February
13, 2004: I must be about three hundred years old.
Since 1959, when I was born, there have been three winters
here in the Monterey Bay area that produced what old-timers
called “100 year floods.” The last major flood
was in 1995 and every square inch of the land I’m now
farming was under two feet of water. Plus we’ve had
a “hundred year freeze,” a couple of “hundred
year droughts,” and a “500 year earthquake.”
Maybe my next seventy five years in farming will be uneventful.
Things are “normal” now. It feels weird. I'm even
smiling about my purple goosefoot.
Purple goosefoot, or Atriplex hortensis, is an antique vegetable
related to the spinach. It has never caught on here in the
states, probably because your average shopper worries overmuch
about where a goose’s foot might trod. The plant can
also be called mountain spinach, or orach. The plant sports
two decorator colors, red and green, and it has a nice, mellow
flavor.
I paid $126 for a pound of goosefoot seed last year and planted
a seed crop. When the crop germinates you jump with fright
because it looks just like the pernicious weed lambsquarters,
or Chenopodium album. In fact it practically is lambsquarters
and it grows like a weed. Out of 4 beds 40 inches wide and
two hundred feet long I got four garbage cans of seed. The
seed I didn’t harvest sprouted with the first rains.
We harvested it and sold it loose, piled high in big fluffy
purple mountains, for $4.00/pound at the farmers’ market.
The seed is encased in a papery membrane. I lack the machinery
to buff the membrane off so it looks like a breakfast cereal.
With the plates entirely removed from an Earthway® seeder
the seeds feed out pretty well. My first planting from my
own seed came up a deeper purple than the mother stock and
have proven to be very vigorous. Sales have been clicking
along. Boulevard and Incanto, two of San Francisco’s
nicer restaurants, have it on their menu, the public is buying
all I bring to market and I’ve got no competition. Call
it a “100 year harvest.” 
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