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Farm-at-a-glance
Mariquita
Farm
Location:
Land in Watsonville and Hollister
Years farming: Andy has farmed
for the last 20 years in various capacities from
farmworker to owner, from large farm to small.
Total acres farmed: 25
Key people: Andy, farmer and
rave king; Julia, farm wife, CEO, mom, email elf,
etc.; España, foreman, tractor driver,
all around repairman; Jose España, head
harvester; Lourdes Duarte, head vegetable packer
Range of crops: greens, root
crops, tubers and herbs, berries, peppers, tomatoes,
garlic, melons, artichokes, and more besides that.
Marketing methods: CSA and 1
farmers market, with a small number of carefully
selected restaurants that pick up at the farmers
market
Soil type: silty loam
Regenerative practices: cover
cropping, crop rotation, fallowing
Length of season: all year
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March
4 , 2004: We grow garlic near Gilroy. Will Rogers
once said that Gilroy, California, was the only town in America
where you could marinate a steak by hanging it outside on
a clothesline. Gilroy styles itself the Garlic Capital of
the world. You can buy garlic ice cream there during their
annual Garlic Festival. A big factory at the edge of town
processes garlic into garlic salt, garlic powder and peeled
garlic. At one time the town was even surrounded by fields
of garlic.
Nowadays the garlic industry in our area is almost as dead
as Will Roger’s steak. A lot of the garlic that gets
processed here is trucked in from other growing regions. Increasingly,
America’s appetite for garlic is even satisfied by garlic
from other countries, like China. We survive as garlic growers
only by “thinking outside the box” and using “appropriate
technology.”
The box we are outside of would be the big box stores that
are casting such a shadow over retail these days. Big boxes
are happy to buy their garlic from overseas where land is
cheap and labor is dirt cheap. Even if the retail giants wanted
to buy from little farms like ours we couldn’t meet
their price. So, instead of competing to supply a market that
no longer wants us, we grow spring garlic. If you harvest
garlic at the scallion stage the tender stems are flavorful,
but garlicky. Spring garlic can’t be shipped in from
China easily because it’s perishable. Spring garlic
can be used minced raw in salads, salsas, or marinades. Cooked,
it goes well in a lot of provençal and Italian dishes.
The restaurants we deliver to love it.
The appropriate technology we employ to save costs is a piece
of sewer pipe we found in the weeds. Last fall, while farmhands
Claudia and Lourdes broke up bulbs of softneck early white
garlic into loose cloves, España cut the tube in half.
Then he straddled the planting bed with a Kubota. He affixed
two cultivating knives to the tool bar behind the tractor.
Then he wired the three foot lengths of plastic pipe behind
them with old baling wire. He put the tractor into a creeper
gear, got it going down the row and dismounted.
España’s cousin José came forward with
buckets of loose garlic cloves and together the two of them
walked behind the advancing tractor, trickling a stream of
cloves into the sewer pipe. The pipes conducted the cloves
into the grooves in the soil cut by the knives. Sweeps attached
to the tool bar covered the two rows with soil. At the end
of the rows, España turned the tractor around for another
pass.
One irrigation brought the cloves to life. We burned the
beds with a handheld propane burner to kill any weed sprouts
before the first garlic leaves were up. Rain did the rest.
Now and through April it is harvest time, and the cash is
flowing just when we need it. By July when the tourists crowd
into Gilroy to eat the garlic ice cream and celebrate the
historical garlic harvest, our garlic crop will be safely
stored in the bank. 
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