“Twas Ever Thus.”

 

Nicholas Culpeper, an English botanist, doctor and astrologer active during the first half of the 1600s, said of comfrey that the herb was good for treating ailments related to “Spitting, pissing Blood, Inward Wounds & Bruises, Phtisick, Bloody Flux, Terms stops, Whites, Nervs cut, Muscles cut, sharp Humors, Wounds, Ruptures, broken Bones, Knotted Breasts, Hemorrhoids, Inflamation, Gout, Pained Joynts, and Gangreans.”

Wow! That’s quite a plant.

I’ve got some comfrey growing in my yard. We’re going to take a closer look at this herb in a bit but first let’s go back in time to the late 1970s and parachute out of the time machine into West Marin. That’s what I did.  I landed in a cow pen on the Strauss Dairy, in Marshall, along the Tamales Bay. I worked there for a year and learned a lot about cattle, but it was Ellen Strauss, the matriarch of the farm, who noticed the interest I had in the cottage garden we maintained. “If you ever want to work on a vegetable farm,” she said, “I’ll give you a number to call.””

After a season on the Strauss Dairy I returned to college at UC Davis, The first thing I did was switch my major from Range Management to Western Philosophy. I’d fallen in love with West Marin, and when I needed absolute quiet and a lack of distractions in order to choke down 1000 pages of Hegel or Leibniz I’d retreat to Pt Reyes and read. When I finished the philosophy program I visited Ellen Strauss at her home in Tamales and asked about that phone number.

“Call Warren Weber,” Ellen said. “He has Star Route Farm down in Bolinas. He’s one of the most progressive farmers in the state.”

In 1981, when I graduated from UC Davis, organic farming was not considered “progressive” by many people in the mainstream farming community. Organic farmers were typically dismissed as dirty hippies; drug-addled losers who were looking backwards towards an idealized, pre-scientific past, instead of using the chemical crop management tools that God had blessed us with. The Strauss dairy was not yet an organic dairy when I worked there, but the Strauss’s had open minds. In fact, Ellen Strauss was one of the key people, being both a farmer AND environmentalist, who helped to found the Marin Agricultural Land Trust.

So I made the call to WarrenThe first day I stepped into the tool shed on Star Route Farm to grab a hoe I noticed a tattered copy of R Crumb’s poster of Mr. Natural pinned to the wall. “Twas Ever Thus,” proclaims Mr. Natural as he drives a stylized 1940’s era tractor down the row of a cultivated field. I had never seen that particular poster before but I was quite familiar with R Crumb, who was the artist/cartoonist responsible for a number of popular “underground comix.” R Crumb did the artwork for Janis Joplin’s album “Cheap Thrills.” I had to smile; if there was ever a “poster child” for “dirty hippies” who could fulfill every conventional farmer’s worst fantasy/nightmare of hippies farming it would be “Mr Natural.”

When I’d worked at Star Route Farm for a while and gotten to know Warren Weber I asked him about the poster. He laughed. “Don’t those plants in the poster that Mr Natural is cultivating look like comfrey?

Comfrey was one of the worst weeds we had on the farm and we were endlessly hoeing it out of our tidy rows of lettuce, chard, and kale. Warren went on to explain that when he’d first started farming organically in the late ’60s comfrey had an outsized reputation among the hippies for being almost a miracle herb, capable of curing everything from halitosis to parking tickets. He’d planted a row of comfrey, only to discover that

a. There was no meaningful market for comfrey and…

b. Comfrey is toxic to your liver and kidneys if consumed in quantity, and it may even provoke abortion.

So Warren turned the comfrey crop under with a disk harrow, only to discover that comfrey spreads a lot quicker from root cuttings than it does from seed. By attempting to destroy the crop, Warren succeeded in creating a new “weed” all around the whole field. He had just reaffirmed the Law Of Unintended Consequences.  “Twas Ever Thus,” Mr Natural says, but he’s looking back in time. We are all of us, always, reconfirming the Law Of Unintended Consequences. Once you have a comfrey problem in your field it may “Always be thus,” unless you use chemical crop protection products that open the doors to their own unintended consequences.

I worked on Star Route Farm for almost 5 years and I learned a lot from Warren. He’s a very educated man, who is funny, smart, disciplined and progressive. Without his mentorship I never could have gone on to have my own farm. Besides the myriad of details about plants and cultivation that he shared, he taught me a lot about marketing. “Know your market BEFORE you plant!” He learned that lesson from comfrey, and I learned it from him.

I also planted some comfrey; not a lot, but just a little, because it does make a good feed for chickens, and we keep a tiny flock. When I walk past my little bed of comfrey it makes me think back fondly of my “salad days” back in West Marin and the cool people I got to know there. Recently, when I saw the Mr Natural poster on line I had to buy it and hang it in my room as an homage to Star Route Farm.

Another thing Warren taught me was that the crops don’t sell themselves. You’ve got to get out there and hustle; tell the people what you have, tell them why they need it, and then get the crops picked, packed, cooled and delivered. That’s why I’m writing to you now. It’s full-on tomato season RIGHT NOW. We’ve got lovely tomatoes, herbs, citrus crops and cut flowers that have been grown with care for you.

We’ll be in San Francisco this coming Sunday, August 16th, down in the Dogpatch at Piccino Restaurant ,1001 Minnesota Street, from 9:30 to 12:30. We’re taking pre-orders and we will also have plenty of things on hand for casual sale. We happily accept cash, but we can take Venmo or Zelle too.

Saturday, August 22nd finds us in our own home town Corralitos at Jett & Rose, on Freedom Blvd at Corralitos Road, from 10 am to 4 pm. On Sunday, August 23rd, we’ll be at Brocc Cellars in Berkeley, details tba, and we’ll be back in Berkeley on Saturday, September 5th, down on 9th street between Virginia & Cedar, from 9:30 to 12:30  We hope to see you.

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