Letters From Andy

“Give me two reasons why anybody would want to live in Texas,” I said to cousin Weldon. I was probably nine at the time and I’d only passed through the Lone Star State once on a cross-country trip my family had taken three years before in the summer of 1966. We had a Volkswagon bus, and I’d been stuck in the back seat, sweltering, so I wouldn’t bug my sister, for the last 1,500 miles. Looking out the window of that VW, Texas had looked to me a whole lot like Bakersfield CA, except that it was a whole lot bigger- indeed, it seemed to go on forever. I wasn’t in love with it. But Weldon was, having had the good fortune to have been born there, and at 12 years of age, he had the maturity and confidence to answer me boldly and unequivocally.

Drive up window for a liquor store somewhere in Texas.

“Dallas Cowboys, Houston Oilers,” Weldon said, without a moment’s hesitation, before reciting the litany of Texas’s endless charms and marvels; the coldest beer, the hottest women etc. etc. And while I’ve remained amused by the average Texan’s oversized pride of place, even into adulthood, I’ve gained a more nuanced appreciation for Texas. Bottom line; despite the state’s insane politics, Texas really IS big, and it’s big enough to embrace a kaleidoscope of characters that defies any attempt to simplify or pigeonhole it. There’s Willie, of course, who I think is a truly great American, but there are a growing number of my own family members there, and I’ve had an opportunity to make some friends there over the course of a number of trips. Last winter, Starr and I passed through “miles and miles of Texas” on our way to visit my cousin, Elizabeth,  in Houston, and we had an opportunity to visit my friends, the Arnoskys, at their flower farm near Blanco, up in the Hill Country.

I met Pamela and Frank Arnosky years ago at the Texas Organic Farmers and Gardeners Convention, that was held that year down on South Padre Island on the gulf coast. Later, after a subsequent conference held up in Kerrville in the Hill Country, I had an opportunity to visit their farm. No farmer anywhere would ever suggest that the interior of Texas is the easiest place in the world to grow organic cut flowers, but they’ve done a magnificent job. I could write a whole essay about how systematically and generously they’ve gone about the task of growing flowers and the mission of creating community, but today I want to talk about just one flower; the marigold.

Andy and Starr inside the Big Blue Barn at the Arnosky’s Flower Farm.

Frank and Pamela are not just good growers- they’re very thoughtful and innovative about marketing. They’d always grown marigolds and over time they developed a reputation for having beautiful, clean, sturdy, and affordable marigolds at exactly the right time for the Dia de Los Muertos celebrations that are a yearly tradition in the Hispanic community. The Arnosky’s flower farm is out in the boonies, but it’s more or less equidistant between San Antonio and Austin. So it wasn’t too long before the Southern Asian communities that have sprung up around Austin found out about them and began arriving in the fall to get their marigolds for Diwalli, the festival of lights.

When farmers get together we usually seize the moment to bitch and moan about the weather, the prices, the regulations, the cost of fuel, packaging and labor, but we will usually trade tips on what crops have been working. As we listened to Frank and Pamela talk about their experiences growing marigolds it occurred to Starr and I that we ought to give the flower a try. Our farm is in the middle of a very vibrant Hispanic community and there are large populations of South East Asians nearby and, besides, who doesn’t think marigolds aren’t beautiful. Plus, from an organic perspective, marigolds make a good rotation crop, since their roots create natural chemicals that tend to depress the populations of pathogenic nematodes.

There are any number of marigold varieties available, but Frank hooked me up with a seed company out of Thailand that has the best marigolds for sacramental purposes. The type I chose to grow- which he recommended- is called Chedi, and the orange color is exactly the hue of the orange robes you’ll see Vietnamese Buddhist monks wearing. He also gave me suggestions for the best dates to drop seed in order to make the Diwalli/Dia de los Muertos harvest a bullseye. Conversations our foreman, Fidel, had with local Oaxacan growers confirmed the dates that work best at this latitude and we made plans. But because I’d never grown Chedi before, I planted a series of small crops to have an opportunity to learn the crop. I ended up learning a whole lot more.

Our friend, Jordan, who owns and operates Happy Girl Kitchen in Pacific Grove, came by the farm to pick up a quantity of dry farmed early girls to can and she saw one of my experimental rows of marigolds. She was stoked. I didn’t know it, but one of my test plantings of Chedi was blooming just in time for two important celebrations; Balarm’s Presentation, and Krishna’s Birthday. She asked to get a large quantity of blooms for the temple she’s a member of up in Mountain View. It was a lot of fun getting all the blooms picked, and she sent us some great pictures of the garlands that the people in the temple created.

If you want to check out the farm in early October, come on out to see a handful of farms on the central coast, ours included, during the Open Farm Tours on October 8^th.

Thanks again for all your support!
Andy and the Crew at Mariquita Farm

© 2022 Essay by Andy Griffin

Photos of locations in Texas and of Starr harvesting Marigolds at Mariquita by Andy Griffin.
Photos of Marigolds and Andy harvesting them by Starling Linden.
Photos of Marigolds at Temple by Jordan Champagne.

Tomatillo de Milpa

The Islas Marias are an archipelago in the Pacific some 60 miles offshore of Nayarit that have served as a Mexican Federal Prison Colony. I’ve never been there, but when we pick tomatillos I’m prompted to think back on Tia Maria “Pistolitas,” because her husband served a life sentence there, having been convicted of growing opium poppies and making black tar heroin back in Jalisco. “Pistolitas” means “little pistols,” and I’m not quite clear on how Maria first earned her name, but I remember her as somewhat of a firecracker by nature; a curandera, or natural healer, a defiant and outspoken lesbian grandma, a farmworker, as well as being a part time “coyote” who brought people across the border deserts ahead of every strawberry season. She was Ramiro’s auntie, or “Tia,” and I lived with Ramiro Campos and his family here for a couple of years back in the early ’90s. Besides Ramiro and his wife, Amparo, and their two children, I shared the house with his big sister, Maria. Ramiro’s uncle Raul and his wife, Maria, were frequent visitors to the ranch, as was Maria Pistolitas, his Tia from the other side of his family. Having one Maria go by the moniker “Pistolitas,” was helpful in keeping all the Marias sorted out.

Tomatillos (Verde and Milpa) in a molcajete with a stone pestle, or ‘mano.’

Ramiro, Raul, Amparo, Maria, Maria, and I, were all sitting around the fire one evening in the yard, warming tortillas on a grill and sharing some beer and tacos. It was summer, so we had plenty of tomatoes, cebolla de rabo verde, or green-tailed onions, jalapeño peppers, and tomatillos. The women were making salsa by grilling the tomatillos, chilis and green onions over an open fire until they were slightly charred and softened by the heat, and then they’d mash it all together with a squeeze of lemon in their stone “molcajete” or mortar, using a stone “mano,” or pestle. With a lemon and limes hanging from the fruit trees growing not more that 20 yards from the fire, the smell of grilling jalapeños in the air, a handful of goats scandalizing just beyond the fence and peering through the woven wire fence at us, and with the Ranchero music playing low on the radio it was a very Mexican scene and a very pleasant evening. Ramiro was moved to philosophize: “You know, Andres,” he said. “This is really a paradise. We’re at the end of the road and the gate is closed, so we have all the privacy a person could want. With squash and garbanzo and corn and cilantro and chilis and corn growing in the garden, we’ve got almost everything we want.”

“What’s missing,” I asked?

“Tomatillo de Milpa,” Ramiro answered.

“These tomatillos are fine,” he said, gesturing to the big green tomatillos that were sizzling and popping on the grill. He and I both worked on Riverside Farms back then, and he’d brought the big, green tomatillos home from work where we had a big patch of them to harvest for our farmers market customers.

Tomatillo de milpa presenting itself as a weed in Andy’s young Hoja Santa hedge.

“But back home on our ranch in La Barca we’ve got the wild tomatillos growing all over the place. You don’t have to plant them, or water them, or anything; just send the kids out to pick them when they’re ready. They’re small, but they have less juice so they keep better, and the flavor is great, and they grill up well. The salsa is “mas autentica” con tomatillo de milpa.”

“Luckily,” he continued, “Mi Tia Pistolitas is coming up from La Barca next week to visit, and I’ve asked her to bring me a handful from the ranch so we can plant them here.”

Toma Verde tomatillo, the cultivated form, big and green.

That was thirty years ago. Maria Pistolitas came to visit and she brought up a small paper bag with a handful of small, half-purple tomatillos de milpa for Ramiro to plant. The “milperos,” as they’re called, did great. Amparo and Maria harvested some of them, and the squirrels and crows and mice harvested some of them. Milperos don’t need a gardener’s attention to thrive; they just do their thing, and now we have milperos growing everywhere on the farm, whether we want them or not. I have a milpa, or corn patch, and of course the milperos have popped up there. But they’re also growing in the zinnias, they’re growing among the roses and lemons and cacti, and they’re even showing up in the old water troughs I’ve filled with soil and planted out in Hoja Santa.

But the tomatillos in this week’s harvest share box are the milpero’s larger, domesticated cousins called “Toma Verde.” Toma Verde tomatillos are fine, and they are the backbone of the green salsa industry. They pick quick and cook quickly. The variety is reliably disease free and pest resistant for the most part, and the variety is familiar to most consumers. We will have the  tomatillo de milpa later in the season when the plants are heavily loaded with their tiny fruits and all we have to do to “pick” them is pull up the plants and shake them.

And what happened to Ramiro? He and Amparo saved up their money when they lived with me and bought a house in San Juan Bautista. When the housing market was going through a periodic peak they sold their California home, moved back to Jalisco and bought a goat ranch. Ramiro started a small goat dairy. It’s a success story of sorts, but it’s not a simple  “happily ever after” fairy tale because there are problems with armed gangs there that never was an issue in the past, and cartel violence casts a worry over everything. The last time I spoke with Ramiro he had taken to sleeping in his barn loft with an assault rifle, ready to fend off the rustlers who would steal his quality dairy goats to slaughter and sell for meat on the black market. I wish Ramiro and his family the success they’ve worked so hard to achieve. The Campos family is gone from here, but hardly forgotten, since their tomatillos de milpa have made themselves at home here.

Tomatillo de milpa growing as a thicket of weeds among the rows of Oaxacan beans.

© 2022 Essay and photos by Andy Griffin

Windmill at Mariquita Farm

Water witching works like a charm. Or not. Some people call the ancient practice “dowsing.” Others call it “magic.” It works like this; cut a young, but firm, forked branch from a tree- preferably a willow if you’re dowsing for water- and trim it so that it is shaped like a “Y” with each arm or leg about 12 to 18 inches long. Grasp your forked branch with both hands, palms up, each hand holding on to one of the outstretched arms of the Y, and with the leg of the Y pointing out in front of your body like the bowsprit of a sailing ship. Keep your willow “bowsprit” level in front of you as you walk around the area in which you are searching for water. If you are sensitive — and if there is a hidden water deposit below — the witching wand will dip down to point to the underground water source as you pass over.

Archeologists will tell you that people have been divining the presence of water in this way for thousands of years. There are images that depict these dowsers at work carved in the walls of Egyptian tombs and scratched down in antique Chinese etchings. Some people even swear by dowsing as a way to find other hidden resources, like underground veins of gold or lost cell phones. But other people think that dowsers are frauds, or worse. Over the years I’ve asked a number of professional well diggers what they think.

Jack Edsberg dug my newer well twenty five years ago. He was one of four different well diggers I sought bids from, and it was interesting to see how little they varied in what they all said to me. I’ll quote (or paraphrase) Jack and let him speak for all the well diggers I’ve met, because they seemed to speak like a chorus in a Greek tragedy. In fact, the only difference between what any of them said was the price they asked for their services. In the end, I went with Jack Edsberg, not because he was the cheapest, but because he’d also been a local farmer for many years, and I got along well with him.

“Andy,” he said. “It doesn’t really matter if dowsing works or not. If you want an electric pump you’re going to have to dig the well near an existing power drop, because lawyers, guns, and money aren’t enough to get PG&E to extend a new line these days. You’d need lots of time for them to get that done, so if you want water in this life you’ll dig next to an existing power pole. And since the county has a mandatory setback of 25 feet from any property line for any new well, and since this pole is the end of the line for PG&E, you’re going to want to dig here.” And he pointed to the same spot, 30 feet from our property line, 20 feet from the power line, and 10 feet from my house that every other well digger had pointed to. “Also,” he said, “I charge by the foot, whether or not I hit water.”

Well diggers are careful not to promise that they will find water for you. But they’ll usually offer an informed opinion on what they think is going on under the ground. Here too, I found that the well diggers spoke in unison. “We’re going to get some water within the first 50 feet,” Jack said, “but we’re going to drill right past it. It’s just surface water, and we’re aiming for a bigger aquifer that’s around 160 feet down. It’ll have better water and more of it. It’s an aquifer that’s flowing down from the Sierras.” Our house is at about 38 feet elevation and we’re about three miles from the coastline, as the seagull flies, so I’d imagine any water flowing past under our house will seep into the ocean at about 140 feet under the waves. It was surprising- and sobering- to find out our water comes from the Sierra. When you think about it, my farm is pretty close to the end of the line for this underground river, and there are LOTS of pumps “upstream” between our fields and the Sierra snowpack.

Jack did hit a modest flow of water through a vein of gravel about 25 feet below the surface and then the drill bit into a deep and dense layer of clay. He poured a plug of concrete around the well shaft to keep any of the surface water from draining down into any deeper aquifer. At around 160 feet below the surface he hit the first trace of the water he was looking for and he stopped drilling at 250ft. With the pump installed I was drawing twenty gallons a minute from 160 feet, with a 70 foot column of water below. Everything went just as every well digger had projected. They get around, and an old well digger, like Jack, has been to many, many wells over the landscape and over the years as they do their work digging or repairing wells, and they keep notes. Sometimes talking to them can be eye-opening.

During the last drought I had an emergency with my newer well, and I feared I’d run out of water. Jack had passed away, but the well digger that took my call could have been his brother. “It’s a pump problem,” he told me after some preliminary tests. “You’re looking good water-wise with about 10 gallons a minute, pumping from 180 feet down.”

That didn’t sound so good to me since we’d been pumping twice as much per minute from 20 feet higher twenty years before. So our water table had dropped considerably. I was telling the well service guy all about my worries, but he put a hand up and told me to relax.

“I just came from a job off of San Miguel Canyon, where it comes into the Valley by the railroad, and the fellow there said his pump had burned out. The pump was fine but his well was dry- and they were pumping from 750 feet.”

That was alarming news. I have farmed out in that neighborhood, and that area used to be a wetlands, crawling with crawdads, frogs, and turtles. It’s my understanding that those wetlands were drained for farming by the Slavic immigrants who came into the Watsonville area in the late 1800s from the Adriatic. The flooded land was cheap because the Gringos didn’t want it for their cattle pasture and it didn’t have redwoods for logging, so the Slavs bought it, drained it, and were rewarded with some of the richest farmland you can imagine. You still see the Slavic names all over town; Scuritch, Marinovitch, Matulich, Pavitch, etc. Their ancestors laughingly call themselves the “Sons of Vitches”, and quite a few of them are still farming.

In 1990 I was farming out in that neighborhood and our farming neighbor across the road was a very successful conventional grower named Bukonovitch. His label was “Boogie Woogie,” and his cartons had the outline of a saxophone printed on the sides. But “Boogie,” as he was known, lost all his jazz cool when he found out that we were growing vegetables organically right across the road from him. “You can’t do that,” he hollered at us, all red-faced and agitated. He was worried that we’d “infect” his crops with all the pests we were breeding and harboring. Boogie thought that organic growing couldn’t be done and we were dirtbag hippies for even trying. There was no reasoning with him. “But we’re doing it!” we replied. Nowadays organic farming is widespread across the Pajaro Valley. But clearly water supply is a looming problem, even if the crisis is underground and out of sight.

It would be good if everybody learned more about the security and stability of their own water supply. Now that I know my water table has dropped by a foot a year I’m certainly more aware of water and how much I’m using. We are not going to have enough water in the future for everybody in California to do what they like, so controls are inevitable and hard policy choices will have to be made. Does it make sense to use the state’s scarce water resources to irrigate alfalfa for an overseas market? Or, why should we, the public, watch as the water table in the Central Valley is drained to grow almonds for export by a few large landowners, when that water might be more equitably shared among numerous interests, including communities and wildlife? Or, have we ever looked honestly at what the impact is on our environment of turning so much “water into wine.” In a future newsletter I’ll tell you a counterintuitive and happy story about our older well.

© 2022 Essay by Andy Griffin

Photo by Starling Linden

When I think about the desirability and feasibility of a farm saving its own seed, my mind turns from considering the actual mechanics of how to go about maintaining and reproducing healthy seed stock to reflecting on the high cost of rent. A look back at the business practices of The Beatles is illuminating, as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah! So here’s my perspective:

The first thing to bear in mind is that a seed crop inevitably takes a lot more time to realize its potential than would the harvest of the same plant grown for the consumer. Take lettuce, for example; if a romaine lettuce seed can sprout and grow into a plant that is the ideal size for harvest in 60 days, then the same plant grown for a seed crop would still have to grow until it is mature enough to flower. After flowering, the seed grower still has to wait for the pollinated lettuce flowers to set seed and then dry down to the point that the seeds can be easily threshed and collected. By now, you’re talking about almost a year of time invested by the farmer in a seed crop of lettuce. Crops other than lettuce might take even longer to produce. Celery can grow a whole year before it bothers to send up a seed stalk, and the celery plant might only produce the mature seed after 18 months. The time that a seed crop takes to produce is a very important consideration because “time is money” and, if you’re renting the space you’re growing on, then rent exercises a constant force of gravity on your decision making process.

I’m farming within several miles of the ocean near Santa Cruz, with one rented parcel and one field I own. The landowners are not managing most of the farmland around here. Maybe the owners’ grandparents were farmers, or their great-grandparents, but the present day owners are often/usually the descendants of the historical farmers and they are the beneficiaries of family trusts that rent the land to the contemporary farmers. The Monterey Bay Area is a very pleasant place to live so there’s constant market pressure on landowners to develop rural land into housing. If you see a large tract of ground being farmed around here anymore you can assume that it is such good farmland that it is worth keeping in agriculture. Out along San Andreas Road, for example, within sight and sound of the waves breaking on Sunset beach, the farmland will rent for at least $2,500/acre per year, and in some cases even more than that. That land is great for strawberry production. If you’re a landowner with a 40 acre parcel there you’d be a fool to be a farmer. Forty acres rented for strawberry production yields $100,000 to the landlord with payments due on the first day of the year. You’d be super lucky to realize that kind of income actually growing crops on that ground, and you’d be subject to every vulnerability and liability that every grower faces. There are hardly any crops other than strawberries that can hope to cover the upfront costs of such expensive land and seed crops definitely don’t “pencil out.”

Further up the Pajaro Valley, away from the ocean, where the conditions for strawberries are not quite so perfect, the price per acre may fall to $2000/acre by Murphy’s Crossing Road or even to $1800/acre out by the county line. By the time you get to Hollister, where the land is not cool enough for strawberries, land rents may only total $700 or $800/acre, which is cheap enough to allow production of cheaper crops, than strawberries, like summer squash, broccoli, sweet corn, or peppers, but the land is still not cheap enough to make the costs of managing the land for most seed crops. There actually are a number of seed companies located in the Hollister/Gilroy area, but they are mostly focused on the breeding and development work for new crop varieties. Not only is the Hollister/Gilroy area a great environment for growing a wide range of floral and edible crops, the neighborhood is also a pleasant (if expensive) place for the seed scientists to live and do their work. But once a target crop has been “improved” under “laboratory conditions” by the plant scientists, then the actual bulk seed production is farmed out to a grower in some other part of the world. Seed companies look for places where the climate and environmental conditions are acceptable, but the cost of land is low and the cost of labor is cheaper than dirt. Here’s where the Fab Four are worth remembering.

When The Beatles were starting out as teenagers they got their chops down by playing all night long in the strip clubs along the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, Germany. They played loud and they played covers of other artists’ music, emulating their heroes, like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, or the Isley Brothers. But by the time they were recording their third album, A Hard Day’s Night, they’d learned that they’d make the most money if they composed and performed their own songs. Critics could listen to their music and hear echoes of all the influences that they’d absorbed. “Cultural appropriation” you could say, if you listen to “Back in The USSR,” for example, and hear Chuck Berry. But unlike some of their contemporaries who signed their names to other people’s work, the Beatles themselves were always clear about their admiration of the musicians that inspired them and keen to give credit where credit was due. If you want to look at glaring examples of “Cultural appropriation” look at the behavior of the big seed companies.

Seeds, like songs, used to be passed from one generation to the next. Who wrote “Shady Grove” and when did they do it?  Who saved the first Scarlet Runner bean seed from a wild plant to sow in their garden? With music, the folk tradition guarded and honored the roots of the music even as successive generations of artists reinterpreted the melodies and themes of the songs they’d grown up with. With agriculture, the different varieties of crop plants were selected for over generations by tribal people you’ll never hear of, and women probably did most of the work. When a seed company takes a traditional, open pollinated crop like corn, which was nurtured out of wild nature by the indigenous people in the mountains of Central America, and they “improve” it, they can get a patent for their creation and start earning money. They don’t have to share any of the profits of their work with the people who did 99% of the historical work of selecting from the raw materials of nature. Just as the Beatles chose to focus on recording their own songs, however derivative they may have been of other artists’ music, the seed companies can choose to focus on producing and selling the “improved ” varieties of trusted, traditional crops that they hold patent rights on. The more successful seed companies buy out the less successful ones that were selling traditional, un-patented seed and close them down to gain more control of the market, or they may keep the brands alive but replace the open pollinated seeds with their proprietary varieties. And the price of seed to the grower goes UP, UP, UP!

Yes, because seeds are like songs, a grower can make their own music and produce their own seed. If a seed variety gets expensive enough, maybe it even becomes worthwhile to produce it on rented land in the first world. But besides rent costs, there are also other management issues that complicate seed saving. With some crops that are pollinated by the wind, like corn, it can be hard to find a spot that is isolated enough so that the seed crop is not negatively affected by being cross pollinated by another crop. With crops that insects or bats pollinate there can be isolation problems too, but they can be managed by tenting the mother plants with a system of screens. All in all, saving seed can be fun and interesting, but it can be a distracting hassle if the income of the farm is primarily derived from the sales of food crops. At Mariquita Farm I can’t really afford to save much of my own seed for the reasons outlined above, but I’ve always done it when driven to it by scarcity or frustration. Take the Scarlet Runner bean that evolved in Central America that I’ve alluded to as an example:

Akahana mame in flower

Following the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the Scarlet Runner bean made its way by donkey back and sailing ship from the mountains of Oaxaca to ports of Japan.  Japanese farmers took the culture of this bean up and in time selected the largest beans to replant until they’d achieved an absolutely giant bean, which they called the “Akahana mame.” Because the cool, coastal conditions on my farm in Corralitos mimic the original mountain conditions where the runner bean evolved, I know I can grow good Akahana mame here. For years I’d been getting the seed from Kitazawa Seeds, an Oakland based seed company that traded in Asian crop varieties. Their seed was good, but expensive, so I began saving my own seed and, boy, am I glad I did. Last winter Kitazawa Seed got sold to a larger company, and I just went on the new website to see about getting some more Akahana mame seed. I’ve got a few blank spots in the beds that I could fill out and I’ve planted all my own seed. But the new owners want- get this!!!- $92.88/pound for their runner bean seed! Ninety-two dollars and eighty- eight cents per pound! Peaches H. Christ! Here’s the link.

Scarlett Runner Beans

So yes, I’ll be saving more Akahana mame seed going forward. Luckily for me, I own a patch of ground that is only suited for small-scale production, and rent is not an issue. My field is isolated, so I don’t face difficulties with cross pollination, plus I’m crabby enough at the seed companies to make the work of sorting and selecting seed a satisfying task. Here are some pix of our Akahana mame beds. A bean we can all get excited about.

First Akahana mame flower – Scarlet Runner bean!

Andy & the crew at Mariquita Farm.

© 2022 Essay by Andy Griffin

Photos by Andy Griffin

Samson watching over the Mariquita labyrinth

Oh, my God, the violence lay hidden in their hearts! One little old lady said she kept a loaded rifle by her sliding glass door so that if she saw one she could open the door… and open fire. Another woman said she connected a garden hose from the exhaust pipe of her husband’s Cadillac so that she could gas them to death.

I’d been invited to speak to a local Watsonville ladies’ garden club about the principles of organic agriculture but it turned out they were more interested in murdering gophers than they were in hearing about cover crops, beneficial insects, or mulches. “How do you fight gophers?” they asked me. So I told them about my black cat. That was years ago, and since that time, that cat and several others have come and gone from the farm, but I’ve loved and appreciated all of them. Here are their stories:

I was still working on Star Route Farm in Bolinas in 1983 when my first cat came to me. Two Israeli women were working on the farm at the time, Estee and Mirav. They’d been front line nurses in the Israeli Army during the Lebanon War, and when their tour of duty was finished, they came to the San Francisco Bay Area to unwind and recuperate their spirits by working on an organic farm and playing at being hippies. Estee and Mirav missed the Summer of Love by 16 years, but they enjoyed the tranquility that Bolinas had to offer, and since they’d grown up on an agricultural kibbutz they had lots of prior farming experience. After work they liked to take a stroll around the farm, and one summer evening they passed by the trailer where I was staying. I greeted them, and Mirav had a question for me.

“You have a pot?” she asked.

Mirav and Estee spoke Hebrew amongst themselves, and they were fluent in French, but their command of English was still charmingly erratic. “You want to borrow a pot?” I replied.

“No, no, what you say?” Mirav asked. “You have a little pot?”

“You want to buy pot?” I asked.

“No, no, no,” Mirav laughed. “You have a little pot friend?”

“A pet friend? I asked.

“Yes, yes, a pot friend!”

I told them that maybe I did. I’d noticed that somebody had come in through my trailer window when I was gone and licked the corners off a cube of butter that I’d had on the counter. So I put out a dish of cat food on the floor and left the window open, and soon I had a friendly black cat sharing my trailer- and hunting for gophers on the farm. Obviously, his name was “Pot Friend.”

I was surprised a few weeks later to hear a horse snorting outside my trailer, and when I opened the door, a nude woman riding bareback confronted me. “You stole my cat,” she said.

“No, I didn’t!” I said. “A black cat showed up here and I fed it.” Pot Friend came down the trailer steps and passed us by, paying her no mind. But he stayed with me, even when I moved to Santa Barbara to work on Winchester Canyon Ranch, and then again when I moved up to Watsonville and worked on Riverside Farms. Pot Friend’s black coat was salted with white by the time my kids were born and I was farming with Julia, but he was Mariquita Farm’s first official Farm Cat.

Our second cat, Taco, came to me by virtue of a tragic accident. A fellow who worked for us had a brother who was killed in a drunk driving accident. The whole family picked up and left with the body for Mexico, and on their way out they dropped a litter of kittens off at a farm field we were leasing. The kittens were tiny, and terrified. They hid under a pallet of cartons and survived by licking the grease off the tin foil the farm workers had wrapped their tacos in. I caught one little kitten and brought it home. He was a lovely, long-haired cat with Siamese “points” and I named him “Taco.” Taco survived and eventually thrived. He became Pot Friend’s gopher hunting companion and was the first cat my kids can really remember.

A mountain lion spotted on the farm

Sarah and Clara came next after a neighbor’s cat had a large batch of kittens. Sarah and Clara were more pets at first than “farm cats” and they played with the kids. I think pets are important for kids because they can teach a child how to express love and kindness. And, until “The lion lies down with the lamb,” it must be noted with sadness that pets can teach a young person how to deal with loss. Besides our “official farm cats” we also have our fair share of predatory wild cats, like Bobcats and Mountain lions. Yes, we have lots of coyotes too, and since they make so much noise they end up taking the blame for most disappearances, but I’m convinced that the Bobcats are often the culprits; it’s just that they come and go with such stealth. Sarah and Clara did grow up to be hunters, but we lost Clara.

Sarah, the Rockabilly Hep Cat, lounging

Sarah lost a leg to cancer, and she became a full-time house cat. Sarah liked to sleep on my Fender amplifier when I played my electric guitar, and since I play an orange Gretsch 6120, like Duane Eddy and Poison Ivy, I called Sarah my “Rockabilly Hep Cat.”

After Sarah passed away Starr and I adopted two kittens from the local shelter and she named them “Samson & Deliah,” after the Reverend Gary Davis song that was popularized by the Grateful Dead. Samson is still with us, and he’s as beautiful and lordly as an apricot blonde male cat born under the sign of Leo can be. But Delilah tended to wander into the forest where the wild things are, and one day she didn’t come back. We felt sad that Samson didn’t have company so we kept our ears open for kittens. When our friends, Todd and Jordan, who have Happy Girl Kitchen in Pacific Grove and who put our farm’s produce in jars for us, bought a place in upper Carmel Valley, we were gifted two matching tabby kitten twins. The rural property that they purchased had an unruly tribe of feral cats on it, so they set about catching them and spaying and neutering them and finding homes for the kittens.

The two kittens showed up early in the whole Covid drama, and they very much lightened the mood for us. They were small and wild, but proved to be very sweet and tameable. We initially named them “Cachagua & Tassajara” after landmarks in the neighborhood they came from, but Starr shortened the names to “Casha and Tassa.” The sisters are not quite identical, but they can be hard to tell apart from a distance, so they are often known as “This and That,” as in “this cat” versus “that cat.” This and That have turned into good hunters, and they’re helping Samson to keep the ever-present population of gophers in check.

Casha and Tassa as kittens

Because we love our cats and appreciate their efforts, we have planted plenty of catnip around the farm so that they can pepper all their hard farm labor with moments of euphoria. Catnip is in the mint family, but it tolerates relatively dry conditions. We have it planted on a sunny slope and it’s thriving. Catnip is one of those plants that could become a weed if we let it, but we clip it and dry it before it goes to flower. Catnip dries well and remains pungent. It’s spring now, and the plants are growing fast so Starr has been keeping the dehydrators working around the clock.

Tassa taking in the catnip

If you want to treat your cat to a whiff of locally grown, aromatic, organic catnip, now is the time to get it. Or maybe you want some for yourself. Catnip is usually thought of as a cat herb, but people do make aromatic herbal infusions from it that are reputed to be good for treating colds, fevers and flues, and dried catnip is used as a seasoning in some cuisines. I offer it to my restaurant customers and I’ve noticed that the places that focus on Italian food buy it. I need to ask them how they’re using it. Catnip, or Nepeta cataria, has a scent that is not unlike its cousin Nepitella, or Calaminta nepeta, also known as “Roman mint.”

Tassa likes to hang out when we garden. She is Mariquita Farm’s “spokes cat” and social media influencer. She enjoys and endorses our catnip products and personally oversees the harvests. Check out the shop store, we are harvesting today!

© 2022 Essay by Andy Griffin

Photos by Andy Griffin and Starr Linden