Virtual Farm Tour

by Julie Cummins

Visiting farms is like a pilgrimage for me. I know that sounds over dramatic, but that's really how it feels. I don't attend any regular religious services, and the part of my life that feels most like daily worship is eating delicious, simple, fresh food. Following my food back to its source is as close as I'm ever going to get to traveling to the holy land. I'm not going to go so far as to call farmers messiahs--they're just regular people, as quirky and flawed as the next. But I do have a tremendous respect for the hard work they do in the name of feeding the rest of us.
 
Last month I visited several local farms and I wanted to share a little photo tour. This is Dirty Girl Produce, just outside of downtown Santa Cruz, CA.

The first thing that struck me about this farm is how close it is to the city. As one who always wants the best of both worlds and has considered starting a farm, I thought this would be an ideal place to farm and still be able to ride your bike to the movies or a cafe.

What Dirty Girl is known for is its dry farmed Early Girl tomatoes. Grower Joe Schirmer's trick is to get them in the ground at just the right time--when the soil is dry enough to work, but still plump with winter rains. By the time the dry season is in full swing, the roots have stretched out and tapped into the moisture deep beneath the surface. The plants are watered once when they are set out, but after that, they rely just on what's in the soil. Dry-farmed tomato plants look nothing like my pampered garden ones. They look scrawny and thirsty. In fact, they only yield 1/3 of the harvest that an irrigated tomato produces. But the shortage of water produces a dense fruit that's all flavor.

Dirty Girl also has really yummy strawberries and beans (both are irrigated). This photo shows strawberries on the right and beans on the left (I think they're Yellow Wax).

The next stop on the tour was Four Sisters Farm. This farm is operated by Nancy and Robin Gammons, with help over the years from their four daughters, for whom the farm was named. This is a sweet little postage stamp of a farm carved into a hilly patch of Aromas, in the mountains between Watsonville and Hollister. If you sneezed while you were driving by, you wouldn't notice a farm. Four Sisters grows wonderful organic greens, flowers, kiwis, and avocados. This is their field of greens, and to the right is some kale that caught my eye.

The soil here is very sandy. I reached down and took a handful, and it looked and felt like the stuff at the beach. But through soil amendment and ecological farming practices, Robin and Nancy have built up its topsoil from just a few inches when they started to about two feet!

Here is a picture of their kiwis. They grow on a trellised vine with large, dark green roundish leaves. California kiwifruit are available roughly October through April, while fruit from New Zealand and Chile is imported on an opposite schedule. I am always grateful for kiwi in the dead of winter, when our local fruit choices are limited. As Robin and Nancy move toward retirement, they are going to grow more kiwis--a low maintenance crop--and fewer labor-intensive greens.

Finally, we visited Heirloom Organic Gardens in Hollister. This farm was much bigger than the first two, but still small as farms go (almost 100 acres here, plus another field). Farmer Grant Brians has his hands full, even with the help of a hardworking crew. When we visited, the heat was suffocating and I came away with about 20 mosquito bites!

Heirloom grows a little of everything. As you can see in the picture, this is a big farm with long rows, but it's not like the surrounding monocropped fields. Each row is filled with something different, from carrots to greens to potatoes.

This purplish plant to the left is orach, one of the unusual greens Grant grows. Orach is an old European kitchen garden vegetable. It's in the same botanical family as spinach, beets, and chard. Its leaves are stunning in a salad, especially with vibrant green (E.coli free) spinach. It's also great cooked. The leaves don't lose that dark burgundy hue, but they do impart their color into the entire dish. My orach scramble was delicious, but the pink eggs were a little disconcerting!

Today someone asked me what I thought of the spinach issue. Sensing that she was fishing for the short answer, I said that I didn't think we would have a rampant E. coli outbreak if we knew where our food came from and if it were grown locally on a small scale. I see no reason not to buy spinach at the farmers' market. This recent incident has sadly made us afraid of our food. For me, the antidote to fear of my food is meeting the farmer face to face and, when I can, setting foot and laying my eyes on her land.

Julie Cummins lives in Oakland, CA and is Director of Education for CUESA, the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture.

 

Comments

[Tea]

Thanks for this post, Julie. It is so fun to get a sense of the farms and farmers from whom we get our produce--I love the stories and pictures!