Organic Radish Soap

When Seed Bank shoppers wait in line at the checkout counter, many are drawn to pick up one of the vegetable soaps on display beneath and give it a sniff. They often even add a bar or two to their purchase.

These produce inspired soaps containing certified organic ingredients are such popular sellers that we decided to talk to their creators and share the story behind such gardener friendly “flavors” as carrot, radish, and cucumber.

What we discovered is that the 5 ounce bars actually get their natural vegetable garden essences from certified organic vegetables, fruits, and herbs grown on a 500 acre beef ranch in Nicasio.

There’s a lot of mooing going on as grass fed cows roam the hills of this west Marin property called Cow Track Ranch, but amongst the blond landscape, green oasises thrive—two acres in all—where organic farmer Liz Daniels raises the produce and herbs that find their way into the Gourmet Garden Soap that’s become a Seed Bank favorite.

Her soaps are actually made with the “leftovers,” says Liz, who owns the ranch with husband, Bruce, a large animal veterinarian. “That way nothing goes to waste.”

Liz Daniels Weeding Lettuce in Her Organic Garden

What Liz means is that the certified organic produce and herbs she raises have other purposes. Pounds and pounds go to Marin Organic’s school lunch program, and the rest of her just picked veggies, fruit, and herbs go to local restaurants and fine food purveyors, including Point Reyes’ Stellina, Café Reyes, and Cowgirl Creamery as well as a west Marin deli and whole food market.

Liz’s favorite thing about raising her crops—which makes for 12 hour days—is the satisfaction of feeding so many people, she says, about 2,000 a week.

The soap making idea came about when Moon Essence, a Petaluma salon, day spa and body and skin care product manufacturer, was making some wine scented soaps and Liz provided them with organically grown Zinfandel grapes for a Zin soap. “I said ‘why not carrot’,” she recalls. “They said ‘yes,’ and then it all just took on a life of its own.” Liz’s Gourmet Garden Soap line was born.

In addition to carrot, radish, and cucumber, there’s melon, rosemary, pear, lavender, even garlic—for the campers, she adds. It’s a natural mosquito repellent. Plum and peach are coming, and ladyfinger grape, an exotic grape variety.

Ted Giammona, owner of Moon Essence, where Liz’s Gourmet Garden Soaps are made, says that in a way her line has a seasonal aspect like a vegetable garden. For example, coming up with the fall harvest is a pumpkin soap.

Other flavors can be made year ‘round from produce that has been frozen, he adds, including pear, carrot, rosemary, and lavender.

In addition to being made of natural ingredients—like all the body and skin care products manufactured by Moon Essence—Liz’s line actually has the certified organic fruits, vegetables, and herbs (in a finely processed state) added right into the soap. Other ingredients include certified organic olive oil and coconut oil and purified distilled water and essential oil.

Remember to take a sniff the next time you’re at The Seed Bank’s checkout counter—if there are any bars left, that is.

You can find out more about Cow Track Ranch at www.cowtrack.net and about Petaluma’s Moon Essence Salon and Day Spa at www.moonessence.com. 

Sue Capella is a Northern California garden writer, photographer, and artist. She can be reached suecapella@gmail.com.

Clarington Forge Toolmaker

We have the late Alan Chadwick, a leading innovator of organic farming techniques, to thank for the fact that we can buy the best gardening tools ever made here in the U.S., including at The Seed Bank in Petaluma, CA.

In the sixties, when Chadwick was teaching French intensive gardening at the University of California at Santa Cruz, he wanted all his students to use the same tools he did, a treaded digging spade and digging fork handmade in his homeland of England by the infamous tool maker Bulldog Tools, says Robert Larsen, a San Francisco based importer of the finely crafted tools. Chadwick had a spade and fork shipped out for each of them, Robert adds.

These best of the best, hand forged gardening tools are sold nowadays in the U.S. under the Clarington Forge trademark, but they’re still made at the same location—Clarington Forge in Wigan, Britain—and in the same way they were over 200 years ago when brothers William and Henry Parkes founded the company in 1780.

Clarington Forge tools are all handmade with up to seven men crafting each particular implement as it is passes through 12 sections in the forge. This doesn’t even include the crafting of the classic hardwood handles, which are handmade in another area of the site and include a steaming and drying process that takes up to two days. And literature on this landmark company shares how proud Clarington Forge craftsman are to create such fine tools, many having worked there for a lifetime.

A “forge” is traditionally the workshop of a blacksmith, and in this instance it’s also the process used to create Clarington Forge tools, which are formed by heating and hammering the implements into shape, Robert explains. For the majority of their tools, the company uses Boron steel, which provides flexibility to absorb shock and durability to endure the pressure of hard work.

Most Clarington Forge tools are made of one solid piece of steel from head to shaft for durability that lasts a lifetime.

Gardener using a Clarington Forge spade

“If you look at how much time, effort, and energy it takes to craft these pieces, you’d be surprised that they don’t cost more than they do,” says Robert.

He says he’ll run into gardeners who have their 30 year old digging fork in the car with them—still in prime condition. These tools are “guaranteed for the life of the tool of defects in materials or workmanship,” he adds.

Check out our Clarington Forge line at The Seed Bank—we have weeding trowels, transplanting trowels, garden spades, weeding forks, hoes, rakes and more—or call us at the store at 707 509 5171 for more information about simply the best tools made.

Sue Capella is a home and garden writer, photographer, and artist living in Northern California. She can be reached at SueCapella@gmail.com

Cookbook authors Cathryn Couch and JoEllen DeNicola

Author and food activist Michael Pollan has given us “Food Rules” for choosing healthy foods and eating habits, and if you need some ideas on what to do with those fresh, whole foods you’re harvesting from your garden and filling your canvas bags with at the grocer, Cathryn Couch and JoEllen DeNicola can help.

The two Sebastopol women have authored “Nourishing Connections: The Healing Power of Food and Community,” a cookbook that provides the basics for creating healthful meals daily.

As Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company provides gardeners and farmers with heirloom, non GMO seeds for growing the most nutritionally potent—and flavorful—fruits and vegetables, Cathryn and JoEllen’s cookbook is designed to help everyone create delicious, easy to make dishes from whole foods for meals packed with the highest nutritional value.

In an organic nutshell, the idea is “to make it really easy to nourish yourself and those you love,” says Cathryn.

Yet Cathryn, a professional chef, former Director of Communications for The Hunger Project—US, and former manager for a home delivered meal service, and JoEllen, a nutritionist, holistic nutrition educator, and organic gardener, didn’t set out to write a cookbook. “Nourishing Connections” immerged as a natural next step in the ever evolving Ceres Community Project formed in 2007 out of Cathryn’s inclination to say “yes” rather than “no” (more about that later).

The Sebastopol based nonprofit provides delicious and nutritious whole food meals and community support to individuals and families touched by life threatening illness, sometimes for up to a year. The creators of these meals are mostly teen volunteers (although there are adult volunteers too), and the meals are made from the generous food donations of local farmers and grocers as well as through generous financial donations from businesses and organizations near and far.

Ceres Community Project was born out of Cathryn’s idea of donating the meals she and a friend’s daughter were cooking together to local families dealing with cancer—the result of Cathryn saying “yes” to the mother’s request for a summer cooking job for her daughter and of a fortuitous connection was made when Cathryn asked a friend in the local cancer support community if they knew anyone who could use help with meals. The girl’s mother donated the money to pay for the food, Cathryn donated her time, and what followed were three years of serendipitous events, including the generosity and perseverance of many in helping the Ceres Community Project evolve to what it is today.

“The vision was very clear,” Cathryn writes in “Nourishing Connections,” “and I sensed an elegance to it—the way that it addressed so many needs in the community and so many things that I cared deeply about. Young people would learn to cook. People who needed healing food would have it. We would help teach people about the link between what we eat and our health. And we’d help to restore the idea of caring for our neighbors, something that had been lost between my parents’ generation and my own.”

To date, Ceres Community Project has provided over 55,000 meals and taught close to 300 teen volunteers how to cook healthfully and how good it feels to do something for others.

Cathryn is the Project’s executive director and JoEllen, who Cathryn met when she attended one of JoEllen’s healthful cooking classes, is the organization’s nutrition director. Yet beyond their titles, these are two women are working hard to get the word out about eating healthily. “Our mission,” they write in their cookbook, “is to restore whole, local and organically grown food to its place as the foundation of health and healing for people, communities and the earth.”

Volunteers in the Kitchen

Also offered through the Ceres Community Project are cooking classes for those wanting to create healthy meals for their ill loved ones as well as general cooking classes open to the public. (Ceres, by the way, is the name of mythology’s Roman goddess of growing plants, the harvest, and mother’s love.)

The project is always looking for volunteers, both teens and adults, and donations of case load amounts of whole foods as well as monetary contributions are always welcome.

For more information about Ceres Community Project and the “Nourishing Connections” cookbook, visit www.ceresproject.org.

Sue Capella is a Northern California home and garden writer, photographer and artist. She can be reached at SueCapella@gmail.com.

We’ve really been busy adding new products for sale in the gift shop of the Comstock, Ferre & Co. store including handmade braided rugs, handcrafted cold-process herbal soaps from Country Family Soaps and Bayberry Meadow Herbs and the above pictured lanterns that are wired for electric!

Paul Greenberg NY Times Magazine and National Geographic Journalist

 Maybe you don’t give fish a second thought. You shop for fresh fillets at your favorite whole food market and enjoy a salmon dinner now and then. But if you attended food journalist Paul Greenberg’s talk at The Seed Bank last night, you’ll most likely look at this ocean-born food source a little differently from now on.

Greenberg, who writes for New York Times Magazine and National Geographic, spoke about his new book “Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food,” sharing some real eye-openers, like the fact that “90 million tons of fish come out of the sea each year—the equivalent in weight to the entire human population of China.

“Wild fish seemed to be a crop, harvested from the sea, that magically grew itself back every year. A crop that never required planting,” said Greenberg, who spoke to a good-sized crowd as part of a series of author events The Seed Bank co-hosts at the store with Copperfield’s Books.

Also, added Greenberg, “in the fifties, only a portion of our oceans were fished. Now, the whole world is a fishing ground.”

And another interesting fact from Greenberg: “Per capita, fish consumption has doubled in the past 50 years.”

You can see where this is going: Our wild fish supply is becoming depleted. Greenberg illustrates this depletion in his book by focusing on four fish he could always count on seeing at the Connecticut Fish Market near where he grew up: salmon, sea bass, cod, and tuna.

At one time, he writes in “Four Fish,” as many as 100 million Atlantic salmon larvae hatched every year in the upper Connecticut River, making their way south to Long Island Sound, north to Greenland, and then back to the Berkshire foothills to spawn. Nowadays, due to overfishing and numerous dams, this healthy population is dwindling. The salmon we buy and eat today is all farmed, he writes. “Fifty percent of our seafood is farmed.” (And in a few years, this number will exceed the halfway mark.)

Attendees at The Seed Bank talk shared their experiences ordering salmon from restaurants here and on the East Coast from menus claiming “wildly farmed” and “organic” salmon. “There is no such thing as organic fish,” said Greenberg, (at least here in the states.) And as for “wildly farmed,” well, that descriptor got a big laugh from the crowd.

(Currently, a proposed pebble mine to be built near the waters of Bristol Bay, the easternmost arm of the Bering Sea, is threatening enormous Alaskan salmon runs, Greenberg also shared. Click here for more info.)

Greenberg's new book .

Greenberg, a life-long fisherman, is an enthusiastic, energetic speaker and a well-schooled expert on global fishing. His book provides land and sea reporting on the subject from Yukon to Greece and from Long Island Sound to the Mekong Delta. He shares stories of accompanying fishermen on fishing trips near and far as well as a plethora of information on aquaculture and the ecosystems of the wild oceans.

What needs to happen, stressed Greenberg, “is that we need to come up with a roster of farmed fish that don’t impede on wild fish.”

Wild fish need to be reframed as “something precious,” he added, just as deer are viewed as an “animal” and “game,” wild fish need to be redefined as “game.”

Paul Greenberg invited last night’s audience to continue the discussion and to direct questions to him at www.fourfish.com.

Sue Capella is a Northern California home and garden writer, photographer, and artist. She can be reached at SueCapella@gmail.com.

Kenwood beekeeper Randy Sue Collins with a honeycomb pulled from her Hex Hive.

Randy Sue’s newest creation is a hexagon shaped beehive. The only one like it in existence, she says. Called the Hex Hive, it consists of five “bee boxes,” an inner cover and a peaked roof. You start by placing the first two boxes on a stand with cover and roof and add on the rest as your swarm grows.

A beehive’s design—slightly offset hexagon‑shaped cells—is used in the engineering of airplane floors, says Randy Sue.

It’s designed for the comfort of the bee in the same shape as the hexagonal cells in a honeycomb, she explains. The popular Langstroth hive developed in the 1800s is rectangular for the beekeeper’s convenience, she says.

The densely packed matrix of hexagonal cells that form the front and back of the honeycomb are slightly offset, she points out. It’s such a strong design that it’s used in the engineering of airplane floors, she says.

Randy Sue’s first Hex Hive customer was John Lassiter, chief creative officer at Pixar and Disney Animation Studios. She also recently sold two to a New York interior designer. But you don’t have to be a mover and shaker to purchase one or have a lot of beekeeping knowledge. They’re easy to maintain, she says.

Randy Sue, a member of the Sonoma County Beekeepers Association, will even come get your hive started for you, and she provides beekeeping services as part of her business

Randy Sue’s beeswax candles and skin care and bath products can be found at The Seed Bank

Bees are a great resource for your garden, she says. They pollinate your plants; they give you locally produced honey, which when consumed helps people with hay fever type allergies; the hive helps populate the diminishing bee population; and it’s great for teaching families more about nature.

Randy Sue says her bees have taught her a lot, including patience, a greater respect for nature, that there’s a purpose for everything, and, bee lieve it or not, to be less judgmental. There are so many ideas and theories about bees, and so much we don’t know yet, she explains, and she’s learned to better accept that everyone has different opinions and ways of looking at bees and at everything in life. This acceptance is another way, like her business card says, to “bee happy.”

Sue Capella is a Northern California home and garden writer, photographer, and artist. She can be reached at SueCapella@gmail.com.

We received our first collection of consignment antiques today…they are for sale in the second floor room, formerly the home of “Sit & Knit.”  The owner formerly owned an antique store, so these are some beautiful pieces! We’ll be adding new items every week so please stop by often!

Inside and out, the renovations and organizing are moving right along at the new Comstock, Ferre & Co. store! We’ve been welcomed with open arms by neighbors and folks who have read about the new owners, Jere and Emilee Gettle, in local newspapers and on the News. We’ve even been visited by the New York Times who will be running a piece on Jere and Comstock, Ferre & Co. in August.

Some Recent Highlights

Neighbors, Pamela Hall and Damien Creguau, walked down the historic Main Street to the store in their historic outfits to give a very special welcome!

Paul from the Petaluma store, The Seed Bank, has been working extremely hard arranging the seeds, the various antiques, and making the place warm and welcoming.

And Jere has been arranging displays of historic Comstock, Ferre & Co. heirlooms; seed packets, seed packing memorabilia, and special treasures.

The heat has been recordbreaking…or feels that way at least, but the new garden beds are looking beautiful.

So, if you are in the area, stop in and say HI! We’re currently open 9:00 – 5:00 p.m., Monday – Friday. We’d love to show you around!

We’re on Facebook, too!