Strawberries and Cream

It was so simple I feel silly really, writing about it. But I can't get it out of my mind. Strawberries bought from the farm in Santa Cruz. Organic strawberries. From the girl that always has me smiling. Her mother helps on Sunday mornings. Sometimes. Selling strawberries, artichokes, blackberry jam. How I love the blackberry jam. Swanton Berry Farm it's called.

That's how it started; this simple idea from a friend. I bought the strawberries. Carried them to the birthday celebration, whole, in our big red bowl. Each berry flower-side-up and a layer on top, upside down for pinching. We voted to slice them. A quiet moment in the kitchen. Slicing, tasting. Mouths silently watering.

And then I poured on the cream. Thick, pearl white cream.

Saved the empty jar for little girl nosegays. Returned the strawberry baskets to the farmer.

Strawberries and cream.

Not a thing wasted. So simple I feel silly.

Marin Bee Company

I get excited about the funniest things these days; a couple of weeks ago it was finding the first asparagus at the farmers' market, last week it was eating it picked from a friends backyard. This week? This week I happened upon a truck load of bees.

The cute guy was putting gas in the car. I was staring off towards the vacant building next door. There were a few people in the parking lot walking with arms outstretched, stepping carefully; gingerly describes it best, each carrying a wooden box. It was strange. They watched the box in their hands as they walked, from the back of a truck towards a car across the lot, as if the box might spill and then they deposited their box in the trunk.

And I knew. They. Had. Bees.

I held back from running but I was at the truck before a dollars worth of gas clicked off on the pump. It was stacked end to end with boxes of bees. "I brought sixty boxes this time," the man in charge answered a woman at the back of the truck.

She had an English accent and saw my hesitation as I got close. "They're quite gentle," she offered. She stepped forward, put her finger on top of a box until a couple loose bees crawled on her. We both watched them, smiling. I thanked her and got closer.

One car left, bees secured in its trunk, another arrived and the English woman smoothed a blanket in her van. Her box was held outward across the parking lot too, all of us watching until it was deposited as gingerly as the others.

The next man in line looked like a casual Friday banker. "I have three daughters," he told me. "We never get stung and the bees pollinate the garden." He took away a box for each girl.

Then there was a man with an empty box beneath his arm. He traded it for a full one, held with two hands, arms outstretched. "I raise pastured chickens in Sebastopol," he told the cute guy who had by now joined me. He invited us to the farm, "the next time you're up that way," he said. He deposited his box of bees on the floor of the front seat of his Honda, his dog watching from the back. We all shook hands and left too.

And another car pulled into the lot.

Next year, I promised. New year I'll be ready for some bees too.

Indian Valley Campus Organic Farm

So many years ago, more than I want to tell you, I took a class on an organic farm, at the Santa Rosa Jr. College. Bob Cannard was the teacher. I ran into him again last year at Bioneers, he was talking about farming, the same common sense, use what you have philosophy of the last time I'd seen him. Except everything he said was new again, as exciting as the first time I'd heard him. He talks a lot about dirt, taking care of the dirt, where the dirt comes from, how important the dirt is. He's teaching again, or maybe still, I haven't followed him closely. He teaches interns at Green String Farm in Petaluma; a wide expanse of a farm with rolling hills of vineyards as a back drop, a real old wood barn, chickens and a farm stand open year round. It's worth seeking out.

Last week I found myself at another organic school farm, this one younger, on the campus of College of Marin at Indian Valley. The student tended rows of turnips, lettuces, beets, and kale reached from the open space land that cradles the entire campus to a soccer field that caters to joggers, bike riders and dog walkers, not a person with a ball to be seen. And the first thing the farmer did when he walked through the gate, you already know, he picked up a handful of dirt and brought it to his nose. He seemed to relax then, the feel of dirt on his hands, the difference between the classroom and the garden. He reached for a calendula, handed it to the first person beside him, another and another, I had one too. Orange and yellow calendulas, no two the same and I never knew they could grow in such variety.

He with the dirt on his hands was Steve Quirt, the planner and teacher on the farm, our tour guide for the visit. He's another farmer, like Bob Cannard, who knows the importance of dirt. And Wendy Johnson, also a teacher at the farm, we didn't have her pleasure but it's impossible to know about the farm and not know about Wendy. She was there in the impossibly silver artichoke plants and the fava beans, magenta blossoms. Deep, saturated magenta. She's the same Wendy Johnson of Green Gulch Farm, and the author of Gardening at the Dragon's Gate, a big green book I've entered through a hundred different gates or often while beating back the weeds looking for a damn gate.

The farm at Indian Valley has a farm stand of sorts too but the hours appear random. It's either open or it's closed. A shaded roof and plywood tables. If there's class I suppose, and vegetables to be picked, enough to actually sell, it seems they sell them. How perfectly wonderful for the neighborhoods nearby, the communities of people on foot, what a bit of magic to bring home a bag of peas or a pair of artichokes from so close to home. From school. It's their secret garden. (Don't tell anyone you read it here.)

And while they're there, neighbors meeting again or for the first time, at the cyclone gate near the metal sink with a hose running in it, I hope someone invites them to pick up a handful of the dirt, bring it to their nose and, yes, take a smell of it. Maybe you will too, if you find yourself the next time at a farm, letting the dirt fall slowly, in dusty drifts through the text books of your hands, appreciating it for everything we eat.