Emerisa Gardens/ Heirloom Expo

Yesterday I went on a field trip with my Nursery Management class. We drove up to Santa Rosa in Sonoma county. First, we went to visit a large production nursery called Emerisa Gardens. I have bought their plants at my local nurseries hundreds of times: perhaps you’ve seen this logo?

Emerisa has 15 acres of land in a beautiful spot in the county. It is family owned, having been started by the patriarch many years ago and now run by his children, who gave us a wonderful tour. They employ about 30 folks, both full and part time, and pride themselves on the family feel of the group.

In the first greenhouse. My teacher, Lawrence Lee, is on the right in the hat and glasses. He’s worked at many botanical gardens and large nurseries across the world, but is now a full-time teacher. Many of my classes have been with him and I love to learn from him. He knows so much about classic and production horticulture, and about plants from other countries. He seems to know everyone in the business and managed to get this tour for us with the owners.

Emerisa has most of their property laid out to greenhouses (only one heated), hoop houses, shade houses, and propagation greenhouses. We talked a lot about microclimates within a property, and how best to keep certain plants in the right zone. Emerisa does a lot of hand watering instead of sprinkling things on a schedule, to make sure the right irrigation is getting to the right plants. All in all, it seemed like a very hands-on kind of operation for such a large nursery.

The owners explained to us about how hard they are working to add hedgerows to the edges of the buildings. They very much want to reduce any kind of pesticide use, organic or otherwise, by increasing the amount of beneficials in these hedgerows. They also act as a demonstration garden of sorts, and unfortunately I didn’t get a picture of the most beautiful gardens (guess I was too busy listening!) - they were incredible, and full of life.

It really struck me how much work it takes to keep thousands of plants looking good, for sale at any moment. If a smaller nursery calls up and says, “I need 100 lavender plants, stat,” Emerisa needs to be able to provide that the next day. So much is up to the whims of the customers, or what’s trendy, or what the latest gardening magazine has written about. Finding new varieties is crucial, and staying on top of the marketing side of things is very important.

In the propagation area, we learned that the owners are trying hard to move towards a model where they propagate all their own plants. At the moment, about 50% of their cuttings come from other places (one thing you learn quite quickly from any of these places is that there is always another level of growing - someone has to propagate from seed, someone propagates from cuttings, some sell directly to customers, some sell to larger nurseries like this one). It was fun to see all the experiments they had going on in this building. The amount of variety this nursery has is remarkable.

I was quite taken with all the different dahlias they had growing and ended up buying four of them. This is the ‘Mystic’ series that has become popular lately. I have one of them already and I love the dark foliage contrasted with the striking blooms. The bees also love them, because they are single blossoms.

The nursery allowed us all to buy plants on Lawrence’s account, and so I brought home 12 (natch) - the aforementioned dahlias, some Bidens, some Agastache, and some oddities that were growing in the demonstration beds that were covered with pollinators. It was such a wonderful visit and I learned so much about what it takes to own a nursery!

Next, we traveled across town to the fairgrounds and spent a few hours at the National Heirloom Expo, which is organized and run by Baker Creek Seed Company. The expo goes on for three days, and there are three stages with speakers from all over the world, speaking on things like food justice, no-till farming, livestock, and soils. There are vendors, too, with all kinds of goods ranging from fermenting supplies (our local FarmCurious was in the house) to sheep’s wool for knitting to chickens for sale to seed suppliers to tool makers. It was smaller than I expected, but I also really enjoyed it.

Contemplative paths, made of gourds

Interesting apps

plant vendors

lots of seed vendors. This one, Hudson Valley Seed Co, has artists create the art for their seed packs. They were incredibly beautiful.

Live music, mostly fiddling. Lots of food. I bought fresh limeade sweetened with agave, some organic fruity iced tea, and a coconut ice cream that was heavenly.

more dahlias

Lectures. I only got to see this one. I admire Singing Frogs Farm and wanted to hear more about it; they did not disappoint.

Poultry breeds, sheep breeds

The highlight, in my opinion: The Hall of Heirlooms, where every kind of fruit and vegetable heirloom was laid out and labeled, and could be properly admired

tomato art

the famous squash tower

This is Brad Gates of Wild Boar Farms. He is one of the best tomato breeders we have right now. He makes amazing varieties. I’ve grown only one of his - the Pink Berkeley Tie Dye - and I ended up buying four more kinds to try next year.

And the best thing I saw all day. I asked this kind person if I could take a picture of her shirt. I absolutely adored it.

And that says everything about Sonoma that you need to know!

However, if you can make it to next year’s expo, I’d highly recommend it. I don’t think you need to come all three days - just pick the day with the most speakers you want to hear, and come on out.

Four O'Clocks

I’ve got a star in the garden right now, and it’s Mirabilis jalapa, otherwise known as Four O’Clocks (or ‘Marvel of Peru’). These cheerful flowers hailing from tropical South America start to open every day at - you guessed it - 4 pm, just when a lot of other flowers are looking a little peaked in the heat of the day. They stay open all night and close before the sun reaches its zenith.

A lot has been written on the way these flowers smell - and I must say, I haven’t noticed it. But then I’m usually asleep by 10, so I’m not out taking nighttime strolls in the garden. The scent of these flowers, and the fact that they are mostly nocturnal, should tell you something about the insects who like to visit them.

Four O’Clocks are pollinated mainly by hawk and sphinx moths (family Sphingidae). These are mainly found in the tropics, but also can be found in more temperate regions, especially somewhere like warm Walnut Creek. I’ve only ever seen one of these moths and it was years ago, so it might be a good idea to set up a night camera and see if I can capture them at work. In the daytime, I often see hummingbirds on these flowers, but almost never bees.

Four O’Clocks are easy to start from seed. I just ordered them from Renee’s Garden and scattered them in the pollinator beds. It takes them a year or two to get ‘stuck in,’ and from then on, you’ll have a lovely display that will grow each year, as these produce a ton of seed. They also grow via tuberous roots that can be invasive, so you’ll want to watch them. The roots can survive very cold temperatures, as well, and reliably bloom again in the summer.

The seeds are big and look like mini grenades.

This plant is apparently toxic, so don’t eat it. It survives long stretches without any irrigation, and does prefer a lot of sun, but I have them in places that are getting regular irrigation and half-day sun, and they look great. So it seems to me that they are easily adaptable.

At this point, all my different patches are sort of cross-pollinating and I’m getting some interesting mixes of colors, which is a hallmark of this flower. It’s fun to see what will come up next!

Community Seed Library

The other day I picked up a copy of Edible East Bay magazine. There were lots of great articles, as usual, but one really stood out to me - a story about a man in Berkeley who had recently opened a Community Seed Library in front of his house. His drive to make this project a reality, and the possibilities about making this a true seed-sharing movement, really struck me. So I emailed the owner, Charlie, to see if I could come and visit his seed library and have a conversation about it.

Charlie responded with enthusiasm and invited me to come to his yearly tomato tasting. Charlie lives in an historic property (which is named MariLark) on the edge of Tilden Regional Park; what a location! My friend Nils, also a suburban farmer and beekeeper, came along with me. I brought four of my tomatoes to add to the tasting, and Nils and I enjoyed trying all the fruits on display. Lots of them had been grown by Charlie, but many had been grown by friends, family, and neighbors, and it was fun to see all the different varieties represented. There were no doubles - somehow everyone had brought different kinds!

It was a beautiful sunny day, but Charlie has growing challenges with the often-present cloud cover due to our local celebrity, Karl the Fog.  He still manages to have a really wonderful garden, filled with greens, tomatoes, flowers, and herbs, over a large terraced property. He also is growing an enormous pumpkin!

I enjoyed chatting with Charlie about the design of the seed library and his mission to grow the movement and have a seed library in every neighborhood. I've wanted to have a seed library for quite some time now, but I have logistical concerns, especially in the very hot summers and direct sun experienced in my garden. Optimally, seeds are stored in dry, chilly temperatures. Our chilly weather is often wet, and our dry weather is often bloody hot. So I'm not sure how viable the seeds would be after six months in the sun, or four months of rainfall. Charlie and I discussed how to get around that issue - maybe make mine seasonal, or do some sort of finagling to make full-time shade in a certain spot in my garden. Ideally I'd like it to be right next to our Little Free Library, but that might not be the best place for it. Charlie would like to have a 'sister seed library' and is hoping I am game to provide it. It's going to take some thinking, first.

There's a lot to like about the library in Charlie's yard. My favorite thing is the pull-out writing table, so you have a place to sort and label your seeds. Charlie provides the envelopes and pens. He has gardening books inside, too. Other folks have left notes such as "free native plants to a good home" and an email address. The seeds themselves are on the bottom shelf, placed in boxes, far back in the shade, in an insulated area. We discussed how to make some sort of shade cover for them in there - special film? A removable cardboard cover? Nils suggested that we put these library boxes on pivots, so that you can pivot it toward the shade, with instructions how to pivot it around to get inside. All good ideas. Hey, you engineers out there, weigh in on this please.

After all this, I realized I had forgotten to bring seeds to share, so I'll have to go back. This is a really neat idea, and I want to visit often. 

Do you have a seed library that you visit? If so, please tell us all about it in the comments.

September wreath

This month, I decided to use some branches of my Teucrium fruticans bush, a beautiful California native (also called Germander) that has leaves that are silvery grey on top and silvery white underneath. The flowers are tiny but are a lovely purple and attract native bees every spring. Those branches form the base layer of leaves, and then I layered some seed pods from Monarda fistulosa  (Bee Balm or Wild Bergamont) over the top.

This Wild Bergamont is beautiful in bloom. It lasts a couple of months, then the seed pods take over and are lovely in their own right. 

Last weekend, I sowed a bunch of crops in flats for planting October first. I realized that there were some things I was missing - like cabbage. So I ordered some interesting varieties from Seeds from Italy, and I'm hoping to have some different things to show you come Fall. 

Bluma Organic Flower Farm

I'm only taking two classes this semester; one is yet another course in California native plants, and the other is a course in Nursery Management. (I had also signed up for a course on Plant Diseases, but it was cancelled because the person who teaches it retired, so they are searching for another disease expert.) My Nursery Mgmt professor requires us to get out in the community and research some sort of nursery operation, ideally volunteering some time there, and interviewing the owner or staff. Recently I read an article in our local paper about an organic flower farmer about 20 miles south in Sunol. I decided that was the perfect place to visit, so I contacted the owner, and spent about three hours there on Labor Day, weeding a row of flowering oregano and chatting with whoever came near. I also got to spend the lunch break with the team and ask more questions. It was a very interesting morning!

rows of Lisianthus and Zinnia

Joanna Letz is the owner of this two-acre, organic flower farm called Bluma. The farm is located in an area called the Sunol Ag Park, which is owned by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and managed by the Alameda County Resource Conservation District. There are six farms located within this land, which is in a sort of bowl-shaped valley surrounded by hills. Two creeks meet here, and it's easy to see the watershed influence on this land. The soil is very beautiful and Joanna adds 36 cubic yards of compost every year at the start of the growing season. That is the only additional fertility this land needs. 4th-6th grade students come here to learn about organic farms and local watersheds. There is a 59-foot high 'water temple' built on this land, which speaks to the history of water here. This temple was built in 1906 and originally collected water in a cistern which was then funneled to San Francisco though the Niles aqueduct. There are paintings on the roof of the temple. It's closed to the public now (though that might be temporary), but I visited there many years ago in my letterboxing days. 

You can see the water temple at the far left of this photo.

My 50-foot row of oregano was surrounded by a vast variety of weeds, many taller than me. It took me 2-1/2 hours to weed my row, and by the end of it I was pretty pooped. And my hands hurt badly this morning, evidence of the repetitiveness of the activity of grasping and pulling. Farming seems increasingly to me to be a young-person's game. At least this kind of small-scale farming. Joanna works the field from early April to late October, and then rests it by planting a five-seed cover crop, including things like hairy vetch, to return nutrients to the soil. Sometimes she uses weed cloth, but mostly the weeding is done by hand. The weeding is not about elimination; rather, the focus is on knocking back a lot of the large growth so that the flowers can get the sun and space to dominate. So nearly every row of flowers is in some stage of weed overgrowth, and the weeding is just as frequent a task as harvesting. Meaning, basically, it's an everyday task. 

You can't even see the oregano through these weeds. 

My row when I was finished. I was instructed to pile the weeds up in the path on either side of the row; they will break down and feed the soil. However I did pull a lot of weeds that had a LOT of seeds on them, so those will likely germinate at some point and continue the cycle. So this practice is both good and not-so-good.

While I weeded, the rest of the staff was harvesting bunches of flowers for delivery. Joanna makes deliveries three days a week to local grocery stores and restaurants. She doesn't do the arranging, unless she is providing flowers for a wedding or other big event, which is a couple of times a month. She used to sell at Farmers' Markets, but doesn't any longer.

The flower bundles go in to a truck which follows the crew, and then into a cooler at the end of the field, that is shared by many farmers. 

Joanna shares a greenhouse with another farmer in this area and that is her main propagation space. It was fun to walk by that other farmer's fields, too - and see how he does large-scale (well, larger than mine anyhow) tomato and pepper farming. I was pleased to see that he also has cut down superfluous growth on his tomatoes (all of which were small cherry and saladette types) and interested to note that he has done the same on his peppers. Guess I need to take a hint and do that too.

The crew and I sat in an outdoor learning classroom (just basically a few picnic tables covered by a tarp) to eat our lunches, brought from home. Three of the staff are part-time workers - one works once a week, one three days a week, another is on-call. Only one is full-time (other than Joanna) and she works six days a week. There could be others that I didn't meet, and in fact, there must be. They all work from 6:30 am to 5:00 pm, a very long day. This is out in hot sun without any shade, of course. All of them are young, in their 20's, and all of them care about food justice and good organic produce. When asked what they wanted people to know, they said "buy your food and flowers at the Farmers Markets." 

A newly-planted field

Large-scale flower farming is overwhelmingly conventional, using pesticides and herbicides at will. Many also use specific hormones to enhance the crop in some way. Organic flowers cost more, and should, as I learned just from my one scant weeding session. Joanna uses the tractor only to create rows at the beginning of each planting, so this land is also largely no-till. While the weeds are a hassle for the workers, they are good for the soil, keeping a living root growing at all times and feeding the microbial life that lives there. This type of farmer recognizes that keeping the soil healthy will keep the crops healthy, and the downside is the weeds. But it's worth it to see the amount of insect life on an organic farm. Joanna's fields were full of a huge diversity of pollinators, and I saw very little evidence of pests, and trust me, I would have seen them if they had been there. Goodness me, it was my own private little jungle. 

I looked up from my task to take this photo of Joanna, the owner, harvesting flowers. 

I learned an awful lot just by spending the morning with these young, energetic, committed farmers. I encourage you to do the same in your neighborhood, if only to recognize the hard work farmers do to make our lives beautiful and delicious. Especially in our desk-and-computer-oriented tech society. We have it so easy in so many ways! And yet, even though the work was hard yesterday (and I was super relieved to go home after lunch instead of finishing out the day), there were tremendous benefits: Being outdoors in the sunshine, smelling sweet oregano as I brushed past it to pull a weed; using my body the way it's meant to be used, stretching and reaching and squatting and crawling; having my knees in the good dark earth and smiling at the earthworms as they revealed themselves to me; hearing the distant chatter from the other workers but not having to engage unless I really felt like it; the satisfaction of being set a task and completing it before leaving for the day; and the sweet knowledge that I didn't have to organize anyone or figure out the next step or spend time at home figuring out the logistics of the thing. I did not hear one mobile phone ringing. Instead I listened to the hawks and crows and jays. I saw a kestrel fly over the fields. Someone came by to visit the farmers and discussed powdery mildew. It was all very present and NOW. And I imagine that this sort of work could be quite addictive. 

Hard to choose a favorite flower from this farm, but this one might be it, some variety of zinnia that I haven't grown, but definitely need to!