Letters From Andy

 The hare broke cover at the corner of the rosemary patch and lit off. My dog lunged. The leash jerked from my hand and the chase was on. Yes, there is a clause in my farmland lease contract that stipulates I must keep dogs leashed at all times, but who can hold back nature? Red can’t help herself. And the jack rabbit; well he’s one of those twisted Lagomorphs who finds pleasure in danger. Don’t think “plump, naughty, little Peter Rabbit who sneaks into Farmer Griffin’s garden for a nibble of lettuce and then loses a shoe and a blue coat with brass buttons.” No; we’re talking about Peter’s brazen, shameless, wild-eyed cousin, Jack, who loiters in the herbs and eats my vegetables to feed his hunger for speed. Jack probably smokes Marlboros when he’s filling up at the gas pump too. He’s that kind of bad, bad bunny.
I raise rosemary because the herb complements the potatoes I grow, both on the plate and in the field. Rosemary is a perennial. I need my farm-scape to display a patchwork of short term annual crops, like carrots, and longer term annuals, like tomatoes, mixed with permanent, perennial crops. That way, when our tractors are turning under one block of soil, the beneficial insects that live on the farm, like ladybugs, always have a place to take shelter that’s close by. If I turned all the soil over at once, or even if I turned it all over frequently, I’d break the life cycles of the beneficial insects and scare off the birds that I need as allies. Of course, no system is perfect. So the rosemary patch which theoretically gives cover to the quail that eat the ants that would otherwise carry aphids to the cabbages– well, crazy hares live there too. I could shoot Jack, I guess, but that would make Red sad. She loves the chase.
Jack scampered down the dirt road that runs along the levee at the edge of the farm. True, with two hops he could’ve cleared the levee, then dashed down into Pacheco Creek and lost the mutt in the riparian thicket, but where’s the fun in that? Besides, Red was doing well. It’s been a dry winter. The dirt road was hard-packed, without the dust that comes with the heat of summer. Red had muscle, drive…. and traction. Jack looked in his rear view mirror, saw the dog gaining ground, and eased into second gear. Red stretched her legs out. Jack laid his long ears back just a little and executed an instantaneous, 90 ̊ hard left turn into the fava bean patch. But this wasn’t Red’s first race down this track. She cut the corner off the right triangle with a vengeance and ripped a hellish hypotenuse through the beans.

Besides being a dry winter, it’s been cold. We got the fava beans in on time, but the persistent low temperatures throughout December and January stunted the crop’s growth. So now, at a time when our earliest sowing of fava beans are usually a good three to four feet tall, we’ve got long rows of plants that are only two feet tall. I couldn’t get too mad at Red for trashing some beans; I’ll probably turn them under for fertilizer rather than harvest them anyway. We’ll pick our fava beans from the plantings that were sown recently under warmer conditions.
The Jack rabbit passed through the favas and headed out into a large block of ground planted in a cover crop of oats. This was our last cover crop to go into the ground and the oats are only three inches tall. When they’re three feet tall in April we’ll turn them under to add carbon to the soil, then plant the piece out in tomatoes and sweet peppers, but right now the field looks as well-groomed as a golf course, the soil level, smooth and firm. It was a beautiful sight; the buff-colored hare, his long, black-tipped ears cocked back to 45 ̊ now, running smoothly, hitting on all eight cylinders across the manicured green; the fluffy, white dog racing at full speed under blue skies, running as if it were her life that depended on a first place finish.
Our field of young oats doesn’t go on forever, and the bunny knows this better than anyone. There’s a pond at the edge of the field. Jack doesn’t like to swim. So before he hit the water he hit the brakes and did an amazing 90 ̊ left, followed by another immediate 90 ̊ left– a perfect 180 ̊ keyhole turn– and passed Red at a terrific clip, going in the opposite direction. The dog took a frantic turn, went into a sloppy drift that sent turf flying, dug in anew and hit the gas. Jack was way ahead for the moment, but moving into broken ground, a spent patch of rapini, recently plowed, with lumpy clods that are rough on the paws. The dog, with her longer legs and bigger feet, did better on the blocky ground and was making up for lost time.
But wait! What’s this! All the hopped up kinetics and the “hare-pin” turns seem to have molested the gang of fleas that live behind Jack’s ears. The fleas are digging in and holding on for dear life, and the itching is driving Jack mad! He has to stop and scratch! But Red is protected from fleas by FRONTLINE PLUS for dogs©– she ought to have a decal on her bumper– and she’s catching up. She can almost see the checkered flag!
But Jack punches it out of the pit, floors it, gets to sixty in two seconds, makes an evasive maneuver under the picnic table where Nato, the tractor driver, eats his lunch, dodges a pile of sprinkler pipes and two trash cans, crosses the work area where Rogelio is scrubbing radishes, and makes a hard left on to the straightaway by the spring crop vegetables in the front field. Red is slowed by the obstacles. And her feet hurt now after scrambling over all those big clods. But Red reaches deep for one more burst of speed and flies past Rogelio, barking in rage. So Jack pops it into fourth gear, and pours on the coal. There are flames shooting out of his tail pipe now and his ears are flat back. He’s hot-rodding for the San Benito County line like a good ‘ol boy running white lightning, the rows of lettuces, cauliflower, broccoli, and beets all blurring together into a green mist.
Poor Red; she gave it all she had, but she gave up when she caught up with Jack’s sonic boom near the wash tank. Her feet were smoking, she was out of breath, and the crew was laughing. Red stood in a puddle to cool off her paws and sulked. I arrived and gave her a big hug; “It’s ok Girl,” I said. “There’s always tomorrow.”

Article & Photos of Ladybug alighting and of Red by Andy Griffin.

Photo of Jack Rabbit by Jim Harper.
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Big Sur Land Trust Benefit Dinner: March 16th & 17th
Last year I joined the Board of Trustees of the Big Sur Land Trust. The organization is hoping I can add a farmer’s perspective to the board’s deliberations. I’m looking forward to an opportunity to give something back to this community that has supported me and I want to start with a benefit dinner March 16th and 17th at Happy Girl Kitchen in Pacific Grove. You’re invited. (Photo, left, of Glen Devon Ranch by Andy Griffin.)
I’m hoping to raise a thousand dollars for the Big Sur Land Trust to have on hand to help school districts and youth groups transport kids to visit these properties for outdoor education. It’s not enough for us to buy land for parks, or pay for scenic easements, or preserve our watersheds and farm lands through conservation easements. If future generations of kids coming up here don’t have a sense of connection to the lands that sustain them, if they don’t learn to feel a sense of community with the plants and animals of the land, if they feel no kinship or interdependence with the farmers and ranchers and foresters that maintain the land, then our future is in jeopardy. There are a lot of children who don’t have an opportunity to visit parks and farms and ranches. Schools are in trouble and they can’t afford field trips. The Big Sur Land Trust is acting to span that gap between our social needs and our public resources. Help be a bridge.

Besides, it’ll be a good meal. Here are the details:

1. The vegetarian meal will be prepared at Happy Girl Kitchen in Pacific Grove by John Madriaga. John is a Manresa alum, who has worked at the world-renown Noma, in Copenhagen, and he is currently sous chef at Spruce in San Francisco.
2. Happy Girl Kitchen is charging $55 dollars for the meal. I’m asking for an extra $20 per plate as the benefit contribution to the Big Sur Land Trust. I’m donating all the produce from my farm for the event. Carmel Valley’s Heller Estate winery will be pairing wines for each course for an extra $20 dollars.

3. You can sign up for the meal at Happy Girl Kitchen. Dinner dates are Friday, March 16th OR Saturday, March 17th.

4. Inform yourself about the Big Sur Land Trust and its mission.

5. Here’s a link to a story about one of the youth groups the BSLT has hosted on the land at Glen Deven Ranch.

6. Take a look at some of the pictures I’ve taken on the Big Sur Land Trust properties at the I-Heart-Big-Sur-Land-Trust Facebook page.

7. If you can’t make the meal, consider making a contribution anyway and write a check to the Big Sur Land Trust and send it to Shelley at Mariquita Farm, P.O. Box 2065, Watsonville CA, 95076, and we’ll see that it gets bundled with all the other donations from the meal and delivered to the Trust.

We look forward to seeing you there!

It is the middle of the night, and I can’t sleep. I can hear the rain on the roof, and I’m measuring it; not in inches or in centimeters, but in my mind, adding up the chores accomplished in time and subtracting the tasks left undone.
I can hear the logs burning in the fireplace too. I’m glad I spent time last week cutting up dead, fallen branches in the forest. Now I’ve got a couple of months’ worth of dry wood cut, split, and stacked in the shed. The house won’t be damp and cold and my family won’t be crabby. That’s a plus!
Our cat, Sarah, is in the living room, in front of the fire, “toughing it out” on her tuffet. She’s happy. Rain tests all the preparations I’ve made to care for the animals. How have I done?  My dog, Red, is happy; she’s in my room sleeping on her fleece by my bed. She snores. Blue, our other Pyrenees Mountain dog, is asleep in the shed outside. He’s so fluffy he may not even be aware that it’s raining. My two donkeys, Prima and Sweet Pea, have noticed the precipitation and they’ve retreated to their dry shed. The goats are in the barn. Only my cows are out in the wet night, but they’ve taken shelter down in the oak trees. Besides, my cows are Dexters; fat, little, heirloom Irish cows, and a light California rain doesn’t alarm them.
I do hope the rain gets heavier. For the past month I’ve kept the cattle in the pasture next to our house so that I can more easily feed them hay. There’s been so little rain this winter that the grass hasn’t grown like I need it to. I plan on keeping the cattle off of their regular pasture for another month or so. With the nights getting a little shorter and a little warmer the grass will soon get a little longer— if there’s enough rain. I can’t afford to feed the cattle hay all summer, so if it doesn’t rain I’ll have to sell them.
The rain is good for the vegetables too. Crops always grow faster after a rain than they do after an irrigation. The water’s cleaner, I guess. Rain is certainly cheaper than irrigation. I’m short on irrigation pipes right now, so a rain means I don’t have to spend money to move pipes. It doesn’t cost me anything to move clouds! The rain means lower power bills too. If the rain is going to do the irrigation for us we can spend our money to harvest crops. I’ve got cauliflower, carrots, yukina, cabbage, spring garlic, nettles, escarole, and lettuce planned for harvests this week, plus some potatoes out of the cooler. It’ll be a muddy day in the fields, but do-able.
Of course the rain slows some things down. We got ½ of our last winter cover crop planted yesterday before we ran out of seed. Now it will be too wet to plant for a while, which gives me time to get down to King City and buy more cover crop seed. I’d better take more seeds in to Headstart Nursery too. They grow my vegetable transplants. If I can’t sow directly into the field I have them start seedlings for me for transplant out later so that I don’t get off schedule.
It’s awfully early in the year to know how we’re doing, but so far things seem good. We’re on time with our plantings, things are growing, it’s finally raining, the house is warm, and the cat is in front of the fire. It all adds up. Time to go to sleep.
Article and all photos by Andy Griffin.
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Our ‘traditional’ CSA starts in March: Info

The seed catalogs are landing in my mailbox. I’ll read them all with a mix of professional interest, curiosity, amusement, and horror. If you will consider seed catalogs to be a form of literature for a moment– a sub-genre of fantasy, perhaps– then I’ll volunteer to be a literary critic. What? You think they’re nonfiction? Seed catalogs sell a fantasy of summer, and what better time is there for that when the chilly winds of winter blow? In fact, the first catalog to arrive this year was Totally Tomatoes, which is as focused on summer as any catalog can be and I’ll get to it in a moment, but first, a few words about love and cigars.
There are so many varieties of love; romantic love, unrequited love, lost love, maternal love, and the love we have for our pets, just to name just a few. The writer who takes on love as a subject has an endless amount of material to work with. I’m not saying that love is easy to write about. We all experience love, even when we only feel it as a hunger, so every reader is potentially as much an expert as any author. Writers who choose to explore more technical subjects, like cigars, face a different challenge. I don’t smoke, but I have found myself reading Cigar Aficionado Magazine from time to time. “Cedar notes? With accents of autumn leaves?”  I like to see how the editors labor to present cigars anew, month after month. I look for the rhetorical tricks that are employed to get readers like me to smell the cedar. Writing for an annual seed catalog with over 30 pages of glossy photos and mini essays dedicated almost entirely Solanum lycopersicum, must be a difficult task.
In catalog world, novelty sells. “New and Improved!”  But tomatoes, like their close cousins, the tobaccos, were first cultivated by Pre-Columbian Native Americans, so what can possibly be new? For 2012 Totally Tomatoes presents for the very first time “Tasti-Lee™ Hybrid tomato with up to 40% more lycopene than other leading varieties of tomato.” Lycopene is a red pigment with antioxidant properties. According to some preliminary scientific findings there is an inverse relationship between eating a lot of tomatoes and cancer risk, especially prostate cancer. As a tomato grower I’d like this to be true, but I’m not “sold.”
Before I put any credence in any scientific claim any catalog makes I read it from cover to cover and look for the most egregiously manipulative and fraudulent claim. “Aha!” I say when I find it. “This is how low they’ll go!”  On page 25 Totally Tomatoes presents the “Peron” tomato, billed as “The world’s only sprayless tomato, requiring no pesticides.” I never use any pesticides on any of my tomatoes. Just for good measure Totally Tomatoes also says that Peron has 2.5% more vitamin C than the other leading breeds. I suspect that catalog writers twist “recent studies” into creative ad copy whenever the variety that they’re writing up doesn’t give them anything more concrete to work with.
Names count for a lot in catalog literature. A good product name evokes the values that the buyer treasures. For a gardener the size of fruit may be important, as well as the earliness of the harvest, and the potential profitability quotient. Throw in an appeal to ethnic identity and timeless family values and a catalog writer has all the bases are covered. Totally Tomatoes doesn’t disappoint; the reader gets “Goliath,” “Early Goliath,” “Goldrush Goliath,” “Italian Goliath,” and – I kid you not- “Old Fashioned Goliath ™ Hybrid VF.” Don’t you hunger for the “good old days” when peasants named the hybrid fruits of their labors after their Biblical heroes, then trademarked their creations and used their profits to hire lawyers?
But let’s not forget color. Getting paid to write for a catalog where you need to say something unique and appealing about hundreds of different kinds of red ball-shaped is enough to make a poet out of a person; in Totally Tomatoes there are descriptions of fruits with “red,” “deep red,” “bright red,” “shiny red,” and “intense red.” It must be a relief for the writers that there is so much contemporary consumer interest in heirloom tomatoes with their oranges, greens, purples, yellows, and stripes. I give Totally Tomatoes credit for carrying many heirloom varieties. Crafting the story lines behind these antique, open pollinated breeds of tomato that have been passed down through the generations gives the catalog’s writers some room to stretch out and tell a good tale. One quibble with the storyline though; “Old-Fashioned” is not a flavor, it’s a rhetorical crutch, a phonetic catalyst designed to evoke sepia toned nostalgia for better times that probably never existed. But that’s ok. I’m not looking for Steinbeck in the seed catalog. The appeal to “Old-Fashion Values” is only the flip side of “New and Improved” which plays to our utopian hopes of a shiny, bright future.
So what do I look for?
As a grower I want to know if the tomato variety is determinate or indeterminate. Determinate tomatoes set almost all their fruit at once. This is a convenient trait for large-scale growers who harvest their crop with machines. I prefer to harvest more modest amounts of fruit by hand every week over a long season, so I look for indeterminate varieties. Growing indeterminate tomatoes allows me to find markets for my harvest, even out my cash flow, and keep my crew gainfully employed for months.
I’m always curious to know what the disease resistance of the plant is. I don’t use fungicide, so I’m always looking for crops which are resistant to pathogens. That’s been the problem I’ve had with some Italian heirloom tomatoes I’ve trialed with disappointing results. Each heirloom tomato evolved under different conditions with different amounts of humidity to contend with, different soils, and different pests. Some varieties work here, some don’t. I don’t expect a catalog like Totally Tomatoes with ambitions of a continental reach to be able to tell me what will grow well on my farm in San Benito County. Trial and error is my best guide.
Flavor is important. “Old-Fashioned” may not mean anything, but before I try a new variety I do want to know what the acid/sweet balance of the fruits is. I like to know what the texture of the fruit is like too and how uniform the fruit size is too. Size is important, but bigger is not necessarily better. Huge fruit can be hard to pack, and if a crow takes one peck out of a huge tomato I lose a lot. I prefer a plant that gives me a lot of smaller fruit, so Mr. & Mrs. Crow can wet their beaks without leaving me broke.
Flavor has a lot to do with cultural practices, so I like to know if a particular variety of tomato tolerates “dry-farming.” By not watering the tomatoes the plants are forced to reach deep into the mineral earth for their water, and in so doing they gain access to all the trace elements and micro-nutrients that make for good flavor. Nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, or NPK, might be the most important fertilizers for vegetative growth, but it’s all the trace elements that give character to flavor. Some tomatoes will tolerate dry farming conditions and some won’t. Because successful dry-farming is so dependent on local conditions national catalogs can’t really honestly address the issue. Most, like Totally Tomatoes, don’t even bring it up.
So, will I buy anything from Totally Tomatoes?
Yes, I will. “Early Girl” is a hybrid tomato offered by Totally Tomatoes that is indeterminate, disease resistant, flavorful, and adapted to dry-farm culture and I will buy 15,000 seeds. The rest of my tomato seeds I will either save from my own crop, like Principe Borghese, or buy from Johnny’s Seeds. Johnny’s Seeds doesn’t carry Early Girl but they are sensitive to the needs of small-scale organic and specialty growers and they offer many varieties of tomato. For the record, the Johnny’s catalog is the clearest, most informative one out there. I keep it by my bed.
Andy Griffin ||  all photos by Andy Griffin ||  Tomato Recipes, of course!
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