Growing the Great Tasting Vegetable
As our small
vegetable farm enters its 3rd season, we’ve honed in on growing the best
tasting vegetables we can for our customers.
When we
started our farm, it was a big question mark what type of farm we should be,
what to grow, where to sell. An attempt
to grow vegetables for the wholesale market was a useful, but costly education.
We simply didn’t have the necessary scale of efficiency.
Providing a
weekly vegetable CSA (community supported agriculture) box directly to
subscribers was the path chosen. There are many CSAs in the USA now, were
customers pay at the beginning of the season and then receive a box of
vegetables each week. It’s a great way to get fresh produce from local farms.
Customers in
California have many CSA options. Many farms will grow some of their own food
and also buy food from other farms or the wholesale market to put in their
boxes. Some farms will deliver from
over a hundred miles away. Some do home deliveries, some use drop off points.
What niche
could we fill in that would be useful to customers compared to the wide variety
of options customers have?
Quickly we
decided to provide the best tasting vegetables within the constraints of
economic sustainability.
What does it take to grow great tasting vegetables?
There are four basic ingredients and one extra secret ingredient. The
four basic ingredients are:
- Freshness
- Plant Variety
- Soil vitality
- Climate
Let’s look
at each of these.
Freshness
Any backyard
gardener will tell you how much better a just picked vegetable tastes than the
exact same variety bought in a store which was picked a week or two
earlier. Most of our produce is picked
and delivered to customers within 24 hours. This means we have to grow all our
vegetables. Buying from another farm and repackaging it adds at least days to
the turnaround. We harvest most of the produce in the cool evening and some
early the next day. It’s then packed and shipped by afternoon. This limits our
distribution range, we can’t deliver a hundred miles away. And growing all our
own, limits how much we can sell to just what we grow. Focusing on freshness
limits our potential expansion, but provides local customers with the freshest
possible produce.
Variety
This is a
big one. Most Americans have grown up on rather taste-free vegetables. The
vegetables serve more as backdrops to seasoning and sauces rather than their
rightful place as the source of flavor.
How did this
happen? Why wouldn’t farms grow for taste? Certainly customers prefer it.
Unfortunately vegetables are purchased on sight and cost, not taste. Customers
can’t taste them first. Even if they could taste a small fresh sample, this
wouldn’t be enough. Most vegetables need to be cooked first for their full
flavor to emerge. Talented plant breeders of modern commercial varieties, focus
on good looks, fast growing, and disease resistance. Flavor doesn’t sell, so it’s
traded away.
As backyard gardeners running our farm, we
know many good tasting varieties. Also, we’ve been trying many different
varieties of all the vegetables to make sure we grow the most flavorful ones
regardless of their looks. After two years of this, an interesting, and in
hindsight expected, observation can be made:
slower growing, less
attractive vegetables are tastier!
Why would
this be? Without having a PhD in the plant biology of taste, one can only
speculate. Many slower growing varieties have deeper root systems. These deeper
roots can mine more minerals and nutrients.
Then taking more time to grow, a more complex flavor emerges. In
comparison, a shallow rooted, fast growing plant, tastes watery and bland.
Take cauliflower for example, we typically
grow a variety that takes 80 days to mature. It’s a big plant with a large root
system, and has a medium sized head. Last year, late season, we grew a fast
variety, only took 50 days to mature. It
had a surprisingly small body and large head. To me it looked like an alien
mutant you’d see on an old science fiction movie. I could see why it was a
favorite with commercial farmers. The
smaller body meant you could grow them closer together. Overall, you can get 3x
the harvest from this variety. No wonder most farms choose it.
However, after we put it in the boxes, my
wife cooked it and I became ashamed we included it. By comparison it was bland;
not at all what we wanted to be doing. Fortunately, since it was fresh and
grown in good soil, it still tasted better than store bought ones and some
customers even complimented it. But I knew it was far from what we should have
been serving.
The same goes for Broccoli, many customers
have mentioned they never liked Broccoli before they cooked ours. We’ve settled
on two varieties, one takes 90 days to mature, the other 66 days. This compares
to a common commercial variety that takes 49 days.
Snap peas and snap beans are both
vegetables whose taste has almost been eviscerated commercially. I’ve grown
backyard vegetables for over two decades mainly to get good tasting peas and
beans. Commercial farms all plant bush peas and beans that all mature at the
same time and are machine harvested. Very efficient and keeps the price low. The
older pole varieties have deeper roots and mature over an extended time. They
have to be manually harvested often, so few, not even small market farmers,
will grow them. But they taste great! This year will be growing Sugar Snap peas
and Scarlet Emperor Runner beans, the tastiest varieties that will grow in our
climate. Hopefully we’ll have enough labor to harvest them, otherwise we’ll
invite volunteers to pick them for a portion of the crop.
We are taking a chance on Kale this year.
Last year we grew Ripor a beautiful “frilly” type you see in stores often. Two
different seed catalogs have stated, though, that White Russian Kale is the
tastiest. It doesn’t look as good, but we have switched over to it. Hope the
catalogs are right.
For cucumbers we’ve settled on an older
variety, Marketmore 76. We’ll keep trying others, but we’ve already tried
Corinato, Diva, Marketmore 97, … These other varieties look great, have almost
perfect figures with uniform dark color, like they’ve just stepped out of a
tanning salon. They look good on store shelves and if you eat them, they taste
great. But if you eat them next to a Marketmore 76, the 76 will taste even
greater and your opinion of the others will drop.
Zucchinis:
This year, half of our plantings are Costata Romanesco. Here’s what Johnny’s Seed Catalog says: “Traditional Italian Heirloom with the best
flavor … with only half the yield of hybrids, but much better flavor, … nutty
and delicious.” The catalog lists 10 other zucchinis, not one of the other
descriptions even mentions taste, just how prolific and attractive they are.
Hopefully the Romanesco’s will grow well enough in our cooler climate.
Our variety
trails and explorations go on and will continue as we continue to hone in on
the best tasting varieties for each vegetable we grow. We do need to warn our
new CSA subscribers, that some members have told us they don’t enjoy going out
to restaurants as much anymore. Now they pay attention to how the vegetables
taste and are usually disappointed at restaurants. They cook at home more often now.
Soil
Vitality
The health
of the soil probably makes a big impact on flavor. Having biologically alive
soil with lots of organic matter should result in happier plants developing
more complex flavors. While I’ve never seen a definitive study, most long term
gardeners correlate great soil with great taste.
A lot of
media discusses sustainable farming. To truly discuss sustainable you need to
include “at what soil vitality level”. On one extreme you can say hydroponic
greenhouses are sustainable, yet they don’t even grow in soil or organic
matter. They use liquid, petroleum derived fertilizers and grow in inert
mediums that have no alive biology. Yet you could state they are sustainable.
We probably will never run out of enough petroleum products to produce
fertilizer. Also many Midwest farms, where the topsoil has been severely
eroded, can also be “sustainable”. Their soil is virtually lifeless from
tilling, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers, just like growing
hydroponically. This can be sustained as
long a petroleum and gas based chemicals are available, which currently seems
not to be a concern.
On the other
extreme, the most biologically alive soil is usually in backyard gardens that
use no-till, heavy mulch, organic techniques. The soil contains multitudes of
worms, insects, microbes, …. It produces
great tasting, nutritious vegetables. However, these techniques haven’t proved
to be economically sustainable. It takes
too much labor to establish these growing beds and the plethora of insects
typically munch down any small transplants or direct seeded vegetables. A couple market farms I visited or read
about, use no-till and add a layer of compost each year to the bed. They try to
completely eliminate weeds and don’t use cover crops. Their soil is quite
alive, but it’ hard to say whether it is “more alive” than a bed that has a
variety of weeds growing along with the main crop. One farm even grows in weeds, soils great,
harvests though aren’t an example of good economic sustainability.
Our own approach to soil vitality is
evolving. Originally we tried no-till, but the weeds got to be too many and
just putting down finished compost lead to a reduction in worms. Worms need
uncomposted organic matter to feed on. Currently we are cover cropping over the
winter and then doing a light/shallow till in the spring. We add about an inch
of wood chips before tilling. After the shallow till, we mulch with an inch of
compost and wood chips mixed at a 2:1 ratio.
The wood chips attract worms. A Cornell University 15-year study looked
at the differences between cover cropping, adding wood chips and doing nothing
to improve soil each year. Interestingly, adding wood chips did more to improve
the soil than traditional covering cropping. Yields were slightly higher,
organic matter more, and the worm count was several times more. Our goal is to
have biological alive soil with many worms in it all year round.
Virtually all farms, organic included,
don’t have worms in the soil during the main growing season. The big organic
farms, like Earthbound and Lakeside Organics, have really developed cost
efficient methods for growing organically, which is a great contribution. A
recent study showed that 4 out of 10 nursing mothers in America have Roundup, a
chemical herbicide/weed killer, in their breast milk. So having inexpensive
organic produce available is a great contribution to society.
The soil vitality at the large organic
farms though is actually quite low. You
won’t find one worm in them during the growing season. A typical procedure is
to heavily till the soil and flame to eliminate all weeds. Then organic fertilizer is applied and a thin
1/8” layer of compost spread. The compost isn’t to increase the organic matter
in the soil, it primarily reintroduces biological life/microbes back into the
soil that can then break down the fertilizer for the plants. The procedure is
just repeated for each crop. The soil doesn’t improve, and actually loses
organic matter over time, but it is an organic method and is very efficient.
For our soil, we hope that every shovelful
of dirt will have worms in it all year round. We’re not there yet, but striving
towards it.
Climate
For many
crops climate, notable heat or cold, makes the fruit sweeter. Oranges need heat, whereas crops like
broccoli, chard, and kale get sweeter with cold weather. Given we can’t change
the weather, we work with what it gives us.
What about
the secret ingredient? Well, it’s the
most important one—too important to discuss only at the end of an article. It deserves
a full article to itself. Once written, we’ll post it on our farm blog at: www.AnandaValleyFarm.com.
May all your
harvests be joyful,
Eric Munro
Farming
Manager
Ananda
Valley Farm
Half Moon
Bay CA
