple syrup until I find the balance I like. I find that most recipes make a lemonade that is far too sweet for my taste so I won’t tell you how much sugar to use, but I can assure you that the lemony syrup gives a real citrus punch to the drink. Sometimes for fun I’ll use several different kinds of citrus peels to jazz up the lemonade or I will make a batch of limoncello to use in a cocktail. Wintertime is citrus time on the farm, and this week life is giving you lemons. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
© 2021 Essay by Andy Griffin.
Photos by Starling Linden and Andy Griffin.