Letters From Andy

Cocktails are all the rage these days. Cutting-edge bartenders are no longer content to simply pour liquor from a bottle or pull the lever on a tap– they’re chefs too, making their own syrups and bitters from scratch, reviving forgotten drinks from the happy hours of yesteryear and concocting new cocktails for a new century. There’s even a growing literature about cocktails. Some drinkers end up sick as a result of over-indulgence, but if you read much about cocktails maybe, like me, you’ll be surprised to learn that these stimulating mixtures of spirits, sugar, water, and bitters got their start as medicinal potions— the combined sugars, water, and liquors in the cocktail being the sweet vehicle by which the curative bitters were “delivered” to the patient. I happily drink fancy cocktails when they’re offered but they aren’t a big part of my life. I live too far from the big city hot spots to have much of a night life. And then I’ve got kids, a vegetable farm, and livestock to care for so I’m too tired to study mixology anyway. I’m content with beer. Given my circumstances, I think it’s funny that in my cow shed, on my farm at the end of a dirt road, I recently helped to prepare the most artisanal, authentic, and curative cocktails imaginable. I’ll get to the recipe in a minute, but first, a word about parenting.
As I was driving our kids to the school bus stop one morning recently, Lena, my thirteen year old daughter, suggested that I take her to Starbucks for a latte. I demurred. She then raised some concerns about my parenting skills. Luckily, I have a reservoir of self-esteem to draw on over the next few years.
“You remind me of something my mother once told me about the challenge of childrearing,” I said.
“Oh, great!” said Lena.
“My mom told me once that raising a kid is like carrying a newborn calf; every morning you get up and sling that calf over your shoulder, and then one day you realize you’re carrying a cow.”
“What is it with you and cows?”  Lena asked. “It’s like some sort of obsession.”
Lena’s right. When I was in high school I raised beef steers for my FFA project. FFA stands for Future Farmers of America; it’s a vocational agriculture program.  When I became a farmer I chose to raise vegetables, but several years ago, as an avocation, I got two Dexter cows. Then I got two more. Then I got a Dexter bull. Pretty soon I had little herd of Dexters and a freezer full of beef. Then, finally, a month ago, in service of my obsession, I bought a four year old Jersey cow named Jenny. When Lena found out how much I’d paid she said, “With that much money you could have bought some milk at the store AND the cell phone I’ve been asking for.”
Jerseys are a dairy breed. We milk Jenny the Jersey every morning, typically getting around 3.5 gallons, a half gallon of which is pure cream. The milk isn’t white– it is ivory colored, and sometimes you can see tiny droplets of pure fat floating in the pail. Jenny eats pumpkins and cull carrots every day, and when I make butter it comes out bright yellow from all the carotene in her diet. I enjoy having a cow, but watching Jenny eat makes my donkeys honking mad. I can’t help it. Milk cows are like race cars– if you don’t give them a lot of high quality fuel, they can’t perform well.
So anyway, early one recent, rainy, Sunday morning I gathered up my buckets and jars, put on my hat, and went out and got Jenny ready, filling her manger with hay and washing her tits off with warm soapy water. Washing the teats is important, not only for hygiene, but because the massaging motion and the warm water helps the milk cow relax and let down her milk. Music is said to help too. When I worked on the Straus Dairy in West Marin back in 1979, Antonio, the milker, said that classic musica Ranchera recordings of Vicente Fernández inspired the cows to give the most milk. Albert Straus, the dairy owner and boss, said that the cows found David Bromberg’s music to be more soothing. I don’t have an informed opinion about bovine musical tastes, but I do know that, by their nature, cows are very conservative. They find solace in routine. If we milk her at the same time every day, in the same place, feeding her the same kind of food and rewarding her with same bucket of grain, Jenny is happy. The music in my cow shed is the ping as the first stream of milk hits the bottom of the empty stainless steel pail and with my ear next to her belly I can hear Jenny’s belly rumble. The cow munches and snuffles as she plows through her alfalfa, there’s a contented burp or two, and pretty soon there’s steam rising out of the bucket of warm milk.
I was a gallon and a half into the milking when Manny showed up with his compadre, his “compa,” Octavio, from Uruapan, who I’d never met before. Octavio lives in San Jose now and works at the San Jose pulga making and selling the little carpets emblazoned with images of the Virgin Mary that go on the dashboards of custom vans and pick-up trucks. Octavio grew up on a ranch and likes the country life. But he’s a city dweller now so it’s been a long time since he was able to enjoy a real, authentic pajarete. We were introduced and Octavio produced a bottle of “vino.” (In rural Mexican parlance “vino” can be any sort of distilled alcoholic beverage, but it’s almost never actual wine.) It was pajarete time!
It was four years ago when I first heard about a roots Mexican “CSA” down in Moss Landing that specialized in pajaretes. “CSA” is an acronym that stands for “Community Supported Agriculture,” or in this case “Cow-munity Supported Agriculture. CSA works like this: a “community” of consumers who want a traditional product, a product not generally available through the common retail outlets, or who just want to see a local, community farm survive, “support” that farm by paying for the farm’s produce in advance, so that the farmer has the up-front monies needed to keep production going. The “Cow-munity” supporters wanted fresh, unpasteurized, un-homogenized raw milk— REALLY FRESH MILK, REALLY RAW MILK— so that they could make their pajaretes just like they had done back home on the rancho in Mexico. These men would leave their homes early every Saturday and Sunday morning from the suburbs of Salinas, Marina, Watsonville or Seaside and drive to the rancho in Moss Landing that they supported to get the milk they’d paid for. This practice probably ran afoul of USDA and CDFA regulations, Health Department regulations, zoning regulations, the AMA, the California Dairy Council AND the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms but let’s forget about the bureaucrats for a minute. As any curandero can tell you, pajaretes are health food; they take the ache out of a hangover, assuage the stomach and nourish the body even as they brighten one’s outlook and mellow the mind.
Octavio said his bottle was Charanda. Charanda is clear liquor made from cane sugar, common enough in Michoacan but hard to find around here. I looked at the bottle and read the label– 95% alcohol! Whatever Octavio chose to call it, the liquor was essentially Mexican white lightning.
“Híjole,” I said. “Relámpago blanco! You definitely don’t want to be smoking around this stuff– one stray spark and we all go up like Molotov cocktails.”
“Simón,” said Octavio. “Muy auténtico!”
Manny showed me what to do. The first step is to put a spoonful of sugar at the bottom of your cup. “Any kind of sugar will work,” he said, “but the best sugar is crumbled piloncillo.” Piloncillo is a crude, coarse, brown sugar made from unfiltered, boiled sugar cane juice, and it’s very common in the cane fields. “Es lo más natural!” Manny said. “Lo más puro!”
You dissolve and dilute the sugar with a few fingers of charanda. (Outside of the sugarcane growing regions, in areas where agave culture dominates, tequila is the preferred liquor.) How much “vino” to put in the mug is a matter of taste. I’m told that in Mexico when bartenders serve pajaretes they ask the teparochos , or “los winos,”  if they want their drink  prepared “media bloque, un bloque, o dos bloques?” A bloque is a city block. The question really is, does the patron want his pajarete so strong that he passes out and fall face flat after staggering down the street for a ½ block, a whole block, or two blocks. Country living being the clean, hardworking enterprise that it is, we decide on a mere finger of vino per glass.
Once the sugar has dissolved into the alcohol it’s time to add the milk. Of course you could just pour milk from a carton into the liquor but the idea is to milk the cow directly into the mug, squeezing the tit with enough gentle force so that the stream of warm, healing milk comes squirting out in a jet and forms a froth that makes your basic Starbuck’s barrista with his steam machine look like a citified loser. Then, when your cup is full, bottoms up!
Manny is on the wagon so Octavio and I raised our drinks and toasted the cow. “Salud! To Jenny!”
So how do pajaretes taste? They go down easy. The liquor Octavio brought was so pure of any ingredient besides alcohol that it had no distinguishing flavor, only an effect, so the taste of the pajarete was sugary sweet and milky smooth, like something a bad mother might give a colicky baby to shut it up and put it to sleep. “What’ll it be Junior? Media bloque?”
I stood back, sipped my pajarete and watched Manny finish milking the cow. I felt good. The white noise of the rain pattering down on the corrugated tin roof of the cow shed was comforting. The white lightning and fresh milk in my belly was warming. Jenny was content munching on her pumpkin. Octavio and Manny reminisced about old times in Michoacan. They informed me that milkers on Mexican dairies feel that it is a basic right to enjoy at least three pajaretes per shift. “Good Lord,” I thought.
They also told that pajaretes can be made with goat milk, sheep milk, cow milk, or donkey milk, and that of these four kinds of milk donkey milk is by far and away the most healing. It gave me an idea. Life in the country isn’t always idyllic. Sometimes my wife, Julia, comes home, opens the gate, sees the cat sunning herself in the driveway, and then sees the cows, sheep, goats, donkeys, dogs, children, and chickens wandering about in the corrals and fields beyond, with all the attendant mooing, bah-ing, bleating, braying, barking, complaining, and squawking, and  it’s enough to make her wish she could turn the car around and drive off to her imaginary cute little Craftsman bungalow in Pacific Grove within walking distance of the library, the farmers’ market and the post office. But I’m different. In a world full of terrorism, conspiracy, and insurance forms to fill out I find reassurance in a yard full of critters. Mentally, I haven’t gotten much beyond Jehoshaphat from the Bible who measured his wealth in flocks. It’s that darned obsession again.
“What if I started a donkey dairy milking 50 jennies a day?” I asked myself. A marketing plan formed itself in my head. “It’s perfect! During the week I’ll sell the donkey milk to Hollywood celebrities of a certain age who want to bathe themselves back to youth in donkey milk a la Cleopatra, and on the weekends I’ll open the ranch up for pajaretes. I can nail a cardboard sign to every telephone pole between Watsón and Alum Rock:  Amigos! Compas! Michoacanos! Pajaretes de burra en el Valle de Pajaro. Puros! Autenticos! Naturales! Que Vengan Todos Para Su Salud!
And then, maybe not. I do want to stay married. Besides, my teetotaling Grandma Anna–  the grandma who kept this ranchito of mine in our family long enough for me to enjoy– she had a saying she was fond of repeating: “The man takes a drink, the drink takes a drink, and then the drink takes the man.”
It might be fun for a morning to have a pajarete or two, but as far as the idea of opening my farm gates to the world and selling healthful drinks every Saturday and Sunday morning goes, like some sort of rural Mexican Jamba Juice, well, that must have been the liquor talking. The only cocktails around here will have to be hanging off the ass end of our roosters.
copyright 2010 Andy Griffin

Hi Everybody: What can I say? It’s been a difficult and busy year and it hasn’t been easy to find the time to write, but life is smoothing out a bit and Julia and I are looking forward to getting our Ladybug Letter out on a regular basis again. The summer was unusually cool- until it became unusually hot- and summer crops were later, lighter, and less successful than I’d hoped, but, looking on the bright side, we were able to get a series of late fall and winter crops in on time and they look beautiful. We are planning a series of “Ladybug Truck Farm deliveries” this fall and winter so this essay about truck farming that I wrote this summer seemed an appropriate story to kick off our renewed effort at the Ladybug Letter. Thanks, Andy 
Truck Farm
The office at Organic Matters was scuffed and drab. Dorothy managed the company. She had a caustic wit she kept her attitude tamped down in an effort at professional courtesy. Russell was slouching against the counter. He drove the bobtail delivery truck for OM. Russell had that rock band roadie look; black Jack Daniels T shirt, pony tail, mirrored shades, blurry tattoos and a cigarette. He’d gotten the job through a government program that subsidized employers who were willing to take a chance and hire people who were on parole, but lately Russell had been in a series of confrontations with OM’s customers. Organic Matters distributed fresh organic produce to a string of natural food stores and juice bars from Monterey to San Francisco, little hippie joints that smelled of incense like McDharma’s, Sunflower Natural, and Community Foods. I worked in the refrigerated warehouse as a forklift driver. Dorothy had kept her license to drive big rigs current, but she was in no mood to get back behind the wheel. It was time for a serious talk with Russell.
“So what I’m hearing you say, Russ, is that you don’t really like driving.”
“Wrong again, honey,” Russell replied. “I love driving— I just hate to stop!”
“That’s sad,” said Dorothy, “because the ‘stops’ are what produce delivery is all about.”
So I got a battlefield promotion that afternoon out of the cold box and up into the cab. I could sympathize with Russell’s attitude though. When I’d first gone to work on farms I’d been attracted to the notion of being out in a field, far from any peering, poking supervisors. A life in the dirt with the wind and the weeds seemed like an even trade for “freedom.”
But farmers have to make money just like anybody else. I was legal and I didn’t have any DUIs, so it was inevitable that I’d end up driving the farmers’ delivery trucks. I was fine with that at first. Driving has its own romance. I liked the idea of rolling across the green San Joaquin past corn fields and alfalfa, watching the dairy cows in their pastures give way to range cattle, seeing the oak trees fade into pine forests, then revving up the engine to crest the Sierras before gearing down for the long descent into Nevada and the Great Basin, freewheeling with all the wild west out ahead of me and the boss no more than a speck in the rear view mirror.
In the early eighties I worked five years at Star Route Farm in Bolinas, and I drove the produce truck down Highway One to San Francisco. But the coast highway is all curves and cliffs and majestic ocean vistas, so I needed to concentrate on the white lines to avoid ending up in the drink. And then there was driving in the City; getting dogged by meter maids, dodging taxis and bike messengers, breathing bus exhaust. One day there was a traffic accident half a block ahead of me on Stockton Street and I had to back the truck down hill through Chinatown while the crowds swarmed around me. The truck was a manual transmission that you needed to double clutch– not an easy truck to drive in downtown traffic! Every time I let out the clutch and slipped into reverse somebody would step behind me and I’d have to stop. Eventually a cop helped me by swatting pedestrians out of my way, but by the time I rolled backwards into Columbus Avenue my right leg was so stressed it was as stiff as rebar. I double parked in front a brew pub, switched on the flashers as if I was making a delivery, and limped inside for a beer.
“What am I doing here?” I asked myself. “I got into farming because I wanted to be in a field with the birds and the bees and now I’m running with the busses in the shadow of the Transamerica Pyramid?”
Stops! I was making stops. But I didn’t want “stop,” so I quit.
I worked on other farms down in Santa Barbara County, Monterey County and in Santa Cruz County. At every farm I ended up making stops. It slowly sank into my skull that if the stops stop, the farm stops.
The seventies, eighties and nineties were interesting years to be in organic farming. At first, little organic farms could sell anything they grew to the little organic food stores. Then the farms grew and multiplied, and the stores grew and multiplied. There were more stops. Then the bigger stores started to gobble up the smaller stores. When I was working at Organic Matters in the late 80s the bigger produce distributors began gobbling up the smaller ones. I got back into farming as a partner with another farmer. Then the littlest farms began to fail and the biggest farms began to gobble up the medium farms. Then the biggest chains began to gobble up the smaller chains which meant even bigger sales for the huge farms but even fewer stops for the little farms. The buying public benefited, I guess; there was a general trend towards more access to organic food for more consumers.
I was a partner at Riverside Farms in the Pajaro Valley in 1997 when we sold out to the company that became Natural Selections, America’s largest organic grower/packer/shipper. I wonder now if the Darwinian tone to their name was intentional, but I was happy to sign a non-competition agreement and Julia and I got enough money to start our own little farm. Julia and I didn’t even want to “compete” with Natural Selections. We farmed using a new business model; community supported agriculture, CSA, where a group of people support a farm and the farm supports the people.
I was thinking about all this the other day because my CSA route driver had asked for the day off and I was covering his route through San Francisco. I rolled into the City on 19th and down the foggy streets of the Sunset, through Golden Gate Park into the outer Richmond, then the Inner Richmond and up into the Haight , geared down for Masonic and over the hill into the sunny Castro with the rainbow flags flapping in the breeze, and all along I had stops, lots of stops; on to Soma, the Mission, Noe Valley, Glen Park. Every stop made me feel good. I know what I’m doing here now and I can remember all the other farmers who gave up or went broke. I want to stay in field on my farm with the birds and the bees and the wind and the weeds and I’ve learned that the City is the other half of my life’s equation. I’m grateful for all the people who’ve chosen to support my farm, especially the people who lend us their homes and businesses so that we can make our stops. Freewheeling across Nevada is a fantasy, but I’ll stick with the stop and go of small-scale vegetable farming; they don’t call small farms like mine “truck farms” for nothing.
Copyright 2010 Andy Griffin
Ladybug Truck Farm Deliveries This week = Thursday 10/21 from 4-6pm at Frances with just tomatoes: dry farmed early girls and romas… and Menlo Park that same day… and Pacific Grove on Wednesday 10/20.  All by pre-order.  If you’re interested in these and or future deliveries of bulk vegetables and fruits and mixed vegetable boxes, please make sure you’re signed up for your geographical area:

SF sign up      ||      Peninsula/Palo Alto Sign up     ||     Santa Cruz/Monterey Sign up

Andy is again writing every other week. (We are all glad he’s ‘back’!) We plan to continue to update this blog with the same articles that go out via email. There may be more announcement type things in the email version… but mostly it will be the same content. -Julia

I’ve got a glass bowl in my cupboard with a handful of obsidian arrow points I’ve found over the years on the different farms I’ve worked on. No surprise there; the native Californians who made the Central Coast their home before the Spanish invasion chose to make their villages on sunny, well-drained and well-watered flats of ground that late arriving farmers valued too. The farm I worked on in Bolinas in Marin County was a vast midden with charcoal-black soil from the centuries of cook fire. We’d plow the field and the soil would sparkle from all the chips of abalone shells that had been smashed open by the Miwok to make dinner. When we were on our hands and knees harvesting lettuce we’d see splinters of baked deer bones left behind from the people breaking them open to suck out the marrow. One day I cut a lettuce and my knife stuck into the soil. When I went to clean the mud off the tip, I found a small, perfectly formed arrow head for shooting birds stuck to my blade.
Here on my home farm in Watsonville I’ve got a number of stone pestles we’ve uncovered in our farming activities. The pestles are invariably chipped and broken by the rototillers but I keep them anyway. Sometime the people who work for me smile at my antics. “Why keep an old, broken mano,” they ask, “when you can buy a new molcajete y mano at La Princesa Market?” On the one hand, they’re right; these Ohlone acorn pestles are just old stones. But this area’s past means something to me, maybe especially because my family hasn’t been here (or anywhere) for long.
We came here at the end of the 19th Century; my Grandma’s family from Denmark and my Great Grandfather’s family from Farmersville down in the San Joaquin Valley— one hundred years and change. That makes me an “old-timer” in a certain sense maybe, compared to the people who’ve just moved here, but I don’t feel like we’re well rooted. I’d like us to be. I’ve tried to get my two children to the tops of all the mountains in the area like Fremont ’s Peak, Jack’s Peak, and Mount Carmel so that they can see the whole area from above and recognize all the landmarks. I quiz my kids when we’re driving. “What river did we just cross?” I’ll ask. “What valley are we in?” Graydon and Lena get bored with my game, but I don’t care. They’ll probably have to move away someday to find work, and I want them to have a feel for what they’re moving away from.
I was thinking about what it means to be rooted to a place- and to be uprooted- the other day after Jose showed me some photos from his family’s farm in Oaxaca . Jose has worked with me since 1995, first on Riverside Farms where I was one of four partners, then at Happy Boy Farms where I was half of the partnership, and finally here at Mariquita Farm, so he and I go way back. I hear Jose talking with his brother about going home to Oaxaca to visit their parents, but they haven’t been back in twelve years. I’ll miss them when they go. I depend on them a lot. I hear people talk about farm labor as though it’s “unskilled,” but it’s not. Jose’s family farms cacao, just like they have “since God,” but just because I don’t grow chocolate doesn’t mean Jose didn’t come to without an invaluable skill set. There are plenty of simple tasks on a farm, for sure, but there are also many jobs that require an eye, an understanding, an attitude, and a touch that can only come from long experience.
The photos from the family farm that Jose shared with me were jarring. His father wrote to say he’d been walking around on their land after a heavy rainstorm and he found a vent in a low hill that was gushing out muddy water. Mixed in with the mud were lots of ceramic pot shards. He suspected there might be a cave in the hill, so when the water went down he dug around. One of Jose’s brothers took pictures of what their father found and sent them via email. Jose was excited. I get excited finding an arrowhead that someone else’s ancestors chipped from obsidian, so just imagine how it must feel to find statuary carved by your own ancestors. It makes me think that when it comes to being grounded in our region, after a couple of hundred years in California, we farmers are only scratching the surface. How do you think that we modern Californians will choose to farm or live if we put down deep roots? What would California be like once we were here long enough to move past our contemporary struggle with tolerating our diversity and developed a deep running, collective identification with this land that sustains us?
copyright 2009 Andy Griffin
Photo Credits: the two of statues from Oaxaca were taken by Jose’s father at their cacao ranch in Oaxaca and emailed to us; the photo of the molcajete and tomatillos was taken by Andy Griffin.
all 4 photos from Jose’s ranch in Oaxaca
Ladybug Truck Deliveries: I may do a few of these during the winter: carrots, apples, oranges/citrus, whatever we have for you in bulk, or what our fruit-growing friends might have! Sign up for occasional notices about these deliveries.  (the sign ups are to the left on that page)
** What happened in October!? it’s true: we’ve been busy farming bees and just didn’t post anything in October. Sorry about that! We’ll try to get back on our every-other week schedule this winter. Thanks for your patience.

Autumn isn’t far off now. It’s too dark anymore at 6AM for us to harvest so we’re now starting the work day at 6:30. The sun is bright and hot on our backs at mid-day, but the shade under the trees along the creek at the edge of the field is getting deeper and cooler. Evening arrives earlier than it did a month ago, and even with the smoggy glow from Silicon Valley dulling the brilliance of the night sky we’ll soon be able to see Capella rising just after dark.
Capella means “little female goat” in Latin, but don’t look to the sky for a goat jumping over the moon. Capella is a giant star, relatively close to earth as stars go. To scientists, the Goat star is alpha Aurigae, a spectral type G 8 III 0.1 magnitude, binary star that lies 42 light years away in space. This astronomical data sounded like Greek to me until I read what the Greeks really thought.
The ancient Greeks identified Capella as the she-goat Amalthea who suckled the infant Zeus. While he was playing rough house with his goatish wet nurse the rowdy young god broke one of Amalthea’s horns by mistake. Later, as a more mature god, Zeus imbued this broken horn with the power of dispensing copious quantities of food and drink to all who desired it. Poor, wounded Amalthea’s horn became the Cornucopia, or the horn of plenty.
Over time this mythic image of a broken goat’s horn bleeding forth nature’s bounty was appropriated by artists who wished to suggest overflowing abundance. Advertisers followed in the wake of art and the horn of plenty made its appearance in countless ads and logos. Illustrators working for advertising agencies reworked the original bloody goat horn into a charming but less visceral horn-shaped wicker basket. No mystery there; Madison Avenue invites us to wallow in consumption; there’s not much money to be made stimulating consumers to meditate on the capricious nature of abundance.
The identification of overflowing bounty with a goat’s horn didn’t seem as odd to the ancients as it may to us now. At one time people measured their wealth in goats. Second Chronicles 17:11 tells the story of Jehoshaphat, the king of Judah. “Some of the Philistines brought Jehoshaphat presents, and silver for tribute; Arabians brought him flocks, seven thousand, seven hundred rams and seven thousand, seven hundred goats. And Jehoshaphat waxed great exceedingly and he built in Judah castles…” As the Goat star made its seasonal ascent into the evening sky the ancient farmers of the Fertile Crescent were reminded that both the autumnal equinox and the bounty of the fall harvest were drawing near.
Scientists look at Capella through a telescope and describe two distant balls of constantly exploding gas locked in a gravitational Fall Renewal Time tango. The Goat star’s ritual fall rising is dismissed as an optical illusion. Earth is not the center of the universe. We spin on an axis and in due course we revolve again to witness Capella over our northern horizon at dusk. The fact that this cyclic event occurs as our seasons slip from summer into fall is a mere coincidence having nothing to do with goats. Science leaves the nanny goat, Amalthea, with no role to play at all in astronomy and the myth of her broken horn is a children’s story.
But even when science explains everything, it means nothing. Explanation is about facts, and meaning is about us; we are self-centered and significance revolves around our needs. Naming a spectral type G 8 III 0.1 magnitude, binary star after a goat tells us nothing to us about stars but the myth of Capella can be appreciated for the faint light it casts on the meaning of abundance. Capella, the name, is cognate with the Latin noun capra, meaning goat. Mother Nature is “capricious” in the purest sense of the word, which originally meant “to behave like a goat.” The harvest does not come spilling out of a horn-shaped wicker basket horn; that is truly a childish attitude. There is blood to pay. We work hard for everything we eat, whether we labor in actual fields of vegetables, grains and fruit, or slaughter and butcher livestock or work in more metaphorical “fields of endeavor.” Sometimes a rich harvest is a just reward for all our labors. Other times, despite our best efforts, abundance bounds away from us like a wild goat gone to hide from the slaughter in thick brush.
This year, as I look around our two small farms, I see tomatoes and peppers hanging red and gold on the vines, and rows of carrots, strawberries and lettuces. Our coolers are stuffed with potatoes, our barns are stacked high with onions, and our fields are filled with squash and pumpkins turning sweet in the heat of late summer. When I get out of bed in the middle of the night to check on a bleating sheep or quiet a barking dog I see a faint sparkle getting brighter, low in the north eastern sky; Capella is rising. Alpha Aurigae shines back down at me unblinking. I rub my eyes and I think of the slit pupils of Amalthea’s weird, golden, goat eyes; alert, beautiful, inscrutable and uncanny.
copyright 2009 Andy Griffin
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This Saturday  I’ll be in San Francisco with one of our ‘Too Many Tomatoes‘ Events: all by pre order: email me to let me know what you’d like. I’ll be on Folsom at one of our Two Small Farms pick up sites. When you make an order, I’ll send you the address. 10am-12 noon. San Marzano Tomatoes, Early Girl Tomatoes, BeefSteaks, Mixed Sweet Peppers for roasting and freezing, Spicy Chiles for making salsa etc, and of course Pimiento de Padron peppers!
brand new San Marzano Tomato Canning Photo Essay! 1 box = 9.5 quarts in my house…
2 more Tomato Upick Days planned: Thursday 9/24 & Saturday 9/26: both in Hollister at our farm, both from 9am to1pm.  All Tomatoes 50 cents/pound. See you there!  (open to all)
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Ladybug Truck Farm Buying Club (open to all)
Vegetable Recipes A-Z
Two Small Farms CSA
Food Bloggers We Know

At dawn the air is cool and still at the farm. We haven’t had rain for several months here on Mariquita Farm. The weather has been hot, so everywhere we haven’t irrigated the ground is dry. Where we have irrigated the mud bakes and cracks in the heat so that the silt clay soil curls up like pot shards. On the dirt road that divides the field into blocks for easy management, the daily traffic of trucks and tractors has pulverized the soil to a dust finer than flour. Before the sun warms the air and stirs it into breezes, this blanket of dust on the road can be read for animal tracks like a logbook that marks the night time visitors. Take a walk with me around the farm and let’s see who visited last night.
Those big footprints belong to Captain, my landlord’s dog. See how the tracks are leading straight into the tall hemlock weeds? That’s Pacheco Creek back there behind the brush. Captain is a Black Labrador and he can’t stay out of the water, so maybe he was heading off to take a midnight dip in the pool. Or maybe he heard a coyote and he was going to investigate. One of the nice things about having a creek so close to the field is that the riparian jungle of Carrizo canes, sycamores, nettles, and coyote brush makes good cover for a lot of wildlife. Squirrels and rabbits could become a problem if they were allowed to multiply without limit, but any coyotes in the neighborhood will help keep the population under control.
Look over there at that plume of dust rising up behind the pickup truck that Jose is driving; it’s like a smoke signal telling of loss. Dust in the air means soil is being lost from the earth and clarity is being lost from the sky. On our farm we try to minimize wind erosion by sowing every acre we don’t plant out in vegetables with a cover crop. All this stuff over here that looks like dead weeds is actually last spring’s fava bean straw we’ve left standing as a ground cover and for bird and insect habitat. I don’t use any pesticides, so I count on the birds and on beneficial insects to keep the pest insects under control, and if I don’t give them a place to harbor when we’re turning over a piece of ground with the tractor I’ll lose them all. You know those huge monoculture farms you drive past? They have to spray insecticide, because they don’t have any birds left to keep the bugs down, so life is out of balance, and when they plow their fields they kill all the beneficial insects that moved in. It’s sad. Look here; even bugs leave tracks in the dust. See these tiny little marks all in a row? These are beetle tracks.
Here we are in the corn patch. Pheasants love to take cover in the corn. Those rusty squawks you hear scratching the early morning calm are the pheasants talking to each other in their leafy hideout. These big chicken-like footprints you see crossing the dusty road are the tracks pheasants left when they slipped into the tomato patch at dusk to peck for dinner. Yesterday I found some big, three toed tracks that told me turkeys had wandered through here. I’m always amazed that the turkeys can survive in the wild at all, being as how they’re so big and tasty, but they’re seem to be more of them every year. They don’t do any real damage to the farm, and they are very beautiful.
These little scuffs in the dust are jack rabbit prints, and you can tell by how far apart they are if the hare was running fast or not. Poor Captain tries, but he never even comes close to catching the jack rabbits. We see the jacks every day and Captain takes off after them in a big lather, but as soon as he gets close enough to get his hopes up, the jack just slips into a higher gear and leaves him in the dust.
Yesterday a rubber gasket on our three inch aluminum irrigation pipe blew out and water puddle up before Rogelio was able to turn off the pump. You can see here where last night a raccoon took advantage of the pool to take a drink and maybe wash the dust off some morsel it found where the crew takes its lunch. Those prints that look like little human hands are the raccoon’s front paws, the longer paw prints were left by its back feet. Raccoons are cute but they are fierce like little bears. The smaller rat- like paw prints you see in the road are possum tracks.
Quail like to make their nests in the weeds here along the back of the field. Big families of quail come down off the levee in the evening and cross the road to peck for ants and seeds in the field. These tiny, confused, chicken-like prints were left by them. The inch wide trails worn smooth and straight through the dust are ant roads. Ant armies invade the field too to forage for seeds. Sometimes ants arrive bearing aphids which they put to pasture on our crop plants so that they can milk them for the honey dew they secrete. Where ant trails and quail tracks cross the ants lose. But the karma of biology evens the score. If you look carefully over here you will see weasel tracks.
I saw a little reddish weasel with a spotted tail just a minute ago out of the corner of my eye making a rippling dash from the bell peppers to the tomatoes. Weasel’s bodies are so long and their legs so short they have to comically arch their backs to run. Weasels aren’t funny to the quail; they eat the little birds like popcorn and rob their nests of their little speckled eggs. In the end weasels die too, and then the ants will hollow out their bodies if some thing else doesn’t get to them first.
Did you feel that warm breath of breeze puffing up just now? It’s only nine AM. By one in the afternoon this breeze will be a wind. Already the animal tracks are being sifted away. The animals are all safely tucked away in their nests waiting for the cool of the evening. The day will get a lot hotter as the sun climbs higher. Only we humans are crazy enough to work under the full sun and stir up the dust. When evening comes and we’re long gone home to our dinners and families, all the creatures will emerge again and sniff at our tracks. They’ll want to see who visited their field this hot day and discover what we’ve left behind.
copyright 2009 Andy Griffin
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August 14th Andy and I will be at the Hayes St. Grill 30th Summer celebration at their Tomato Dinner! Join us!
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Ladybug Buying Club update  For the convenience of those who want bulk quantities of vegetables and herbs at wholesale prices so they may can, pickle, juice, dry, freeze or otherwise enjoy the summer harvest,  we are planning a series of special deliveries starting next week. The San Marzano tomatoes are still a little ways off, but the Early Girl tomatoes have started, as have the Beefsteak toms and the Cherokee purples, plus we’ll have Padron peppers, tiny Hungarian wax peppers for pickles, limited quantities of small pickling cukes, and Elderberries for pies. If this service looks interesting to you, please sign up to be included on the list of people to get a special email alert. For now we plan to try using different CSA pick up site locations (with the hosts permission, of course!) stay tuned, and thanks for your interest! We hope to start next week…

to sign up:       San Francisco     ||     Peninsula/San Jose/Los Gatos/Sunnyvale      ||      Monterey Bay Area