Letters From Andy

Fidel is working out a grass roots level marketing program for his nascent farm. He shows up on Sunday mornings at the laundromat where the Oaxacan women congregate with his car loaded full of fresh produce. Watsonville is no food desert. Our town is surrounded by farms, many people who live in town work on farms, and if you stroll around the suburbs you’ll see plenty of gardens. If there’s a big patch of fava beans in someone’s yard you can almost bet that a family of Azorean Portuguese descent lives there. The huge, floppy leaves of a Taro plant suggests that the residents have roots in the Philippines or Pacific Islands. And there are plenty of markets scattered about that cater to every taste, from mainstream supermarkets like Safeway to more specialized ethnic markets that cater to Mexicans or Japanese. Fidel has worked for us for at least ten years but he wants to have his own farm so it’s natural that he’s reaching out to his own community of immigrant Oaxacans for support. I’m trying to help him get started by sharing some of our greenhouse space with him, and he’s teaching me how to grow some of the varieties of vegetables and herbs that are grown and appreciated in Oaxaca. Right now I’m learning about chayote.

If you want to be a farmer it can’t hurt to take classes in plant biology, crop and soil science, or business. But you can also get into farming the way I did and learn by just doing the work. If we’re smart we learn from our mistakes and do better every time we try, and getting better at farming is no exception. But if we’re really wise we can learn from other people’s mistakes and spare ourselves some agony. I’m impressed with Fidel because he has an industrious and curious nature about him. He has a lot of questions and I’m happy to try and answer them as best I can. I remember how important it was for me to have spent a number of years working at Star Route Farm in Bolinas during the early 1980s when my employer, Warren Weber, was so generous with his time and knowledge. He taught me how to farm and I figure now is my time to pay him back in spirit by helping someone else. Besides, Fidel seems to be a natural, not just at growing food but selling it too.

Many people have come from Oaxaca to Watsonville to work in the strawberry fields. Sure, Oaxaca is part of Mexico and the Hispanic markets are here to serve their community. But Oaxaca is also a nation unto itself, or rather a region with a number of very independent nations with a number of different indigenous languages and ancient traditions and the people resist being reduced to a generic “Mexican” status. They have their own ways of preparing food and they have their own varieties of herbs and vegetables that they can’t always find in the markets here. Fidel saw an opportunity to grow some of these ethnic crops, like alache, which is a herb in the okra family with leaves that are used to thicken soups and stews, the way filet is used to give body to gumbo. When he shows up at the laundromat the Oaxacan women will leave their laundry swishing in the washing machines and come out into the parking lot to inspect the fresh alache, turning the bunches over and buying what they need. They’ll be cooking later on that day and they’ll tell their friends about where they were able to find these greens they all miss. This parking lot “pop-up” strategy is perfect marketing- convenient, convivial, and “viral,” if I may use that word in these times. But Fidel grows other unusual crops too, and I’m most interested in the chayote.

Chayote, or Sechium edule, is not an uncommon crop in Mexico. In fact, chayote isn’t even an uncommon crop across the world, despite the fact that it is still relatively unknown across white bread America. The chayote plant is native to Southern Mexico and Central America, but when Columbus came to the “New” world sparking the so-called “Columbian Exchange” this squash family member was dispersed across South America and also found new homes in Asia and eventually even in Australia. Most chayote varieties are smooth skinned, with a firm but creamy flesh that can be used like their summer squashes cousins are, but can also be grated, tossed with lime juice and served as salad. But the Oaxacans prefer a very spiny variety of chayote- not as convenient for a cook to prepare perhaps, but more to their taste, more “authentic.” So Fidel is growing the spiny Oaxacan variety. As for me, I’m always interested in any crop that can find a happy home across cultures. I think of myself as “ethnic Californian,” which means that, like my state, I’m open for business across the myriad of cultures that make up our population. Plus I’m curious about food. I haven’t cooked chayote and I’m looking forward to learning how. Besides the squashy fruits, the plant also has big, potato-like tubers that can be cooked like potatoes and I’m looking forward to trying them.

Fidel described for me how to build a frame for the chayote plants to climb on. He gave me 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

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.

This year our cover crop is a blur of purple and white pea flowers. Every year we sow a “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.

The grasses in the cover crop mix do a lot to lock down the soil and keep it from eroding in the rain. The legumes capture lots of available atmospheric nitrogen for the soil. Together the grains and legumes that make up a well blended cover crop can grow a rich, green thatch of foliage, and when the farmer turns the cover crop under the farm “feeds the soil.” The cover crop captures carbon from the air and when  the farmer turns the cover crop under that carbon is put into the soil where it acts to make the earth more biologically active, with better water retention and  more friable texture. In many cases, a good, thick cover crop can also act to clean the soil of weeds. In our fields, for example, malva, or “pigweed” is a problem. The feral malva seeds in the field will germinate with the first rains, the same as the cover crop we’ve planted, but the cover crop will choke them out before they can flower and set more seed, so the field gets a little cleaner with every cover crop.

But just because we plant the same blend of seed every year doesn’t mean the crop comes out the same every year. We’ve had years with such cold weather that all the peas 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

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.