Good Clean Dirt

My daughter, Magdalena, as a child in the greenhouse. She’s 26 now.

  My theory on child raising was pretty simple- just throw them in the tub at the end of the day and call it good. My kids grew up on the farm, so they were surrounded by dirt. When they were little their mother, my late wife, Julia, was dealing with a first bout with breast cancer, so I had them with me a lot in the field when she was off at the hospital getting treatments or at home recuperating. I’d often be working with the crew for most of the day so the children would be more or less unsupervised, but we did have some rules: Stay out of the poison oak. Don’t drink from puddles.  Don’t play with harvest knives or propane weed burners. No turning on the tractor. Don’t pick up anything dead. No throwing rocks, sticks, dirt clods, tomatoes or zucchinis at each other. Always walk down the rows in the wheel track, not on the raised bed where the crop plants are. And Don’t leave your clothes in the field. I know it seems like a pretty strict  regimen, but they survived, and there weren’t too many problems. Until we had a tomato U-Pick on the farm and my son ended up mingling with the visiting children. Then I ended up facing down a posse of really unglued mothers. More on that in a minute….

Samson, the apricot blond farm cat, supervising the lavender harvest and remaining chill.

People go to U-Picks for a lot of different reasons. Some people see a farm U-Pick as an opportunity for bonding with each other. When I worked at Star Route Farm in Bolinas in the early ’80s we had a pumpkin patch in what we called the “Lagoon Field,” alongside the Olema-Bolinas Road and we did a U-Pick. Two separate and unrelated fathers showed up at the same time and parked by the side of the road. Somehow, in that very large field with thousands of available pumpkins in every shape and size, their two boys ended up needing- REALLY NEEDING!- the exact same pumpkin. Neither child could be convinced to select another, different, but equally charming pumpkin to take home and carve. Long story short, as the autumn sun got low in the sky giving Mt Tamalpais a golden glow, and as waterfowl circled overhead and came in to land in the placid waters of the Bolinas Lagoon, two fathers could be seen beating the stuffing out of each other by the side of the highway. Over a pumpkin. The cute hippie girl with a background in retail who’d been hired to oversee the U-Pick was horrified. Maybe we should have hired a bouncer. Luckily, fights between customers were rare. U-Pick is actually a very nice way to sell pumpkins, since there’s always a kid who wants the biggest pumpkin, another kid who wants the smallest one, and somebody who feels sorry for the Charlie Brown pumpkin that the other kids overlooked.

We did a potato U-Pick on our farm once. Some people come to a U-Pick so that they can “get their hands in the soil,” “get close to the earth” or find some balance from their typical day jobs in the cubicle mines of Silicon Valley. Boy, did those people get their money’s worth. When you encounter a round, close to clean potato in the store display there is little evidence of the “earthy” environment the potato developed in. But when you put your shovel blade in the soil and start digging you turn up all kinds of stuff besides potatoes. Yes, there are plenty of colorful potatoes, so a potato “U-Dig” can be a bit like hunting for Easter Eggs. But there are also the rotted remains of the mother, or seed potato that was planted in the ground by the farmer for the new plant to sprout from. And there are sometimes big, fat, nasty looking potato bugs chewing on the potatoes that are developing. And there are ants, and centipedes, the occasional scorpion, caches of pearly snail eggs, weird worms, unidentified pupae and larval forms of scary insects.  And it is dusty, heavy work. But our potato U-Dig was very successful. I’d taken the precaution of harvesting hundreds of pounds of potatoes before the U-Dig, and we’d washed, sorted, and weighed them out. It was a hot day, and after a half hour of digging all but the most adventurous diggers decided that they’d be happy to buy pre-dug potatoes. I heard the phrase, “I’ll never look at a potato the same way again,” again and again.

Some people go to a U-Pick to pick. We did a number of tomato U-Picks over the years and that’s where I ran afoul of the mothers. Even at age 8 my son, Graydon. had “leadership qualities.” As the visitors picked their way through the tomato patch some of the younger kids got bored and ended up doing a “farm tour” with Graydon, who was very familiar with the layout of the fields. But when nobody was paying attention he took his new friends to what he billed as the “Fun Puddle.” It was a hot summer day but along the edge of the field in a remote corner of the farm there was a large, shallow puddle that had formed where an irrigation pipe had leaked. At first the kids had fun stomping around in the mud with Graydon, but soon he showed them how much more fun it was to actually roll in the puddle. While their parents and older siblings were dutifully harvesting tomatoes, Graydon and his companions joyfully slopped around in the mud as though it were Woodstock ’69 and they were all tripping on acid. The $#iT hit the fan when the moms called it a day and loaded up their harvest and, for the first time in a couple of hours, got a load of what their “leaders of tomorrow” had been up to. “How could you let this happen?” they asked incredulously. But I’d been helping them learn how to pick tomatoes. My attention had strayed. It didn’t help much when I said, “It’s just good, clean dirt. It washes off.” I still feel a debt of gratitude to some Russian mothers from Mountain View. They’d been the most businesslike about picking tomatoes and when it came to their kids they dealt with the situation in a business-like fashion too. They weren’t thrilled with the mud, but they weren’t devastated either. I turned on the ag pump, got the irrigation sprinklers going, and they marched their kids into the spray to clean them up. Even some of the more delicate moms saw the wisdom in this maneuver, and soon everybody was on their way home to the cities and suburbs, tired but alive.

Graydon, the instigator, in the Hollister tomato field.

This Saturday, June 10th through June 23rd our farm will be open to make reservations for a series of dates to participate in a  lavender U-Pick. I predict a successful experience for anyone who chooses to come and visit us. The lavender is planted in raised beds that make up a huge labyrinth. It’s a serene setting. The scent of lavender is calming and healing, and there’a a lot of it, so I don’t expect to see anybody coming to blows the way that can occur when two fathers choose to stand up for their sons’ “rights” to a particular pumpkin. There are creepy crawlies in the soil, the way there always is, but the nature that any visitors experience is likely limited to birds, butterflies, and bees. For their part, the bees will be minding their own “bees-nis,” working hard to collect pollen and nectar for their hive at the top of the hill. The high raised beds of the lavender patch make for relatively easy picking, but we will have some lavender bunches available for people who want extras and there will be some other herbs, citrus from our orchards, edible items and treasures available in the farm store.

This is a great time to see the farm. We are also looking for volunteers to help maintain the labyrinth or those interested in roses that want to admire and help deadhead the plants.  Signup for U-Pick and check the website for all the ways to enjoy the farm. https://www.mariquita.com/features/lavender-u-pick/

The lavender field is our home and we have the well being of our neighbors to consider, so we are doing the U-Picks by reservation. Please don’t bring pets, even if they are in the car. The U-Pick is for Ages 8 and up only. A sun hat is highly recommended, as is a full water bottle. Thank you, and we hope to see you soon!  Andy & Starr

Starr’s grand daughter is a great volunteer and a meticulous weeder.

Check this link if you’re interested in volunteering. https://www.mariquita.com/friends-of-ladybugs-labyrinth/