This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Business & Tech

The Future Of Food

Love Apple Farm continues to attract attention to its garden beds on Vine Hill Road.

Arguably Santa Cruz County's most famous farm, Love Apple Farm on Vine Hill Road is about to see more of the spotlight. Writer, producer and director Michael Whalen is shooting a documentary about the farm called The Farmer & The Chef.

“People from all over the world arrive with TV cameras and just knock on the door," said Daniel Maxfield, business partner with Cynthia Sandberg of Love Apple Farm. The rural Santa Cruz farm has been featured in Sunset Magazine, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle and many industry zines.

The kind and quality of plants growing in garden beds at the farm attract international attention, because Sandberg, Maxfield and crew are achieving what Maxfield describes as their biodynamic quest for vegetable perfection.

Interested in local real estate?Subscribe to Patch's new newsletter to be the first to know about open houses, new listings and more.

“Currently we cultivate 100 different kinds of vegetables, herbs, fruit and flowers," said Maxfield. "And we're expanding very fast."

The farm will have 200 boxes overflowing with plants and an orchard of 50 fruit trees this year. Gene Lester, Sandberg and Maxfield's local mentor, has the largest private citrus collection in the U.S. and will pass along his knowledge to Love Apple.

Interested in local real estate?Subscribe to Patch's new newsletter to be the first to know about open houses, new listings and more.

"Local is as important as organic," said Maxfield.

Generous with her expertise, Sandberg runs a veritable school for gardeners and farmers. She offers an average of 10 classes every month, including “From Farm to Fork,”especially for kids, cheese-making, garden design, bee-keeping, home preserving and, of course, vegetable and herb growing. The next class is “Making Artisanal Marmalade” with Pim Techamuanvivit, a cult figure in the food world. Sign ups will be taken for the March 13 class at Love Apple website.

Exclusive Kitchen Garden

At least as pretty as the show's hostess, Sandberg appeared on The Martha Stewart Show in May 2010 with Michelin-starred Chef David Kinch. Sandberg's farm is the exclusive potager (kitchen garden) for the vegetables, herbs and edible flowers at his Manresa Restaurant in Los Gatos. The upward spiralling partnership is expanding both farm and restaurant.

Manresa serves such compelling cuisine that people fly in from all over the world just for dinner. Considered one of the best even by other famous chefs, the 17 courses on the tasting menu indicate just how haute is the haute cuisine chez Manresa.

Love Apple provides Manresa with countless pounds of fresh food per month, cultivated in redwood boxes arranged along terraces and filled with soil and amendments according to Rudolph Steiner's methods of biodynamic cultivation. Vegetable scraps from the restaurant go back to the farm to make compost.

Biodynamic Farming For The Future

According to Steiner, "The effect of every kind of synthetic fertilizer, after a time, is that the products grown on the fields thus treated lose their nutritive value."

Sandberg, Maxfield and their apprentices use worm casting tea as their principal fertilizer, which is worm poop marinated in water. This tea repels white flies, aphids and other pests while being a great source of nutrient for almost any plant.

“Put the tea on your seedlings at three weeks, or they'll start to yellow,” advises Sandberg.

Worm casting tea was made available in 2-quart bags for $12 at last week's tomato seedling class at Love Apple Farm. Thirty participants of all ages bent over their 32-cell seedling trays, carefully inserting their choice of more than 150 varieties, with charming appellations such as Amazon Chocolate, Berkeley Tie-Dye, Paul Robeson, Hippie Zebra, Bloody Butcher and Hillbilly. They painstakingly wrote each variety's name on small white plastic sticks and covered their seeds with exactly a quarter-inch of special soil under Sandberg's relaxed guidance.

Participant Sue Villanueva said, “I've grown tomatoes for years, and Cynthia has seeds that aren't available anywhere else.”

When asked about terminator seeds, Sandberg said, “We'll get in trouble with Monsanto's take-over of seeds in this country.” Rather than send her seeds to the world seed bank in Norway, she's building her own.

“I came to tomato class to learn how Cynthia grows them,” said Gary Neier. "I'll get way too many for a backyard gardener, but this class is quick indoctrination and a swift kick into the tomato world."

Participant Jodi Avery from the Morgan Hill/Gilroy/Hollister Fleurs Club, said, “Tomatoes are my favorite food, and I look forward each year to the first one I pick. I planted 150 seeds and got 148 plants.” 

Living Where You Work

Conversation with Maxfield took place while he shoveled and raked oak bark. A former exhibit developer and designer for the San Jose Tech Museum, he's moved onto the property and shares the work load with eight apprentices and two residential investors.

Everyone affiliated with the farm lives there. The farm is self-sustaining and pays its own bills. The 10,000-gallon water tank holds pure, unfiltered water pumped uphill from the aquifer 300 feet away.

“Water is not scarce here, but we use it judiciously,” Maxfield said.

He feels lucky to be on the property, with its sunny terraces, fresh air, views of the tree-dense valley and glimpse of the bay. There is great diversity of wildlife, including bobcats, owls, hawks, rabbits, fox and many species of birds.

The Smothers Brothers, brilliant, ground-breaking comedians yanked from CBS in 1968 for their opposition to the political mainstream, terraced much of this Santa Cruz Mountains acreage for grapevines. When Tom and Dick Smothers come for a visit from their Sonoma Remick Ridge winery, they will marvel at the ground-breaking underway on their former 22 acres. The terraces are now named after biodynamic principles: Horsetail, yarrow, silica, oak, valerian and dandelion.

Top Pests Bugging Love Apple Farmers

Pests plague even a paradise like Love Apple Farm. Residents are vigilant to eradicate aphids, slugs, tomato russet mites and cabbage loopers, the chief malefactors.

Three principal, non-synthetic abatement methods are used: Pyrethrin spray, made from marigolds; diatomaceous earth, which dries out pests as they crawl across the soil; and the ever-popular eradication by hand. Sandberg and Maxfield said the same thing the same way when gophers were mentioned. “We trap 'em and kill 'em.”

“I don't like to kill things, but it's war with gophers.” Maxfield's hands whitened slightly around the shovel handle. “On a farm it's life, sex and death.”

The Beautiful Wizard

Sandberg is Maxfield's mentor whom he knew from her fame as a microfarmer before they met two years ago. “I was a big fan of her work,” he said. "She has few peers. Cynthia's unique model makes her a trailblazer, and at a time of chaotic change. Being a farmer is tough! You have to be good at so many things."

Tall Sandberg wears glasses over lovely eyes on a face that is used to smiling. She declined to state a romantic interest, “you mean someone other than Gael Garcia Bernal?” and showed some teeth when she found a dying six-pack of sprouts an apprentice had neglected to water.

Sandburg spends seven days a week guiding gardeners and farmers in how to extract maximum growth, flavor and nutrition from seeds and soil. She is the same person wearing jeans and boots shoveling compost as she is at table with celebrities.

“People come here wanting to work around Cynthia," said Maxfield. "She can look at a plant and tell you 20 things happening with it.” 

When asked if she has that capacity when she looks at a human, she said, no, only with plants. “It's a calling to love and cultivate plants” she said.

“Some people start but don't know what they're doing and they give up," she continued. "When I had my first black thumb experience, I didn't want to give up. I took classes at Cabrillo Horticulture and continued learning and experimenting. If you fail as a gardener, don't give up. Try again. No one is born with a green thumb. The beauty of gardening is that there is always a next season.”

From Love Apple Farm's website: Biodynamic agriculture is a method of organic farming that treats farms as unified and individual organisms, with an emphasis toward balancing the holistic development and interrelationship of the soil, plants and animals as a closed, self-nourishing system. Regarded by some proponents as the first modern ecological farming system, biodynamic farming includes organic agriculture's emphasis on manures and composts and exclusion of the use of artificial chemicals on soil and plants.

For further reading: Check out the Patch on Seedfolks, a book about a culturally diverse neighborhood cultivating a community garden.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?