I Heart Farms

Blog Day 2007: Five from My List

Today is Blog Day 2007 (if you look at the cunning lettering, it renders 31-08, or August 31 as it's known in other regions of the world than Amurrica.)

Participating bloggers are just supposed to recommend five blogs you've maybe never heard of.

Some are food-oriented, and some are not. All are strong writers: the photography is secondary. (But part of the fun, duh, these are blogs!)

Edible Communities: Spreading the Good Word

This picture was taken on October 18, 2003, at Coleman Family Farm in Carpinteria, California. In the lower left corner, you can see the beaming face of Evan Kleiman, who with her small and dedicated crew from Angeli Caffe in Los Angeles, had just prepared the most delightful al fresco dinner for the crowd you see. Across the table, peeking out from the profile of the man in the blue shirt—and unbeknownst to me at the time—is Tracey Ryder, publisher of what was then a small quarterly local newsletter known as Edible Ojai.

Little did I know that six months later, in one of a steady stream of e-mails pertaining to food and farms and beauty like the kind you see here, one of my oldest (as in "long-lived friendships") friends in the world, Maria Nation, would send an e-mail about Edible Ojai and her friends, who published it.

You MUST meet my friends Carole (Topalian) and Tracey (Ryder). They live in Ojai near my sister and are major foodies (Carol is also a professional photog AND they do web designs and corp designs as a living - you have much in common - AND they are cool and wonderful.)  Anyway - they launched what has become a very successful magazine:  Edible Ojai—and here in its 2nd year it was voted one of the best food magazines by Saveur or something.  It was very impressive.  It's all about local people writing about local
food/farms/ideas etc.  Very cool and might give you some ideas on putting Santa Cruz on the map.

Well, of course I was gobsmacked when I saw Carole's photographs, and double gobsmacked to find out that Tracey had attended the dinner I was photographing at the recommendation of a mutual friend of hers and Maria's.

One Answer to Flawed Thinking: "California's Real Water War"

Pictured here: a recent visit to one of Santa Cruz's best places to eat and mingle: Soif Wine Bar & Merchants. I was recently hired to do some photography for their new website—they're in the process of selecting photos now. The wine is a dry moscato, Oppidum, from Italy, and the padrón peppers are from Meder Street Farm, up near UCSC.

I will write more about them another time: it is a wonderful place to go.

This is going to be brief, but Bob handed me the newspaper yesterday, and it contains an answer to the flawed thinking of Mr. Fred Freid (and allegedly, his professors). Mr. Freid wrote:  Our professors in the subjects of Botany and Agriculture have both stated that there is no scientific basis for Organic foods to be healthier than Conventionally grown foods. I took a course on Botany, and will say now that nutrient density is not based on the amount of pesticide sprayed. The words straight from my professors mouth: "The Organic craze is nothing but un-researched, hippy-spread bull****."

In yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle, a long article appeared called "California's Real Water War." It is a series on the urgent issue, and the gist of it is this:

"In 2004 alone, tens of thousands of Central Valley residents received bright orange notices from their public drinking water systems saying their water was not safe to drink and exceeded legal contaminant levels. Many Central Valley residents drive 30 to 50 miles each week just to buy bottled water, effectively doubling the price for this basic need.

"More than 90 percent of Central Valley communities depend on water stored underground for their drinking water. Unfortunately, years of intensive farming with uncontrolled chemical use has heavily poisoned that source. Recent groundwater sampling in Tulare County found that 3 out of 4 homes with private wells have contaminated water that is unsafe to drink."

Paging CASFS, Paging CASFS: Come In, Do You Read Me?

The man pictured here is well known to a great many of my friends, and I am reluctant to name him, as he doesn't seem to seek the limelight. I think he'd rather you look at the things he grows than at him, and I understand that.

But because of his 30-year dedication to teaching hundreds and hundreds of people how to farm sustainably up on the UCSC farm, I immediately thought of Orin Martin when I received the following series of communications from one Fred Freid in Missouri. I would like to be respectful of Mr. Freid, but my golly, I'm having to bite my tongue right now.

I am just going to post Fred's comments to a separate page, and beg Orin and anyone involved in sustainable farming—people who give their very lives to DO THE RIGHT THING—to address Fred's beliefs.

I feel so deeply that the farmers I know are the true heroes on this planet, because they do REAL work—backbreaking work, sweating work, dawn-to-dark (not dusk) work—and nobody I know is gettin' rich from it.

Soil Amendments, Avoiding Scams, and Something in Hawai'i

The most recent comment on my weblog is from David, who asks, "What did you amend the soil with?"

This is straight from Linda Butler, whose plants up at Lindencroft Farm resemble ornament-heavy Christmas trees.

Hi Tana,

Here is a list of soil amendments I use.
• Greensand: a product of the sea, supplies trace minerals and boosts microbial activity for long term release of nutrients, potassium source (K)
• Oyster shell powder: calcium source
• Blood meal: nitrogen source
• Rock phosphate

For 100 square feet, apply 2.5 pounds of blood meal, 4 pounds of rock phosphate, 3 pounds of green sand, and 5 pounds of oyster shell powder.

This I use when I work the soil for the first time, when I make a new bed and fill it up. I dig this all in the first foot. Then just before I plant in the new soil I add about one pound each of fish meal and kelp meal and work it into the top six inches. When I harvest and then get ready for all subsequent plantings or sowings I add generous amounts of compost and a little more fish and kelp meal. If I'm sowing carrot seeds I work some worm castings in also. All the leafy vegetables that we harvest for their leaves like broccoli, kale, chard, spinach, lettuce, and brussels sprouts, I give a fish and kelp about once a month in the form of a dilute emulsion. I just dump about a half a gallon of each around the base of the plants for the big ones. The small ones like spinach, chard, kale, and lettuces get a foliar feeding of the same fish and kelp emulsion.

A Hill of Beans: Lots of Shout-Outs to Good Things

These beautiful beans were at the weekend farmstand just north of Año Nuevo on Highway One: grown at either Pie Ranch or Blue House Farm—both partnered at the farmstand we visited last Sunday. I intend a longer piece on each, but cannot do them justice this evening.

You traveling SF Bay area foodies: if you are going as far as Swanton Berry Farm, then you need to make room on your schedule for the rustic and beautiful farmstand, called the Roadside Barn, at 2080 Cabrillo Hwy, Pescadero CA 94060. If you hit Año Nuevo, going south, you've gone too far. Mind you, they don't open until noon on the weekends, so plan accordingly. And get there early: the pies are a dream.

• • • • • • • • • • •

The lovely Kirsten Roehler, who was farming with Jasmine Roohani at Everett Family Farm a couple of years ago when I met them, has moved on, but is still quite active in the work of promoting sustainable agriculture. And sustainable, additionally, in terms of human life.

She recently sent me a link to an article by Matthew McCue, at Farms Not Arms. McCue is an Iraq war vet who is now teaching farming in Niger, Africa. Kirsten interviewed him for his position in the Peace Corps—a very moving piece. He writes:

I would still go to sleep afraid of mortars but the joy of the present and anticipation of the next harvest made the past seem to loosen its grip on my life. I learned more from six months on a college farm in Santa Cruz than four years in the Military. I escaped the army without a scratch -- but before learning to care for life I was caught in a slow death with nothing to watch but my own mortality and the horrifying news.

I feel like the luckiest person alive because as I work in my field in west Africa my body becomes stronger and I am no longer an observer of the quiet beauty, I am a caretaker. Having been very effectively conditioned to kill and accept death, taking care of plants has had a kind of opposite effect on my mind, heart, and soul.

• • • • • • • • • • •

A Question for My Readers about Organic Dairy

Pictured here, one of the sows out at Deep Roots Ranch, nursing a co-mingled litter of piglets, some of whom are hers and others, not. These are probably some of the piglets that Pim Techamuanvivit saw born when she visited a few weeks ago, and described in detail: "the piglets were cute and pink and spotted and got big floppy ears, but before all that they were wet and mucous-y and bloody and stuff." Heh.

Please put that image out of your mind when you consider the question a reader asked me. I didn't really feel qualified to answer, but here is what Marjorie Taylor asked me my thoughts on organic dairy.

UCSC's Apprentices: Scattering Seeds of Good

A simple sweater, a simple peach, a simple stone wall in the Chadwick Garden at the University of Santa Cruz, where for forty years, thirty people in each class spend six simple months of their lives, coming to know the land, and learning how to ask the land the right questions. Sound simple?

It's deep.

As mentioned previously, I spent part of the weekend at UCSC at the end of July: it was the 40th anniversary and reunion of the program, commonly known as the UCSC Farm and Garden, and formally and bureaucratically called "CASFS" (pronounced cass-fus).

The bulk of my participation was sitting in the audience of a symposium, largely comprised of graduate apprentices, who have taken the knowledge they received and who've gone on to create new programs in the world.

It's National Farmers Market Week

In honor of the occasion, nothing here today but some pictures of my local farmers markets. What's showing up at yours?

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: "Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it." — Russell Baker

Thanks for visiting!

Taking the Veil

Pictured here: cornfields looking over the Pacific Ocean, taken last August at the UCSC Farm and Garden.

Since last weekend's celebration and symposium up at UCSC, I've had the opportunity to talk to a whole lot of the farmers I know who graduated from the apprenticeship program there. I had run into Joe Schirmer, of Dirty Girl Produce, who attended the program in the Nineties, at last week's Sunday market. He was wistful that he'd missed the proceedings, but when you have to get up well before dawn to get to the Saturday farmers market in San Francisco, well, staying up late on either Friday or Saturday's not going to happen.

But I weighed it out to him: I had had only one day, and Joe had had the blessing, the luxury, the privilege, of living in the program, at what is arguably one of the most beautiful farms in the world, and studying under people who have intense commitment to what is REAL and MEANINGFUL, and who are doing what is really, if there is such a thing, God's Work.

When I say "real and meaningful," I mean they wake up early and get out of bed, and go move the earth and their bodies and grow food that feeds people. Food that pleases people. They tell the truth, they're real, and they are not a bunch of puff-ball fame-seeking egos. The work, as I have been witnessing from my perch since 1999, is creative in the most essential meaning of the word, and the community is collaborative in the most fluid sense of the word.

I'll write more about one individual in particular involved in the program, but that will wait.

At yesterday's market, I was sharing my joy with Kurt Christensen, of Oso Velloso Farm, who graduated from the program back in the Eighties. Now Kurt's not only a farmer, he's a talented landscape designer, and everything that pours from his abundant well of creativity is aesthetically beautiful and nourishing on some level. I reiterated what I've said many times in the last week: "It was like being at church, or how church should feel."