Letters From Andy

The guys on the crew called him “El Bullo” but I can’t remember what his real name was. He was a Jarocho, a native of Veracruz, and, true to the stereotype Mexicans have of Jarochos, El Bullo had a gift for music. I can still remember the song he’d sing between bites of his taco at lunch. With his palm to his chest like an opera singer and his other hand holding a taco and held out wide to acknowledge the applause, El Bullo would begin his corrido slowly in a deep voice: “One woman, two men, and three gunshots rang out!” he’d sing. I can’t remember the rest of the song, but it never stayed the same anyway; Bullo would sing it some days so that different people died, and sometimes the woman was pregnant and one of the men was the real father of the infant, and sometimes it was the other guy, and sometimes all three bullets missed their marks entirely and only innocent bystanders were killed. Bullo had a good voice and a great sense of humor. He was a fine story teller, an amiable personality, and he had a nimble mind. But he was a lousy worker. Just thinking about Bullo reminds me how, as an employer, sometimes the best thing I can do for someone is fire them.
I was in charge of the harvest crew for Riverside Farms back then. We had two hundred workers and we farmed in Santa Clara, San Benito, Santa Cruz, and Monterey Counties. The people who worked for us were great, but it’s the human condition that you can’t gather 200 people together without having issues. One problem started with a call from the foreman. “I need you to talk to ‘El Bullo,’” he said. “He won’t hoe weeds.”
At Riverside Farms we worked under contract with Teamsters Local 890. There were rules. I went over them once more with El Bullo. “You know the deal,” I said. “You have to show up for work on time. You can’t drink or get high on the job. You can’t fight at work, or wear gang colors, or bring a firearm to the work site, or conceal guns in your car. And you have to do your job.”
El Bullo nodded.
“We’re not playing games here,” I told him, “but this is like beisbol; three strikes and you’re out.”
One Monday I came to work and my message machine was choked with messages from the San Benito County Sheriff’s Department. The cops alleged that my crew had violated noise restrictions on Saturday, and they insisted that I contact them promptly. “This is impossible,” I thought. “I didn’t even have a crew working in San Benito County last Saturday.” Alas; the Sheriff’s Department was on to something. The weeding crew I’d had on the Sargeant Ranch, down in the very corner of Santa Clara County alongside the Pajaro River, had created a ruckus. El Bullo had showed up to work that Saturday driving a borrowed beat box bug, a Bochito, a Volkswagon Beetle, that had had it’s rear seats stripped out to make room for an immense sound system with  independent tweeters and subwoofers that could be placed on the roof of the vehicle and aimed. As Bullo hoed his long row he got further away from his tunes so he kept turning up the volume. Sound carries in the country. By noon, as El Bullo was reaching the end of his row, home owners a mile away along School Road in San Benito County, across the river and up the mountain from the farm field, were calling the Sheriff’s Department and screaming. The Sheriff had to respond when one resident threatened to open fire on the bug with a scoped 30-06.
Then one day I got a call from Federico, the foreman, complaining that El Bullo wouldn’t do anything. I headed out to the field.
El Bullo was visible from half a mile off. He was a great big, round guy anyway, but he was sporting a preposterous white, cartoon-like straw sombrero that had to be at three and a half feet wide with a cone-like crown that stuck up into the sky like a witch’s hat. He looked like Pancho Villa’s sidekick.
“What’s with the hat?” I asked, “And how come Federico is so unhappy?”
“It’s hot today,” El Bullo replied, “and my sombrero keeps me cool. Plus, this is the hat the pistoleros wore during the Revolución. Federico needs a Mexican revolution; he’s muy cacique!”
A cacique is a tribal chief. Someone who is “muy cacique” throws their weight around and lords it over others. Federico wasn’t “muy cacique.”
“Look, Bullo,” I said. “We’ve been over this before. Federico is only doing what I’ve asked him to do. The problem is that you don’t want to work. You’re like a soccer ball; you only move down the field if someone’s kicking you.”
“If you fire me now, how am I going to eat?” Bullo asked. “I’ll have to go Santa Cruz and sing sad songs on the street corner. Maybe then you’ll throw me some pennies.”
“Come on, Bullo,” I said. “Let’s go.”
That was fifteen years ago. I’d almost forgotten about El Bullo. Until the other day. I was driving a produce truck southbound on 101 outside of San Jose. Traffic was at a crawl. On the northbound side of the freeway traffic was stopped dead and I saw an old, battered bus painted in peeling yellow hoisted up on a very large tow truck. Outlines of seven happy faced musical notes, chipped with age, danced down the side of the bus. In big letters I read the legend; “Los Canarios.” Still on the bus, decked out in stiff black cowboy hats, looking glumly out the windows and going strictly nowhere, were the seven “singing canaries.” Then I remembered El Bullo.
Two years after I fired Bullo I was at the side of a field on Betebel Road off of 101 south of Gilroy with the crew as they took their ten o’ clock break. An Econoline van came down the off ramp and stopped short. A big man got out wearing a stiff, white, cowboy hat. He put a hand over his heart, reached out wide with his other hand to gather the applause, and began to sing: “One beautiful woman, two ugly men, three pistol shots rang out!”
“El mero Bullo!” someone yelled out, and Bullo came forward laughing and started passing out handbills. He’d found enough to eat. In fact, he was fatter than ever.
“Is life treating you well?” I asked.
“The best,” Bullo answered. “I’ve got my own banda group. I sing and play the bajo sexto. We’re on our North American tour. Come check us out. We’re playing at El Rio Nilo in Gilroy tonight.” And he handed me a handbill. “Tell a friend!”
I had to smile. El Bullo was promoting his band and doing what he wanted to do. He was working, working hard, and I didn’t have to kick him down the field. Sometimes a story has a happy ending.
Andy Griffin
photos by Andy Griffin. They are not part of the story, but they are autumnal and chosen by Andy’s editor for this piece. (that would be me, Julia)
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This Weeks Farm Activities! San Marzanos, Pumpkins, and More! and a San Marzano Tomato UPICK this Saturday in Hollister! If you are planning on canning and picking your own tomatoes at our fields, this is your 2011 autumn chance. Join us!

Thurs. 10/20 SF Aziza 4:30-7pm
announcement info || form to make order

Fri. 10/21 Palo Alto 4-6m
announcement info || form to make order
Sat. 10/22 Piccino 11am-1pm  this is our Tomato Emergency for the year! 5 boxes (20# each) of San Marzanos for $100.
San Marzano & Pumpkin Patch
form to make order
Sat 10-22 Hollister SAN MARZANO Tomato Upick

I know Natal better this afternoon than I did this morning. He’s a short guy, built like a bull, Portuguese, out of the Azores, with a big mustache. I wouldn’t want to be on his bad side. Not that he’s known to be fierce; Natal’s reputation is for being a hard-working guy. He’s got to work hard because he’s a California flower grower. Ever since 1991, when the first President Bush signed the ATPDEA, our domestic flower industry has been in a free fall. What were the politicians thinking? Supposedly by opening our markets to flowers from Colombia we were giving the Colombians farmers a legitimate crop they could sell instead of cocaine. Naturally, some of the coke lords saw the Andean Compact as an opportunity to invest in legitimate flower shipping businesses so they could launder their coke dollars. Colombian flower exporters have thrived. And why not?; growers in Columbia pay less for a day’s labor than a US farmer does for an hour, they have no meaningful controls on pesticide use to contend with, and their geographical location at higher elevations in the Andes near the equator provides a consistent cool climate and long days that mimic perpetual spring-like conditions and make for very high quality, long-stemmed roses and carnations. Not only that, but the international nature of the flower market and the standardized 48x20x12 flower cartons which are air shipped by the hundreds of thousands all around the globe combine to create the perfect vector by which the narcotraficantes can export their small packets of white powder to major cities. But don’t get me started; today the US flower industry is almost dead, our greenhouses are empty, and imported flowers are cheap. Our politicians are either naïve, stupid, or corrupt. Any domestic flower growers still in business today have got to be hard workers, real smart, or rich enough to keep losing money year after year. Natal isn’t rich. I knew he was a hard worker, but after today I can see he’s sharp too.
I’ve rented cold storage from Natal all year but I’ve only rarely talked to him. He rents the coolers he doesn’t use for his flower business to other growers. I store potatoes there so I pass through his warehouse from time to time. When I see Natal he’s usually standing at his desk in the middle of the shed talking excitedly on the phone in English, Portuguese, or Spanish. When he hangs up he hustles out, hops in his pick-up truck and speeds off to his green house for another load of Gerbera daisies. But when I went to his cooler at 6am to pull a pallet of potatoes he was seated at his desk looking at his phone. I stopped to talk. We discussed the biochemistry of ripening fruit.
Apples, or any fruit for that matter, give off a gas called ethylene in the ripening process. Ethylene is a gaseous plant hormone. If you’ve ever ripened a hard avocado by putting it in a brown paper bag with a yellow banana you’ve been taking advantage of the ethylene given off by the banana to provoke the avocado to ripen. When you hear the term “gas green tomato” it refers to the process by which tomatoes are machine harvested when they’re still green as grass and hard as rocks and then ripened to red in gas chambers pumped full of ethylene. Right now the apple crop is still hanging from the trees. Once they’re picked I want to store the apples in a cooler so that we can have them for sale through December without losing any to rot or to rats. I asked Natal if he’d have any space available.
“You can’t store them with the potatoes,” he said. Natal went on to explain that the cooler I’ve got the potatoes in shares the ventilation system with all the coolers in the building. The cold air is recycled, so any air that is fanned out of the cooler I occupy would find its way into the other coolers, and if I was storing any apples the ethylene-laden air would soon make its way into the other coolers. Ethylene not only ripens fruit, it causes flowers to mature rapidly. Since the neighboring coolers are full of flowers, my apples could cause the blooms to open in the dark and lose petals and the flower stems could shed leaves. Luckily, Natal had another cooler especially for apples that Life Earth Farm was going to rent. We agreed that I’d talk to Tom at Live Earth and see if I could share their space and park my apples with theirs. Natal’s phone rang. My phone rang. We jabbered in English and Spanish we each hustled off, jumped into our trucks, and sped off.
At 2pm I was back at Natal’s for another load of potatoes. He was standing at his desk talking excitedly on the phone. I walked through the warehouse and entered the cooler at the back. It’s a cavernous space maintained at around 34º, and almost entirely empty except for my pallets of potatoes in the corner. I got to work. It’s time for me to decide how many potatoes I want to save to plant out for next year’s crop. I began shuffling totes around, consolidating the pallets and sweeping. I like working in the cooler. There’s no cell phone reception in there. I also like the cold. Sorting and counting potatoes is my way of “chilling out.” I was surprised when I heard the big door open, and I heard the Mexican music from the warehouse float in. I looked over my shoulder. How strange; two white women in late middle age, both quite conservatively and professionally dressed, wearing heels, with frosted bouffant hairdos had entered the cooler. I motioned to them to close the doors; there’s no point in renting a cooler if you’re going to let all the cold air out.
“Are you Mr. Griffin? One of them asked.
I thought for a second before I answered. They didn’t look like inspectors. And I couldn’t think of anything specific that I had or hadn’t done that required inspection, and I don’t owe anyone money, and I don’t think I’m in trouble with the IRS.
“Yes,” I replied. Whatever these women were up to, they’d certainly gone out of their way to find me. They’d had to drive up a country road until the valley narrowed to a canyon and the redwoods closed in. Then they had to park outside and walk past a ferocious looking Azorean cattle dog that guards the entrance to Natal’s warehouse. Then they had to brave the fierce macaw that patrols the loading dock; a shrieking, swaggering, flapping, psychedelic, avian badass with a beak that can cut bolts; even the dog keeps his distance. Then they had to negotiate around the women trimming flowers and go through a dark dry-storage space full of cob webs before opening the huge door and entering the refrigerator.
“Are you the owner of this business?” they asked. “Mr. Natal said we’d find you here.”
“Hmm,” I thought. “Mr. Natal? This doesn’t sound right. Natal’s a flower grower, not a hair dresser.”
“I’m the owner of A business,” I replied.
“Good,” the older woman replied. “We’re conducting a poll of small business owners and we’d like to ask you a few questions. First of all, what’s your opinion about the ways that Obamacare is going to negatively impact your profit margins?”
I considered the situation.
The other woman spoke up. “It’s cold in here,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of questions. Maybe we can step out into the sunshine and talk where it’s warm.”
“Ladies,” I relied, “if you want to talk to me we’ll have to talk in here. I do have a small business and I am busy. I’m here sweeping the floor and counting the potatoes because I am the designated potato counter and floor sweeper.” I kept stacking potatoes.
“What do you think about the effect of intrusive government regulations?” asked the first woman. “Did you know that the government wants to make you to change all your light bulbs? Would you like less regulation? And taxes; would you like to see lower taxes, or no taxes, or are you in favor of higher rates? And do you want the Government to open up your business to unions? Or do you think that it’s fair that small businesses are going out of business?”
“I don’t think life is fair,” I answered. “Look. Every one of these questions is lush with controversy, and if this were talk radio we could spend all day mulling over the pros and cons of these issues, but I’m a farmer. I haven’t got the time. I’ve got to go.”
“We represent a group that is fighting on your behalf,” the cold woman said. “And for a minimal charge based on the number of employees you have you can help us continue to help you. How many employees do you have?”
“Twenty,” I answered. I was curious to hear their price.
“Six hundred dollars,” she answered.
I had to laugh; that stinker Natal. “Come on ladies,” I said. “We’ve got to go.” I pushed the big door open and we stepped out into the open warehouse with the musica romantica playing, the women working with their piles of flowers, and the dirty-mouthed macaw, asleep for once, perched atop a fork lift. Outside in the sun it was warm and the Azorean cattle dog was asleep in the shade. Natal was nowhere to be seen. He’s not stupid; he’d seen these ladies coming, figured they wanted money and ‘put them on ice,’ so to speak, by sending them on in to hustle me. When I see Natal next I’ll tell him I signed him up at the 900 dollar rate; we’ll see what he says in English, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Andy Griffin
all photos by Andy Griffin
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We are selling tomatoes and mystery boxes This Week in Oakland at Camino!  We’ll be there Wednesday from 5-7pm, all by preorder. Here’s the Google Form, here’s more information about what we are bringing. Here’s where to sign up for future Oakland Deliveries!
more information  ||  just the order form  (we are likely only taking orders until Monday evening/Tuesday am)  Camino’s Website
We are also coming to Greens at Ft. Mason this Thursday with tomatoes and mystery boxes and strawberries. All by preorder. 4:30pm to 7pm.  more information  ||  just the order form  || To sign up for future SF deliveries, we do them throughout the city 12 months a year. You get a reminder email, then decide if you want something or not.   Palo Alto/Los Gatos/San Jose/Menlo Park etc deliveries.  Santa Cruz Bulk buying list||  Greens at Ft. Mason website
and our UPICK DAYS are this week: Thursday and Saturday from 9am – noon. IF you’re interested, please read our latest ladybug Postcard missive, (info is at the bottom)  and look for the next one on Tuesday midday for the most up to date info. We will likely post to our facebook page as well: like to get the info. Andy has been posting photos and answering lots of questions there too. Indian Corn will be available, and pumpkins, and lots of tomatoes to pick
Tomato Sauce Photo Essay from Julia

Garlic is a crop that needs to be cured. But why “cure” something if it isn’t sick, especially something like garlic which is, itself, widely touted as a cure for everything from vampire infestations to heart disease?
To cure means to heal. The word “heal” come to us from the Anglo-Saxon word hal, meaning whole. As our language developed it was natural for the word “cure”, which comes to English from the Latin word curare, for caring, to also begin to mean “make whole.” “Caring for” and “keeping whole,” eventually become synonymous with preserving. Thus, even a ham is said to be “cured” after it has been kept from decomposing by being bathed in brine and spices, though its only “illness” was to have once been the leg on a swine. Curing a head of garlic is not nearly as violent a process as “curing” the leg from a pig.
When garlic plants begin to yellow and we observe that the bulbs are swollen we stop watering the crop. At this point the garlic’s roots are beginning to shrivel under ground and any excess water would only invite rot, spoiling the bulb. Then we lift the bulbs and break the dirt clods from the roots. We lay the garlic on the ground in rows to finish drying. We are careful to protect the crop from sunburn by layering the garlic so the bulbs are tucked under the withered leaves of the garlic plants preceding them in the row. The effect is like a thatched windrow.
As the garlic cures any residual sugars are drawn from the wilting leaves into the cloves, and this helps them keep. Remember, unlike a pig that’s been cured of its life, properly cured garlic is a complete living organism, or rather bunch of organisms, since each clove in the cluster is a clone of the mother plant. When the papery husk that envelopes and protects the head of garlic dries we clip the bulbs from their stalks. We will store the dried garlic inside the shade of a dark barn in bulb totes that allow the free passage of air so that there’s no condensation of trapped moisture to provoke rot. In late October we’ll break apart the garlic bulbs we’ve saved for next year’s crop and plant the cloves.
“Curing” garlic isn’t cheap; all that planting, irrigating, weeding, lifting, windrowing, clipping, and packaging takes time and labor– rent and wages, plus taxes and diesel fuel, of course. So, if the farm is going to stay in business, it’s important to get the highest price possible for our crop. In recent years garlic has presented special challenges on both on the production end and on the retail side of the agricultural equation. China has been exporting massive amounts of garlic to the United States at very “competitive” prices. It helps that the cost of Chinese farm labor, when compared to US wage standards, is practically free. It also helps the Chinese producers that garlic, once cured, can be easily held in storage for a long time, allowing the crop to be shipped cheaply to US markets on a “slow boat from China.” Over here, consumers don’t often know where their food comes from, and many of them don’t care; price is almost all that counts.
Time also counts. America is the land where time IS money, and many consumers don’t feel like they have the time left in their lives to peel garlic. Americans are more sophisticated about food than they ever have been before, and garlic is more popular than ever, so much of America’s increased demand for garlic is for convenient, “value added” products like peeled garlic, prepared garlic pastes, dried garlic flakes, and garlic salt. As a small-scale farmer, I can hardly afford to cure my garlic crop, to say nothing of processing it, so I have devised other strategies to grow and market garlic.
First of all, we sell much of our crop as “green garlic.” In the fall, we plant the cloves densely together so that they grow thick. For lack of root space this garlic wouldn’t thrive if we left it in the ground to mature, but we harvest it young and tender, at a scallion stage. Being a fresh, green crop that is perishable, we face no competition in the local marketplace from the Chinese. Green garlic is flavorful but mild and can be used in many applications where cured garlic might make too forceful an impression on the palate. And I like that too, but what I really like is that green garlic is ready in early March, just when our farm has the least to harvest and I need all the sales I can get.
Secondly, every fall we plant some garlic two rows per forty-inch bed at a rate of one clove per every six inches. This garlic will fatten nicely and form a plump bulb. In the past we would have let this garlic fully mature and then we would have gone through the whole curing process. One problem we used to have is that during the curing process we would sometimes get a visit from the night time coastal fog rolling in over the fields. The garlic’s papery husk get damp in the fog and then turn gray, rather than remain the bone-white that the consumer appreciates, making it even harder to sell. Nowadays, we sell our full-sized garlic when it’s fresh. True, without curing, fresh garlic won’t keep, but we’re selling the garlic to people who are cooking with it, not storing it, and they appreciate the bright flavor and the juiciness that fresh garlic has.
Lastly, we often grow a small amount of so-called “snake garlic,” or Allium sativum ophioscorodon.” (Ophioskorodon is Greek for serpent.) A Muslim story has the first garlic sprouting from a print the Devil’s left cloven hoof left in the dust as he followed Adam and Eve out of the Garden, but this garlic earned its name, not because of any satanic relationship or culpability in the temptation of Eve but because the plant sends up a flower stalk that curls like snake. The flower bud is called a “scape,” and it is tender, and mildly flavored of garlic. Due to their unusual shape, garlic scapes make great vegetables for tempura. The scape harvest gives our farm an unusual crop to offer our customers and helps us to attract and maintain our restaurant clients. The scape harvest also comes a few weeks earlier that the fresh garlic harvest, which, again, helps even out cash flow. Once the snake garlic bulbs swell, they are sharp flavored and delicious. Because snake garlic is expensive and sometimes hard to find we’ll save the best heads of our own crop and cure them so that they store well and are available for us to plant back in the fall for our next year’s crop.
Andy Griffin
green garlic recipes
A-Z recipes from Mariquita Farm
Green Garlic pesto photo essay and recipe
our 2011 CSA has begun!

When I pick up a rifle and put my eye to the sights I have a choice; I can focus on the bead at the end of the barrel or I can look towards the distant target, but my eyesight is too poor to see both things at once. I’m not the hero of this story. I don’t even shoot at the ground squirrels that plague my farm for fear I’ll slay an innocent irrigation pipe, or worse, my left foot. But this is a tale of the hunt, another chapter in the saga of civilization’s struggle with Nature, and an account of how the stuffed head of a Mountain Goat came to hang on the wall of one man’s home in the suburbs of Salinas, California. So let me take you back to a starting point very near the end of the story, to this past Christmas and to a sock hung from the mantle of the fireplace in my living room.
Santa Claus is for kids. In my family adults don’t exchange gifts at Christmas. But Julia broke the rules this year when she saw a little button for sale– the kind that you can pin on your shirt. This button displays the little cartoon profile of a goat and above the tiny image floats the word “old.” Old goat. So she thought of me. She bought the button and put it in a Christmas stocking. I suppose her gift came wrapped with a subtle message too; perhaps my beard has grown to long, or maybe I ought to bathe more often. I accepted the gift, and the joke, and pinned the button to the band of my old black cowboy hat.
The “old goat” pictured on the pin is a barn yard goat, Capra hircus. I like goats. I’ve kept a flock for years. Goats are endlessly amusing creatures to watch, beautiful, and intelligent. The wild Mountain Goat that animates big game hunters and sends them on foot into the highest peaks is Oreamnos americanus, a very different animal from the domestic goat. True, there is a superficial resemblance between the two species; both sport beards and horns and cloven hooves, and both animals are related to deer, but they aren’t closely related to each other. The domestic goat comes from Western Asia and has been the companion of man for thousands of years while the few remaining Mountain goats hide in isolated mountains across the American West. Before whites came with rifles, Mountain goats ranged from the Chugach Mountains of Alaska down through the Rockies and the Cascades into Washington and Idaho. In modern times hunters have decimated the population over their natural range, but Mountain goats have been successfully introduced into places as far south as Nevada and Texas. Mountain goats are alpine animals. They are able to withstand profound cold– their coats help them to withstand temperatures as low as −50 °F and winds of up to 100 mph. Where mountain slopes plunge to the sea Mountain goats have been seen on the coast, but they typically inhabit the remote, high peaks, and they’re “at home” up to 13,000 ft. The size of these animals, their beauty, their rarity, and the difficulties a hunter must overcome to find a Mountain goat amid the crags and glaciers and kill it turns the hunt into a quest and makes the horned head a trophy beyond compare. I wasn’t thinking about any of this on the 2nd of January when I loaded my dog, Red, into my pick up truck, put my hat on, and drove out to Chew’s Ridge.
You reach Chew’s Ridge by driving up the Tassajara Road behind Jamesburg. There’s an old Forest Service lookout tower on the top of the ridge at 5082 ft elevation. When you arrive at the summit you see why they built the tower there; the view is spectacular. To the south and west stand the mountains that make up the rocky heart of the Santa Lucia Range; Cone Peak, the Ventana Double Cone, and Devil’s Peak. To the north and west and you can see over the Carmel Valley and Jack’s Peak to the mouth of the Salinas Valley where it spills into the Monterey Bay and across the bay all the way to the Santa Cruz Mountains in the blue distance. Look north and east and you see Palo Escrito Peak and the ridge line of the Sierra de Salinas. Paloma creek drains off towards the Arroyo Seco Gorge in the east. The Gabilan Range, the San Benito Mountains, and Kreyenhagen Peak lie beyond. After my father died we scattered his ashes on Chew’s Ridge, just down the slope on the north side of the lookout. He was a botanist and he did a lot of work in these mountains. We lived on a field station at the foot of the ridge. As far as final resting places with views of forever go, Chew’s Ridge is as good as any.  I try and visit the spot a couple times a year.
Red and I saw the first snowflakes on the windshield of the pick-up truck as I drove past White Oaks Camp. “You’re going to enjoy this,” I said. Red is a Pyrenees Mountain dog and she loves snow. Soon there was a stripe of muddy snow between the tire tracks down the middle of the dirt road and then a solid white blanket covered everything. I put the truck in four wheel drive. Where the road crests the ridge there was eight inches of fresh snow on the ground. We got out and Red ran in circles, licking the snow and rolling. The pine trees with their trunks charred black by past wild fires stood out stark against the snow and the massive ancient oaks loomed in the mist like ghosts.
We crunched through the snow up a side road to the lookout tower.  When Red and I got to the top of Chew’s Ridge we found ourselves in the middle of a cloud so thick I could hardly see the brush that presses up around the tower. I walked to the northern edge of the clearing and looked out into the white. I knew that down below us a half mile and a thousand feet or so, hidden in the mist, is a flattish, grassy, open area sprinkled with pines called the Bear Trap. Back during the Mexican times vaqueros used to ride all the way out there from Monterey to catch grizzly bears. They built a square cage of pine logs stacked one across another and lashed them tight together with strips of wet rawhide, three walls and a roof. They left one side open for a heavy pine wood door which was propped up by a sapling pole stripped of branches and leaves. For bait they’d hang a deer carcass from the roof. Then they’d tie a riata to the sapling pole and slip back into the brush to wait. A bear would inevitably come by– the hills were thick with them then, and as the Grizzlies were the lords of all they saw, afraid of no one or anything, they’d lumber right into the cage and rip at the meat. The hidden vaquero would tug on the riata, which would pull at the pole, which would fall to the ground and release the trap door to fall, which would imprison the bear. The vaqueros would then climb up on the cage, drop the loops of their ropes through the spaces between the pine logs and catch the bear by the head and each foot. When the bear was subdued they’d roll it onto an ox cart for the 40 mile ride down the trail to the arena in Monterey. Crowds would gather to watch the bear fight for life in a death match against a long horned bull. I comfort myself that every once in a while a vaquero got eaten when the bear hunt went sour.
When I was a kid there were old timers around who could still remember where the rotten pine logs had laid in a pile, which was all that was left of the bear trap that gave the meadow its name. They showed me where it had stood, but there was nothing left but grass. Below the Bear Trap though, near Carmel Valley Road, there was a hunting club that we called “the Fish Pond,” because of the murky lagoon back that lay behind a ring of rickety cabins. Most of the hunting club members were retired cops from Monterey, Seaside, and Del Rey Oaks, men like Al Hall. Of course his friends called him Al “K” Hall. The cops must have done some hunting, but mostly they drank. Steinbeck would have loved these guys.  The County Sheriff’s deputies visited the club several times too, or maybe I should say, “they responded.” For example, two cops got drunk and one of them shot the other- a hunting accident. Then there was the time a cop went fishing in a row boat on the pond, got drunk, got tangled up in his fishing line, fell overboard, and drowned. Fishing accidents are hell. And then there was the time a cop got drunk, tripped, fell on his face into the fireplace and burned alive.
One day I went over to the Fish Pond with Jimmy. Jimmy had the ranch across the road from the hunting club. When I was a kid I used to help him with the chores. He was sore because the cops had been poaching does on his ranch and leaving the gates between the pastures open. Deer hunters are supposed buy deer tags-  hunting permits- from the California Department of Fish and Game, and they’re supposed to tie the tags to the antlers of any buck they shoot to prove they had the right to kill it. They’re also supposed to ask permission before hunting on private land. Jimmy was reminding the cops that they didn’t have permission to hunt on his ranch when Officer Golden of the Fish and Game drove into the yard. He stayed in his pick up.
“Had any luck, fellas?” he called out. He’d heard some shots and was sniffing around.
“No luck this year,” one of the cops said.
“Hell,” said another cop. “No luck last ear either. We still got a fist full of old deer tags we never used.
“Don’t believe ‘em for a minute,” Jimmy said to Officer Golden. “Does haven’t got antlers.” He turned back to the cops. “I guess you could tie the tags to their ears.”
The cops chuckled, but Jimmy was half serious. He took hunting seriously. He was born in 1911 and came of age during the Great Depression when food had been hard to pay for and hunting had been a necessity; if you kill all the does, where is the next generation of deer going to come from?
My mood and my head were both starting to feel heavy so I took off my cowboy hat and knocked off the snow. The “Old goat” button looked back at me and I had to smile. Jimmy had an old goat named Bill. For Jimmy, a .30-06 was practically an extension of his trigger finger, and even years after he spent much time hunting he still could load and shoot a gun with a speed and accuracy that was practically instinctual. Good old Bill almost made Jimmy regret a perfect shot.
Bill was a stinky, ornery, brindle colored beast with naughty yellow eyes and a massive rack of curving horns that made him look a bit like a Bighorn Sheep. He’d been a cute kid once, a poor choice as a pet for some child, and the stupid parents that bought him had never bothered to get him castrated. So he got big, reached sexual maturity and started to smell. It’s really a mistake to let an un-castrated male goat become familiar; they move quickly with age from being affectionate to feeling dominant, and when they start butting their inferiors to prove that dominance, the silly, would-be pet owner can end up as a victim. Well some friend of a friend of Jimmy’s had gotten Bill as a kid, rough-housed with him when he was small and cute, and when he grew large enough to be dangerous, the didn’t know what to do with him they dropped him off at the corral. Then one day we slaughtered a steer.
At the edge of the corral, under the shade of a live oak tree, we had a walk-in cooler where Jimmy used to dry-age beef. The cooler was the back end of an old Formost Milk truck and there were a few steel steps to mount to enter the box. We’d hung the beef carcass from a limb outside the cooler and split it down the spine into halves with a chainsaw. Then we cut one of the halves along the rib line to make a quarter– it probably weighed 250lbs and it was greasy and hard to hold on to. Jimmy and I were struggling to haul the quarter up the steps into the cooler when Bill charged. He crashed into Jimmy from behind at the knees, driving his kneecaps into the metal steps and causing him to fall backwards into the dirt with both the quarter of beef and me landing on top of him. Jimmy’s face was red with pain and he let loose with a blue streak of invective, but as he staggered to his feet he swept up the .30-06 that he’d used to dispatch the steer. Quick as lightning he slammed the bolt home, raised the gun, and drew a bead on Bill’s horny head. Then…..then nothing. Jimmy let the rifle barrel dip.
“Look at that son of a bitch,” Jimmy said. “He’s proud of himself.”
It was true. Rancid old Bill was across the corral, all puffed up with glory, pissing on his own beard out of joy and curling his lip.
“I can’t kill him,” Jimmy said, “but he can’t live here.”
So we ran Bill up the cattle loading chute and into a pick up with stock racks, drove him up the Tassajara Road and jumped him out the back just past the Chew’s Ridge summit where there’s a barbed wire corral for Forest Service pack animals and a horse trough. With water, a view to die for, and more brush than a goat could eat in a million years, Bill was only short a few lady goats from being in heaven.
It must have been a year later that Jimmy had to meet some guy who lived in Greenfield. They decided to meet half way, so we drove down to Miller’s Lodge on the river. When we got there his friend hadn’t arrived yet so we went inside. A couple of old boys were at the bar bragging. “…. so then I made the kill shot,” one of the men said, letting out a lungful of blue smoke.
His friend was looking into a mug of beer. “You’re not going to believe this,” he replied, “but I bagged a Mountain goat last month.”
“Bullshit,” his friend said. “This is as far from Salinas as you’ve been in a year”
“I killed it here, up in the National Forest,” he said.
“Bullshit.”
“I can still hardly believe it myself. I saw the tracks first.  I was up on Chew’s Ridge, about half a mile down that jeep trail that drops off to Miller Canyon. The tracks were so big I thought it must be a monster buck, so I went back in the evening and hid up behind the spring. He came down for water, and… BANG!”
“You’re full of shit. There’s no Mountain goats here.”
“Yeah, I probably got the last one.”
“Bullshit!”
“Hey, my word is as good as my aim; I’ve got the head mounted and it’s hanging on the wall of my den.
copyright Andy Griffin 2011

Photos by Andy Griffin:  the ‘spooky forest’ is at Chews Ridge; the pin is his Christmas present; and the goat eye is of one of Andy’s billy goats

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Upcoming mystery boxes in Los Gatos and Santa Cruz:

Los Gatos Thursday, Jan. 27th from 4-6pm (brussels sprouts, chantenay carrots, and butternut squash are also offered!)

Santa Cruz Wednesday, Feb. 2nd from 4:00-5:30pm (brussels sprouts, chantenay carrots, and butternut squash are also offered!)

Like us on Facebook if you do that sort of thing. Andy posts small tidbits and photos during the week.

A-Z Recipe Page

Mariquita Farm 2011 CSA page (boxes start in March)

When my son, Graydon, was three he ran through the kitchen one morning. “I’m hungry Papa!” he yelled. “Make me lunch, make it quick, and make it crunchy!”  I told him to eat a carrot.
Graydon is almost 16 now and he’s evolved into a more complex and meditative person. Carrots have evolved since their earliest days too. Back in the Stone Age it was the carrot plant’s greens, not its roots that attracted humanity’s attention. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Scientists classify carrots in the Umbelliferae, along with other aromatic herbs like cilantro, dill, cilantro, caraway, chervil, anise, parsley and fennel. Carrot greens are not especially strong smelling, but fresh carrot seed has a rich and complex scent. If I was going to leave the farming life behind for an urbane, sophisticated existence as a perfume designer I’d move to Paris and develop a fragrance from the essence of carrot seed that would appeal to all sexes.
The carrot family’s scientific name, Umbelliferae, refers to the characteristic umbrella shape of their flowers. Carrot flowers are pretty. Queen Anne’s Lace is one form of carrot that has found a home in the floral trade. The carrot’s affinity with the other Umbelliferae goes beyond the merely scientific; carrots marry well on the plate and in the pot with other Umbelliferae- think of carrot parsley salad, carrot chervil salad, carrot dill salad, carrot cilantro salad, etc. It has been a long time since carrot varieties were selected for their flavor of their greens, but a carrot’s leaves can be minced and used judiciously in salads or as garnishes, just like cousin parsley. Carrots tops can also profitably be used in stocks and soups.
After millennia of gathering and eating wild carrot greens and carrot seeds we humans settled down, invented agriculture, and developed carrot breeds with edible roots. For subsistence farmers root crops have certain advantages over leafy greens, namely, they can be stored for long periods of time in the ground or in a cellar without any processing or refrigeration. What follows below is an outline, painted in broad strokes, of the major types of carrots available to the cook and gardener with their relative advantages and disadvantages noted and compared:
1. White carrots: First developed from the native wild European carrot, white carrots have been used as fodder for horses and in the kitchen. White carrots are vigorous growers through all seasons, resistant to cold, tolerant of heat, with big, strong, feathery tops and they taste good, especially when roasted. I’m not crazy about raw white carrots– they’re not terribly sweet and can be chewy to the point of giving your jaws a workout– but they are fine roasted. The sugars that lie latent in the raw white carrot’s flesh are caramelized in the roasting process so the roots sweeten and the heat mellows the white carrot’s texture to an agreeable, toothsome degree that never degrades into the cloyingly soft mush that some orange carrots take on when cooked. Some cooks with French proclivities like white carrots for the stock pot because these carrots effectively flavor the broth without imparting an orange color that might distract the diner or spoil the appearance of a sauce or soup that’s intended to be whiter than white .
2. Colored Asiatic carrots: Forget white! Across Central Asia carrots come in a rainbow of colors from red through purple, all the way to black. Like white carrots, most rainbow carrots taste best when cooked. (Have you ever noticed that traditional Indian or Afghan cuisine is all about cooked food and features very few raw salads?) Asian colored carrot plants do grow vigorously, but– and it’s a big “but”– heirloom Asian carrots DO NOT produce roots reliably unless they’re planted after the summer solstice so that the plant is developing as the hours of sunlight are declining. Spring plant Indian red carrots will bolt to flower every time and leave the gardener with only a wiry, fibrous, woody root for their efforts. But plant these carrots in summer and you’ll get a nice fall crop of roots. In the fall, as night time temperatures drop, a carrot root naturally sweetens because the plant converts starches to sugars as a defense mechanism against freezing to death. Cells filled with sugary water have a lower freezing point. This organic process is why most root crops taste their best during winter.
3. Modern Orange carrots: Can you spell “felicitous miscegenation?” Orange carrots developed from a cross between the colored Asiatic carrots and their white European relatives. True, Romans had some carrots that tended towards yellow, but in general, when we read Roman cook books it’s hard to tell if the authors are talking about what we’d call a carrot or a parsnip since the used the same word for both distinctly different plants. Our iconic, Bugs Bunny style orange carrots didn’t develop until fairly recently. Don’t believe me? Go to an art museum and check out lush Dutch still life paintings from the 1600s that feature cornucopias of vegetables, fruits, and flowers. Dutch artists were so realistically inclined that they painted the iridescent flies the saw crawling on the food, and they painted WHITE carrots! Show me a Dutch still life from that period with a bright orange carrot and I’ll show you a fraud! But modern or not, orange carrots have many virtues; they reliably produce roots no matter what season they’re planted in, they’re sweeter than their white, red, purple, or black cousins, and they have a color that appeals to young children. There are several common types of orange carrot commonly available for the cook or gardener:
A. Imperator: I think of the Imperator as the “Safeway carrot.” Imperators are long, straight carrots that grow vigorously. Most important, many varieties of Imperator have been developed to grow evenly and rapidly so that they can be machine harvested when grown on sand ground. Imperator carrots also have slim shoulders so they fit well into a 1lb cello bag. Imperators are cheap, crunchy and they taste ok, especially if fresh, and they work well for major food processors. In Latin the word imperator translates into “commander” and is cognate with words like “emperor,” or “imperious.” I find the authoritarian flavor of this name to be somewhat distasteful and I choose not to grow Imperator carrots.
B. Chantenay: The Chantenay carrot is typically shorter than the Imperator, with broad shoulders, and triangular profile that tapers to a blunt tip when young but that can fill out almost to a beer can’s bulk if given time in the ground. These carrots store very well in the ground or root cellar and they taste great raw or cooked. Because of their shape they do not fit well in the industry standard cello pak so you don’t see them in the chain stores too often. I like Chantenay carrots a lot. My favorite orange Chantenay carrot is Royal Chantenay. My favorite yellow Chantenay is Yellow Sun.
C.  Danvers half- long: The Danvers is a carrot type with good flavor and vigor. They have well-defined shoulders that taper to a point at the tip. They are shorter than Imperator cultivars, but they’re more tolerant of heavy soil and make nice bunched carrots for the farmers’ market. The soil on my farm is not particularly heavy and I’m happy with Chantenay carrots so I don’t usually grow Danvers carrots.
D. Nantes carrots: These carrots are cylindrical in shape, blunt and rounded at both the top and tip, and relatively fast to grow from germination to harvest. Young Nantes cultivars can be sweeter than other young carrots, and they make nice baby carrots for salads. By contrast, Imperator or Chantenay carrots may be better choices for cooking, but they need to mature in the field before they develop their full flavor profile or deliver an acceptable yield. A baby Imperator carrot is like an orange string! I like Nantes carrots for my spring planted early crops. Then I move on to the Chantenay types for my main season and over-wintering crops.
E. Paris market carrots: Parisian carrots are round like radishes. They can be a fashion forward choice for a whimsical cook intent on playing with form, color, and expectation. “What? A round carrot?” Because of they are very short Paris market carrots can tolerate very heavy soils. I grow Parisian round carrots from time to time, especially for my restaurant customers. Sometimes children like them too, because they’re different. Other times kids reject Parisian carrots because they’re round; kids can be SO conservative about food. I hope you’re liberal minded when it comes to dinner. Below are some recipes that stretch modern convention by including carrot greens.
copyright 2010 Andy Griffin
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Recipes and Notes from Julia and Jonathan:
from Julia: ok: Andy’s last line threw me for a loop. Yes, carrot tops are 100% edible. Eat them all you like.  However, I personally don’t find them palatable, and living in the amazing year-round fresh food arena we live in I ask: why eat carrot tops!? I’m simply not hungry enough. So here’s a recipe for Carrot Top Dye from the Carrot Musuem. That’s the best I can do.  Here are more recipes for carrot tops in case you want to give them a culinary spin: just don’t invite me over for dinner! (insert annoying smiley emoticon)
Carrot Leaf Dye
adapted from the Carrot Museum: an amazing website with more carrot lore than you knew existed.
INGREDIENTS: chop up the green foliage of 6 large carrot tops, 1 litre boiling water, alum.
Extra foliage can be added to made a slightly darker colour using no more than 300ml of water
EXTRACTION PROCESS: boil tops for half an hour. Strain liquid, and add 2 teaspoons of alum; make sure the alum is dissolved.
COLOUR MADE: light yellow.
LIGHTFAST QUALITIES: 4: fugitive pigment. The colour fades away over 3 to 5 months, depending on the amount of carrot tops used.
SHADEFAST QUALITIES: the colour fades over a 2 year period.
RUBBINGS: makes a very pale green colour.
METHOD: take the leaves and use them as a crayon, rub directly onto the paper.
LIGHTFAST QUALITY: 4: fugitive pigment. Fades over a 6 month period to an off white colour.
SHADEFAST QUALITY: 4: fugitive pigment. Fades over a 6 month period to an off white colour.
Now some real carrot recipes:
Carote all Giudia
Braised Carrots, Jewish Style
Adapted from Cucina Ebraica by Joyce Goldstein
Serves 4
¼ cup olive oil or rendered goose or duck fat
1.5 pounds carrots, any color, peeled and thinly sliced
¼ cup water
6 Tablespoons raisins, plumped in water or sweet wine
3 Tablespoons pine nuts, toasted
S & P to taste
Dash of vinegar or sugar to taste, optional
Warm the oil (or fat) in a sauté pan over medium heat. Add the carrots and saute until well coated with fat, 5-8 minutes. Add the water and cover the pan. Reduce the heat to very low and simmer until the carrots are tender, about 20 minutes.
Add the raisins with their liquid, and the pine nuts. Season with S & P. Add a little vinegar or sugar, or both. Serve warm or at room temperature.
Carrot Soup
from Chef Jonathan Miller
Oil or butter
1 small onion, chopped
2” ginger, peeled and grated
1 lb carrots, chopped
2-3 cup veggie stock or chicken stock
¼ cup cream
cilantro, chopped
Heat 2-3 TBL olive oil or butter in a pot and add the onion. Sauté until softened, about 8 minutes, then add the ginger and carrots. Lower the heat, stir to coat everything with some oil, then cover and cook for about 5 minutes. Add the stock – use just enough to barely cover the carrots – and the cream, bring to a simmer, cover again, lower heat and cook until the carrots are super tender, about 25-30 minutes, or up to 50. Allow to cool somewhat and then blend the soup in a blender. Add some salt and taste for seasoning. Reheat gently, then garnish with some chopped cilantro.
This Week’s Quinoa Salad
from Chef Jonathan Miller
1 c quinoa
4-8 carrots, depending on size, halved or quartered lengthwise
2 large red onions, cut into thick rounds
1 bunch cooking greens like chard, collards, or kale
sherry vinegar to taste
olive oil
1/4 c parsley, chopped
1/4 c cilantro, chopped
Toss the carrots and red onion with some olive oil and sherry vinegar, salt and pepper. Roast on a baking sheet at 400 until caramelized and sweet, about 50 minutes. Allow to cool and cut into large dice.
Cook your quinoa while the veggies roast: rinse it under cold water to remove the saponin. Drain and put into a saucepan and toast over high heat until the quinoa smells nutty and is popping, about 10 minutes. Pour in 2 c cold water and a little salt. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, cover, and steam for 15 minutes. Remove from heat and allow to rest for 10 minutes.
Wilt the cooking greens by either sauteeing them or blanching them, your choice. If using chard, include the stems, finely chopped, for texture and nutrition. Combine all the ingredients in a large bowl and toss well. Check for seasoning, adding salt or olive oil, or more sherry vinegar as you like. Serve at room temperature.
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We will have even more recipes for carrots and also for escarole and kale in this week’s Ladybug Post Card! And We’ll have my own Quinoa Salad recipe in that letter too.
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