Farmer's touch yields luxuriant produce
Candi Edmondson nourishes local veggies
Take a bite of a Charentais melon sold by Candi Edmondson and flavor dances onto your tongue. Juice drizzles down your chin. Your whole body awakens. This food comes packed with vitality beyond anything found in the produce aisle at the store.
Edmondson, who markets produce grown by her fiance Paul Wirtz in the Sonoma Valley, has spent nearly ten years cultivating green goodies for Oak Hill Farm. She strolls through their leased ten acres, lovingly pointing out heads of cabbage and flowers of broccoli as if they were children. Farming is "really important work," Edmondson says. "People eat the wrong things because that is what's available. This is for health, to educate people. Eating this food can change their lives." She works farmers' markets to sell food and educate people. It's more important to buy local produce than to select organic food, she observes. Local means fresh. Local allows nutrients to make it to your mouth, supports local business and keeps ground open for small farms.
She stops at a glistening row of collard greens flanked by two kinds of kale. "Those are weeds," Edmondson says, noting sprouts between bursts of produce. Rather than spending expensive labor to eradicate weeds, they allow them to coexist. "Weeds are helpful," she says. "We can walk on them and not get muddy. They add carbon to the soil. They hold moisture in." A healthy crop can outgrow weeds.
"Isn't it gorgeous?" Edmondson says, holding leaves apart to expose broccoli fit for a queen.
An acre of salad greens yields far more profit than kale. In summer they replant frequently, staging crops to arrive at market. "Economically, farming is not easy," Edmondson says, lamenting at the dearth of vacation time.
"People don't want to spend a lot for food," Edmondson says. "Food should be a higher priority in their economic picture. Small enterprises like this—it's very hard to make a living." Mega-farms that cultivate produce with mega-tools squeeze prices downward.
Yet they do make a living. She sells produce at farmers' markets and to chefs at upscale restaurants. Edmondson radiates pride in her work, the most satisfying of her life, which included years as art director for several publications, and more years training horses and folks how to ride them.
"Here's garlic and celery," she says. The fields abound with tomatoes, eggplant, winter squash, raspberries, herbs, medicinal tulsi basil, onions, beets, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and cabbages. "Anything that can be grown in this area, we grow, except potatoes," Edmondson says. Next year they will not work for Oak Hill Farm, but will continue the operation on their own. They plan to reduce the number of crops while boosting quantity.
Edmondson refuses to drive a tractor. "The clutch is tricky for me," she says, laughing. "Boy you have to drive it straight!" One cultivator is a bit easier to drive because the engine doesn't obscure the view of the work.
"Here's a good example of heirloom fruit," Edmondson says, pointing at rows of plants littered with tomatoes on the ground. "It ripens so unevenly, it's difficult to get each fruit on the day it needs to be picked." Most of the crop goes to waste.
A fine artist at heart, Edmondson takes brushes and canvas into the field. One of her abstract paintings appears below. "I love the beauty," she says. "I am inspired out here. Selling good food is much more important work to me than painting pictures. But I enjoy painting more than anything."
(Click on cabbage above to visit Candi's blog on painting. Click on the broccoli to visit her farm blog.)
—James Dunn
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