Letters From Andy

 

Corralitos, where I live and farm, isn’t on the road to anywhere, and never has been. The name is from Spanish and means “little corrals.” The soldiers of the Portola Expedition gave our community its present name when they camped here for a few days back in 1770, tired, lost, sick, and confused. At that time the land here was cloaked in a dense and primeval redwood forest, and the trees were the biggest living things any of the Spanish Soldiers had ever seen. If a redwood giant is shattered by a lightning bolt or badly burned by fire, a “fairy ring” of young redwood trees will grow up around the natal stump. When the Spanish soldiers were too exhausted to continue their journey of exploration they stopped here to recuperate. The soldiers were fearful that their pack animals would flee the camp in the night and strand them in the middle of nowhere so they stuffed the gaps between the young redwoods that made up several of the fairy rings with brush and sticks and “corralled” their livestock in the makeshift pens.

We still have redwoods here, especially in the canyons, but the old growth trees that carpeted the valley are gone. When the Spanish king granted the Amesti family a ranch here, the 14,000 acre parcel was called Rancho Corralitos. Both my home ranch and the greenhouse facility I lease are on lands that were once part of the Rancho Corralitos. When Don Amesti, the Rancho Corralitos landlord, saw fit to lease his property to some German loggers in the 1840s, our little valley became the first place in California for commercial redwood logging. Once the big trees were gone our neighborhood slipped into obscurity until 1905 when the San Francisco earthquake and fire prompted the logging of the second growth redwoods that were needed to rebuild the City.

If it was logging that brought many of the settlers here, it was farming that kept Corralitos going. At first the redwood groves were replaced by apple orchards. My family came here in the late 1800s to raise apricots. Nowadays we see more strawberries and raspberries as the orchards are replaced by more remunerative crops. . And wineries! From my kitchen window looking north I can see the vineyards on the higher slopes of the hills that see more sunshine and less of the marine fog that we have here on the flats. Maybe, in time, all of the tasting rooms that are opening up will make our community more of a destination than it has been in the recent past. For now, it is just a nice place to live and work. For culture we have a Grange Hall, a Community Center, a Cultural Center, a women’s club, and an annual pancake breakfast. We also have a weekly market; the Corralitos Farm and Garden Market, and I invite you to come down and visit us at our stall one of these Sundays.

The Corralitos Farm and Garden Market is tiny by contemporary urban standards, but it’s a very nice little scene. For a number of years now, every Sunday between 11 am and 3 pm, a collection of local growers gather behind the Corralitos Cultural Center at 127 Hames Road to offer their produce. Ken is almost always there from Bobcat Ridge Avocados, but he also brings a changing selection of other crops that he grows. We like to get his Shitake mushrooms. Bob is always there, bringing his veggies from a garden way up Eureka Canyon, where most of our surviving redwood trees still live. Our friends and neighbors, Zea and Bryan, from Fruitilicious Farm bring their fruits du jour- right now they’re into stone fruit and figs. There is usually a stall with flowers, and a surprise stall or two, offering anything from crafts to worm castings, and then there’s us.

If you have an urge to get lost in Corralitos there are some fun places to visit. The Corralitos Sausage Company, just around the corner from the Farm and Garden Market, offers a huge list of sausages made in house. It is one of those places that people come from all over to visit. Just a little further down the road is Blossom’s Farm Market, a super cute biodynamic store and cafe, offers food and medicaments and sometimes some plants for sale. And then there are the wineries. There are no crowds, no lines, and the biggest threat you’ll encounter is likely getting stuck behind a string of bicyclists or some wild turkeys crossing the road. Come visit one of these Sundays and see for yourself!

Farm & Garden Market

Corralitos Cultural Center 127 Hames Road, Corralitos, CA Sunday, 11AM to 3PM

Fruitilicious Farm: Fruitilicious Farm

Bobcat Ridge Avocados https://www.bobcatridgeavocados.com/home

—© 2021 Essay by Andy Griffin and photos by Andy Griffin

Photo of Redwoods by Pixabay

People have been asking when the dry-farmed Early Girl tomatoes and San Marzano tomatoes will be available in bulk for canning.

Last week we picked a straw hat’s worth of dry-farmed Early Girl tomatoes. It was a first sweep across the field and there are 10,000 plants. Starr and I were able to eat the entire crop over the course of several dinner salads and some lunchtime tacos. But when we make a second sweep this week we’ll have to graduate from a straw gardening hat to a ten gallon cowboy hat if we want to carry our harvest to the kitchen. After that, experience has shown that the tomato yield will grow exponentially and all the hats in Texas couldn’t hold the crop. I’m hoping we can offer the dry-farmed Early Girl tomatoes in bulk by the end of July.

Every year is different because the weather conditions that push or stall the crop vary, but we always plant our tomatoes after the 15th of April and we usually have a nice supply of ripe fruit by late July. Cherry tomatoes are small and ripen quickly so they come first. Early Girls are called “Early” because they are quicker to ripen than some other varieties. San Marzano tomatoes have many virtues, including a rich, thick texture when they’re cooked down into sauce but they’re not “early.” It’s a lot of work to plant out the tomatoes in the spring and we can’t complete the entire task at once, so typically we plant the different varieties out in stages over several weeks. I figure that we’ll have a supply of San Marzano tomatoes starting in mid-August.

If field conditions are reasonable we should have a steady supply of tomatoes from mid-July  through early October. After the second week in October the days have gotten short enough so that the crop ripens more slowly than it had. By late October we have to worry that an early rain will spoil the tomatoes. Some years we have significant precipitation and the crop is shut down early. Other years, we wait and wait for any rain and the tomatoes keep coming. We’ve had ripe tomatoes for Thanksgiving dinner some years. Other years we’re done for the season by Halloween. If you’re serious about canning the best bet is to plan for doing the work in late August when the crop is reliably plentiful and flavorful.

This week we’re starting in on the earliest heirloom tomatoes. Of all of the varieties they’re the most vulnerable to extreme heat and sunscald, so I’m hoping the temps are moderate over the coming weeks. So far so good- the first fruit is always buried in green foliage and protected from the direct rays of the sun. I hope you are too, and I’m hoping you’re as hungry for fresh salsa and Caprese salad as I am.

—© 2021 Essay by Andy Griffin and photos of farm by Andy Griffin

A little country schoolhouse in the woods adjacent to the site of one of America’s most egregious environmental crimes made a perfect setting for the memorial service. A gentle breeze stroked the pines and eased the 102-degree summer heat as the mourners began to arrive. Many folks tumbled out of vans or stepped down from pick-up trucks, brightly dressed for the occasion in their best tie-dyed formal wear as had been suggested by the grieving family. I didn’t see any black in the crowd, but there were also people in colorful prints and stripes, and a few folks chose to wear next to nothing at all. Excited children ran loose on the grass in the sun and there were glass pitchers of iced, herbal teas and lemonade waiting in the shade. You could hear the music of acoustic guitars and harps coming from a duo down by the makeshift altar where the grownups were gathering. There was a life to be celebrated and honored here, but first let’s talk about the crime.

Malakoff Diggins on the San Juan Ridge North of Nevada City in the Sierra Nevada Gold Country is a vast blight on the landscape that has been re-imagined as a State Park. When California’s Gold Rush matured in the mid1850s the business of gold mining became very industrialized. Gone were the days of the  ’49ers bent over in a river panning for gold nuggets. Capitalists raised money for mining companies to dam creeks and rivers high in the mountains. Then they’d cut down the pine forests to build wooden sluices that would guide the wild water down from great heights to the lower elevations in the foothills. The sluices would be channeled into huge hoses and, thanks to the tremendous pressure from the dramatic descent, the water exploded out of the nozzles with violent, cutting force. Whole hillsides would be washed away in a muddy torrent and the raging slurry would be strained for gold through a series of sluices. Malakoff Diggins is the scar left from one of the largest hydraulic mines. There are eroded canyons where there once were hills. The soil was washed away down to bedrock so a visitor can see deep into the planet’s bones. The park’s stunted forest is struggling to heal the violated earth.

To California’s 19th Century mining industry, it didn’t matter that her forests were destroyed. It wasn’t relevant to the shareholders of the mining corporations that the mud flows from their hydraulic mining polluted rivers and destroyed fisheries and whole ecosystems. It wasn’t a problem for the mining industry that the waste from hydraulic mining destroyed farm fields and flooded cities and ruined bays and wetlands downstream. The only thing that mattered to the mining companies was extracting gold from the ground as fast and as cheaply as possible. The miners had zero social consciousness and their “industry” was a rape. The only thing the mining companies could have done to behave in a less socially conscious manner would have been to use slave labor.

Eventually, the number of citizen victims in California so vastly outnumbered the handful of capitalists who controlled the hydraulic mining business that it became politically expedient for the California Legislature to pass America’s first environmental legislation and ban hydraulic mining. It helped that the Sacramento River, which passes close by to California’s Legislature, was so full of mud from the mines that it overflowed frequently and flooded the politicians. The law was important not only because it put a halt to an egregious crime against our environment but also because it set precedent by showing how the wellbeing of the body politic was dependent on the wise management of the land and water resources that sustain the community. Maybe that moment when our legislature first acted with an awareness of the environment was an inflection point; at any rate, starting in the late 19th Century there was a growing social awareness of our role in destroying or conserving our shared environment. At first it seemed like only the poets and artists and mystics and bohemian freaks could see our natural world as anything more than a piggy bank to be busted open for coins.

Amigo Bob was born in 1951. Post War America was the boom time for chemical  agriculture. The threat we face from chemical residues in our food and water is never as obvious as a wave of mud spilling over a riverbank but it’s just as real. In the late 50’s consumers were ignorant and didn’t understand about the ways chemical laced runoff from farms was altering and degrading our rivers, lakes, and aquifers. We didn’t have a widespread public understanding of our farmlands as an irreplaceable resource to be conserved. The “modern” in everything was being fetishized and what had been traditionally valued was seen as outdated, so antique varieties of grains, fruits and vegetables were being forgotten from cultivation. The Universities only taught the gospel of  “Better Living Thru Chemistry.” But there was also a nascent counterculture springing up that sought to reconnect our society with the natural world that sustains us. Joni Mitchell captured the moment in her song, Woodstock; “We are stardust,” she sang. “We are golden. And we’ve got to get back to the garden.” Amigo Bob had a hippy memorial service because he was a straight up, tie-dyed in the wool, unapologetic and incurable hippy.

The North Columbia Schoolhouse is a community center for the people who live up and down the San Juan Ridge. The Malakoff Diggins State Park is just around the corner.  Amigo Bob may have started off in San Francisco, but he ended up living and farming nearby. What a difference one hundred years makes. Where the gold miners had seen the soil on San Juan Ridge as an obstruction inconveniently hiding treasure, the hippies like Amigo Bob saw the soil as the real treasure. Where the mining companies had no shame in flushing their unfiltered wastes into the whole public’s ecosystem, the hippies envisioned a movement back to the land characterized by a rainbowed network of environmentally sustainable communities where nature was recognized as a partner, not as an adversary. Amigo Bob came out of that loose, nature-centric hippie community and he lived his life as an activist for those life-affirming, scientific, and transcendent values. Amigo Bob put the “active” in “activist.”

In the early ’70s Amigo Bob worked with other consumers to create food buying clubs that could source organic, chemical-free foods for the members. When he found that there was very little organic food to be had he started farming. When he ran into the inevitable challenges as an organic grower he began researching organic farm supplies and ended up starting Peaceful Valley Farm Supply in Grass Valley, a first generation organic farm supply business that is still serving the industry today. When the growth of the organic food business created concerns about standards, Amigo worked with others to link farmers together to craft reasonable, enforceable and transparent standards for the industry. He persisted in trying to get the Universities to work on the challenges facing organic agriculture. When the schools were slow to take up the challenge of learning how to solve agricultural problems organically, Amigo Bob worked with others to create the Eco Farm Conference, which brought farmers, scientists, and activists together. Amigo farmed olives and his olive oil business brought him into the world of fine dining and he helped create an awareness among chefs about the role small farms could play in supplying Restaurant kitchens with fresh ingredients. He worked to save rare and endangered fruit varieties from being lost and he founded the Gillet Institute to institutionalize these goals. https://felixgillet.org/ . Amigo started a farming consulting business to help teach other aspiring and established farmers what he’s learned. For a fitting coda to his life Amigo chose to be composted and turned back into the earth instead of having his body embalmed and boxed up.

As an activist Amigo Bob really covered all the bases and his memorial service was a chance for the community that he sprang from and inspired to gather together and say thanks for a life well lived. Amigo will be missed but the crowd that gathered to remember him spanned all ages and the work goes on. Amigo would be happy to see that the environmental values that he promoted are gathering momentum as day-by-day more people learn to see our shared world from a more holistic perspective.

“All of your actions, no matter how small, can have a huge impact on the environment and all the humans and creatures that inhabit it.”

Amigo Bob 1951- 2020

—© 2021 Essay by Andy Griffin and photos by Starling Linden and Andy Griffin

We planted the first stage of our little “milpa” this weekend. A milpa is a “corn patch.” The City of Milpitas is named after the little corn patches that characterised the area during California’s Spanish colonial period. But a classic traditional milpa is always more than corn. The Mesoamerican farmers who created the milpa typically grew a diversity of crops in their corn fields. The corn stalks grew high and vining beans snaked up the stalks, using them for support. Broad leaved squash plants would grow between the scattered hummocks of corn, and the dense canopy they formed would choke out the weeds.  Crops that we moderns might think of as noxious weeds to be exterminated, like pigweed or lambsquarters, were “quelites” to the farmers of the milpas and they’d gather them to add leafy greens to their diet. A fully realized milpa consisted of Corn, squash, and beans -the Holy Trinity- surrounded by a cohort of useful and nutritious herbs.

I’m playing around with the milpa idea for fun, and to see how well it works out in practice. I see my milpa as a typical type garden which might be found anywhere along the French-Mexican border. For my hard squash I’ve chosen to plant “Doran,” an heirloom French squash for the Cucurbita moschata- like a butternut, but round, like a pumpkin. I think the Doran hard squash will be an excellent size for our farm’s supporters, since they’re small enough for us to fit in the box and for our supporters to consume in one meal. We received seed for this crop from our friend and neighbor, Zea, at Fruitilicious Farm, who has been saving this old fashion variety. Any purslane weeds that come up in our milpa we’ll let go to seed so that we can have “verdolaga.” Purslane, AKA Verdolaga, which is esteemed as a cooking green in both the French and Mexican traditions.

For corn, I’m going with a purple and white Oaxacan corn that has big, floury kernels for making masa, or corn meal. Fidel, our greenhouse foreman, brought us this corn which has big, sturdy stalks that the beans can climb up. For beans I’m going to plant The Japanese selection of a purple seeded runner bean that originated in Oaxaca but is now known in the trade as Scarlet Runner beans or “Akahana Mame.” I’ll wait until the corn is up before I plant the beans so that they won’t choke the poor corn plants out. And to help the beans find direction up I’m also putting some sunflowers in my milpa. Sunflowers are another gift of the Americas to the rest of the world, and the ancient farmers who developed them treated them as a grain crop for their rich seed. I don’t think I can beat our local birds to a crop of sunflower seeds, so I’m growing some ornamental varieties for late summer bouquets.