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PHONE: 619.662.1780
CSA Inquiries, please email rodrigo@suziesfarm.com
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For Farmer's Market Info, please email britta@suziesfarm.com
ADDRESS & DIRECTIONS:
For scheduled farm tours, our Kiki Town address is:
1856 Saturn Boulevard, San Diego CA 92154
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Restaurants & Chefs
Did you know Suzie’s Farm delivers in San Diego five days a week? Not only that, several acres of our farm in San Diego’s Border State Park is dedicated to custom growing for the specific needs (and imagination) of our local chefs. Can you say boutique and convenience all in one breath? You don’t have to. Just say Suzie’s Farm. Visit our Chef's Page to view our delivery schedule and learn more about our partnership with restaurants.
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- We’re Jammin’
- Box Contents September 7-12
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- Winter Squash with Caramelized Onions
- Box Contents, August 31-September 5
- Eggplant Salad with Dill and Garlic
- moon gardening…
- Box Contents, August
- Have your Way With Fava Beans
- Box Contents, August 17/18
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- Zesty Wheat Berries…Friend or Foe?
- Much Ado ‘Bout Okra
- Upheaval
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Having lived on or near the coast San Diego since 1985, I’m fairly familiar with May Gray and June Gloom.
Summer is my least favorite time of year. The heat makes me irritable. I grow impatient with the longer day-time hours. I don’t like sweating. I’m fairly obsessed with my skin, so I tend toward big hats, long-sleeved shirts and pants. I warn the young kids who come to work on the farm. They dare the sun in shorts and tank tops. For some overalls complete their look. Boots are as standard as the flip-flop.
I come from a desert dwelling, olive-complected people. This only makes me keenly aware of the sun’s effects. As a rule, you don’t see indigenous equator dwellers in minimal clothes. Protection is imperative. The full-time crew usually wears double and triple layers of clothes, neck bands and wide hats. They wear knee-high galoshes to keep their feet dry and clean. The wear gloves. My look is somewhere in between.
I adore May Gray and June Gloom. It puts Summer off for just a little bit longer. It makes San Diego feel like a real coastal town, instead of a weedy sprawl.
The calender says Summer. Tourists come, flooding the highways and parking lots with Arizona plates and rental cars. What a surprise when they arrive to an overcast, chilly and breezy summer vacation!
Again this is a case of The Farmer vs. The Lu.
The personal me loves the gray and gloom. The Farmer is getting antsy for some sun.
The calendar can call it Summer and Vacation until September, but until we get some sun and heat, the plants tell a different story.
The plants are on an extended Spring Break; San Diego style, of course with cool days and nights, 19-hour marine layer and 2-5 mph offshore breezes.
I always hated hearing the locals complain about the “weather”. Just as with the rainy season, two or three days and people get antsy. More than two weeks and people get entitled and resentful, as though by having the luxury or choice of living in San Diego, we are entitled to thousands of unremarkable, tasteless days. 72 and mild.
These cooler, longer days make a mess of things in the field. Tomatoes we put in the ground March 17, have had fruit set since the middle of May - almost two months. Production on 1.5 acres is nothing more than 20 cases per week.
Robin walks our 33 varieties. He grabs them off the vine. He savages them, certain he will find a culprit. There. A worm, pinky-long and rearing at the intrusion. With many weeks and opportunities to have buried itself deep in our work. He wrenches a bite of fruit in his mouth, juice dripping, then spits it to the ground. It is pronounced worse than unfit. He flings the remaining fruit down, crushing it under his boot as he searches for his next victim. Worm. Tomato. It doesn’t matter now. Both oppose us.
The worthy are few and far between. Our workers curry the rows twice a day. The sun gives weakly from 2pm - 4pm. The eggplant struts under its cockscomb of flowers. The okra is short and crimped.
We are waiting.
A longer break in the sun. A few days above 70. A calm day without offshore breezes. Any of these could help things along.
We walk along the field sections - 203, 204, 211, 213 - squinting into the rows. We search their length for a splash of red. A weighted branch. A bloom. Anything that will forecast a surge in production. Forward action. A gain in momentum.
We prospect the sky, its gentle grey undulations soft as pillows, cold as dew.
We had a few weeks there - in the beginning of June, where it looked like we wouldn’t have too much Gloom at all. Fickle, Summer has cannonballed into the grey soup.
We wait.
Most days, instead of heading to the office first - to the inevitable erupting emails and the pulsating voicemail light - I head to Kiki Town. I circumvent the field production and dip along the westernmost side of the property. The land is higher there. The native flora offers protection from the afternoon winds. It is a fine place for winter production. There the nine hives sit, facing southwest, away from the field. They are innocuously placed; two stacked, one, two stacked, two stacked and two side-by-side. Their clean white wood homes remind me of the cardboard file boxes we use for our end-of-the-year paperwork. I like to climb over the rabbit fence and sit facing them, and the 40-acre parcel, to the northeast. Here I can see the bees practice their landing and departing patterns. They dip and sigh down into the bottom of the hive. They tenuously paw toward the exit, maybe blinded by the sun, before they set their intention and take off. The bees cheer me.
The gloom is pervasive. The field production is glacial in its speed. Even the bees in their industry, aren’t showing results. They aren’t showing them. But the results are there. Crystalizing. Warm amber, smelling sweet. Of summer.
The Farmer is winning over The Lu.
It won’t be too long now.