I Heart Farms

Happy Halloween!

Logan, dressed as a Storm Drooper (his pronunciation), and I paid a long overdue visit to Jeff and Lori Fiorovich at Crystal Bay Farm today. The whole drive from Highway One was cloaked with thick fog, which only added to the spooky-ooky vibe. Pictured above is our greeting committee: I think it's just brilliant. Crystal Bay Farm gets my vote for the Best Pumpkin Patch I Have Ever Seen.

The farmstand and pumpkin patch were abandoned: the fog was cold, and Logan, shivering. We walked through the fog, past the sunflower "maze", past chickens grazing in empty strawberry fields (I bumped up the contrast here, but they really were enshrouded in fog, just fifteen feet away), past the horse and goats, to Jeff and Lori's house, where my "hallooooo" produced one barking dog, and then two. And then two humans, and a sleek black kitty.

Oh, it was just great to see them again. It's been too long, and I just wanted to catch them on what amounts to their Christmas every year. They barely leave the land for the whole month of October, and by Halloween, they are exhausted, probably thinking that a career in the military would be easy after what they endure every autumn.

I wish I could describe every single thing I saw—like these beautiful Musquée de Provence, also called "Fairytale" pumpkins. Their coppery color deepens through the autumn, and they keep well. I will likely be cooking the one Jeff and Lori sent me home with. It's a beauty.

I think you can tell that they live with the kind of artistry around them that makes people pine for a rural life, pine for a simple place that gives children and other people a chance to regard the world with new eyes, and feel like we get an itch scratched just by spending time in their world.

Thanks, Jeff and Lori. We love you.

XOX,
Nana and Logan

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: "We used to go around tipping outhouses over, or turning over corn shocks on Halloween. Anything to be mean." —Loretta Lynn

Outhouses!

Thanks for visiting!

P.S. One more. Frank the Devil Dog.

Rock & Roll Nature

I don't have a photograph of the lightning that struck in my backyard yesterday during one of our incredibly rare thunderstorms on the California coast. It cracked the air in two around my house. Habitually counting, as I've done since Mrs. Pylant's third grade class, to determine how far away the lightning hit (1/5 is the ratio: one second for every mile), I realized after half a second that I'd seen it hit outside my back door, and the seconds I tallied were the length of the thunder. TEN seconds. Give me that old time religion!

I don't have a photograph of the rollicking earthquake that came tonight: Logan's first. After decades in California, I have developed a built-in seismograph—it's what folks do. You learn to differentiate between a heavy truck on a freeway late at night, which rumbles somewhat, and the literal shaking of the earth. A car backfire might sound like a gunshot (ouch!), but when the chimes and stemware start to make noise, well, all systems alert.

It's amazing what happens in eight seconds or so. It feels like much longer. This time, Logan was in the room, so I grabbed his hand and we made it fun. Well, being with Bob and Logan made it fun. Because here's your little child, looking at the big people for how to interpret the world. I just braced my feet and we (and by "we," I mean "Bob") laughed. I laughed when it stopped. I could do that.

Two natural wildnesses in two days. I'll let you know if a pestilence of frogs appears. So far, just the one (frog in our backyard pond).

And here is a promise, relating to the photo above. Today we (Logan, his mama, and I) visited Camp Joy Garden in Boulder Creek. It's an amazing community, farm, enterprise, and non-profit that has been in existence since 1971. I can think of no better descriptor for it than "a beehive." Because traffic was so bad on Highway 9 (the "road to Hana," as I think of it) we had the briefest of visits, but Camp Joy is such an amazing place. It's a farm where a trailer park was once an alternative. It's a farm, and a miracle, and a CSA, and a place that makes honey and candles and wreaths, and so much more. Goats and chickens and wreaths, oh my.

More to come soon. And with that promise, no "Thought for the Day."

Did YOU live through lightning and an earthquake in one day?

I've been through both, but not both in two days, nor both in two months or years.

Welcome to the Hotel California.

Thanks for visiting. That is my Thought for the Day.

New Leaf Community Day: Benefiting UCSC Farm & Garden

Just a quick drive-by posting to say that anyone in the Santa Cruz area who shops at New Leaf: please go today. 5% of the sales will go to the UCSC Friends of the Farm & Garden. Representatives from the Board of Directors and other Friends will be at all the stores, countywide, with groovy things like seed packets, information, and (ta-da!) my 2008 farmers market calendars. $1 of each calendar sale goes to the Friends of the Farm & Garden, so today's the day!

Thought for the day:         "At the UC Santa Cruz Farm & Garden, students, apprentices, staff, professors, and townsfolk have learned to give more than they take from the soil. They are stewards of our most basic resource." — Louise Cain, Founding Member, Friends of the UCSC Farm & Garden

Thanks for visiting!

Piercing the Darkness with Light

If you are a regular reader, you will have seen this faces before, of Amber and Guillermo. I wrote about them just a few weeks ago when they traveled, stopping at farms along the way, to Austin to bring all of Amber's belongings here to Santa Cruz.

A few months ago, I wrote about driving on June 18th to Big Sur Bakery and Café with Guillermo, but I didn't mention our conversation on the ride home. It was a spectacular night, with Venus so close to the moon, it looked like her daughter. We'd been talking about all the single women who were going to be calling him up in the middle of the night, after his spread in People magazine's "Green Bachelors."

He said, "I don't know. Probably the kind of woman who'd read People isn't going to be looking for someone like me." And then he went on to say that, while finding love would be nice, he was really content in his personal life, and in himself. Because of the rare chance to be driving home from Big Sur along the coast under the gaze of a brilliant moon, the conversation went in deep with me.

It was only about three weeks later that I got an e-mail from Guillermo, telling me about the very special woman he'd met, and how strong the forces were that pulled them together. (Sometimes I use the phrase, "God's puppet strings," because it really seems that there is a cosmic force orchestrating our lives.)

Two months later, they traveled by motorcycle to retrieve Amber's belongings, and a couple of weeks ago I finally got to meet her at her new home.

Yesterday, inside all the panic and pain I was undergoing, anguishing for my friends in Southern California, I got an e-mail from Guillermo telling me that they'd found out that Amber is pregnant, and were married on Friday in a quiet, sweet ceremony. She's due in June...

I was so happy for them that I shed tears of joy, which felt much better than the other tears I'd cried yesterday.

They're ecstatic.

One more tidbit: Amber's birthday is the day after Guillermo and I went to Big Sur. How cool is that?

And that's my good news for today.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: "A consistent soul believes in destiny, a capricious one in chance." —Benjamin Disraeli

Thanks for visiting.

My Friends in San Diego

Just as I felt when watching images of Katrina flooding a city I love, I'm shaking and sad about the fires in San Diego, where I lived for six years. And where I've visited twice in the past two years, including visits to three beautiful little farms. I'll show them here in more peaceful times, and may the prevailing winds soon shift. Wouldn't some rain be nice?

Here in Escondido: La Milpa Organica. I read over on Michael Ruhlman's blog that Chef Gavin Kaysen's main produce guy lost part of his farm. I know the farmer, Barry Logan, at La Milpa, supplies to more restaurants in the county than anyone else, and can only pray he's safe.

Another view of La Milpa: Barry's famous salad mix greens.

Here is beautiful Seabreeze farm, near La Jolla. For now, it seems, out of peril's way. When I visited farmer Stephenie Caughlin, she was feeding a CSA of 65 people from her two terraced, hillside acres.

Another view of the farm: the greenhouse.

Here is Barry Koral's Tropical Fruit Farm in Vista. Figs and citrus.

Ah, the green shade.

I don't have much else to say: it's hard imagining the hell.

I will say that last night, the California Federation for Poultry sent me a press release with the unlikely subject "Truth in Labeling." It seems that Foster Farms and others who use the completely meaningless word "100% All Natural" in their pesticide-laced birds are all a-twitter at "big poultry manufacturers" injecting salt water into chickens, pumping up the weight and sodium content. Well, that's all well and good, but how about if Foster Farms, who isn't quite as despicable as Tyson, comes clean on what's in the feed that goes into those chickens, or the conditions under which they're raised?

The California Federation for Poultry did not do their homework in soliciting my support for their campaign. As one of my friends who raises pastured, truly free-range, organic chickens says, "The saltwater is not what's wrong with the chickens. The problem is pesticide drenched feed and the
confinement of the birds.  To freak out about the salt injection is just silly.

"Maybe if all you've ever seen is really, really nasty cut-rate industrial chickens Foster Farms does look good by comparison, being only moderately disgusting."  (Thanks, Ms. H.)

Also scary: the member list for the federation. Bayer? "Hybrid Turkeys"? Merrill-Lynch? Whuh?

More anon on that. For now, my thoughts and prayers are with the folks in San Diego and the other folks in Southern California. I lived in Malibu for a month when our daughter was an infant, in Paradise Cove Campground. It was heaven.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: "We all have big changes in our lives that are more or less a second chance."  — Harrison Ford

Thanks for visiting.

October Views

Three shots from the farmers market: Thomas Family Farm squash and gourds; Dirty Girl dry-farmed Early Girl tomatoes, and Mike and Teresa's kohlrabi from Everett Family Farm.

Not much else to say today.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation.” — Henry Ward Beecher

Thanks for visiting.

For a Friend: At a Loss for Words

For the friend who wrote me this morning: "Aw Tana, you sound beleaguered. Don't give up! I know I don't comment much anymore, but I still love reading you. Just give us photos when you're tired."

Thanks, B. These are for you.

From last week's downtown farmers market: Route One yellow bells. Summer's last gasp? It's raining and grey outside today.

Suvir's New Cookbook: American Masala

My friend (and client), Suvir Saran, has begun his book tour for the debut of his second cookbook, American Masala, a collection of 125 recipes with Suvir's unique take on classics like mac 'n' cheese, meatloaf, vegetarian enchiladas, etcetera. The photography by Ben Fink is luscious—incredible.

Suvir was in Seattle yesterday, and is in San Francisco today. Tonight he will be appearing from 7:00-8:00 tonight at Books, Inc. at Opera Plaza. Here are the details.

Tomorrow he'll be in Los Angeles, and you can see the rest of his touring schedule here. Laguna Beach, Austin, Dallas, Chicago, and New York follow, concluding on October 18.

Then I hope he gets a nice long break at his farm, also called American Masala.

You can read more about the cookbook and get some recipes from his most recent newsletter. Yum!

Go, please, and see his photos of the chickens and alpacas and goats and llamas in this photo album.

That's all for today. Autumn is here to stay, I think: we had our first big rain last night, and the air has changed.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."  —Thomas Alva Edison

Thanks for visiting.

P.S. If you use the Amazon link to buy the cookbook, you're helping buy "knife guys" (knight figurines) for Logan. And as he would say, "NANKS!"

Congressman Sam Farr: Representin'!

On Friday, I had the utter pleasure of attending an event that was one of the highlights of my year. Originally intended to be a part of the annual UCSC Farm Harvest Festival, a ceremony honoring Representative Sam Farr (my local congressman) was moved to Friday, due to a conflict in his schedule.

Thank goodness. Moving the event from the happy clamor of hundreds of people—many of whom are not yet waist-high or possessed of the ability to remain silent for ten minutes, let alone an hour or more—into the calm and quiet of the middle of a workday, high on the hilltop that is the UCSC farm, was a stroke of serendipity and a blessing to those of us who attended. All of us really wanted to be there, and all of us really relished the opportunity to savor in this small celebration.

It was a small celebration for a very big reason: without this man's vision, and his commitment, and his ability to move mountains (of bureaucratic b.s., for one thing), the UCSC Farm simply would not exist at the level it does, if at all.

Sweet Sixteen: Happy Anniversary, et al

Not about farming. Pictured here is a dahlia on our front deck. Bob grew it.

I repeat: this is not about farming. It's a love letter to my partner (I call him my husband, but let's face it: we're "hitched but not churched"), Bob Churchill. If you don't want to read something sentimental, please avert your eyes. Or go find a new blog from my Bloglines subscriptions and entertain yourselves there. (And a prize to anyone who can tell me how to make them alphabetical order: something on Bloglines burped a few months ago, and they're wacky.)

Long before Match.com and eHarmony, when hardly anyone even had e-mail, there were personals ads in newspapers. Sixteen years ago yesterday, I answered Bob's ad: I was one of three dozen women to do so. (They told him the average man got three or four responses.) And as Bob put it, "One response glowed like a ruby among garnets." He said he "knew" when he held my envelope.

We wrote three letters back and forth before we finally met, and within a month, fell in love.

Reasons this man is my hero and my love?