Purple caulifower? Orange cauliflower? Who knew!

“It just feels like trickery,” laughs Charlotte Romo, the farm’s hydroponic crop specialist. She says her work in the farm’s “Variety Garden,” where she is experimenting with growing interesting varieties of vegetables, feels like playing.

 

 
Charlotte with some of her vegetables

“I was telling one of my old professors from the University of Arizona about my job and she said, ‘You just lucked out.’ You know, I can even see the ocean from the greenhouses.”

“Richard and I kept getting these ideas,” she says. “Can we grow this? Let’s try.”

They are interesting varieties that she is growing—not much in the Variety Garden is run-of-the-mill. There are things like tiny carrots that are purple outside and orange inside; beet sprouts, which taste like beets and are a fuscia color; beets with a pink and white spiral inside; sweet golden beets, which are, you know, golden; pea sprouts; and lots of different squashes.

Purple carrots

There’s also eggplant, and a bi-colored sweet corn, and peppers—hot peppers, bell pepper, all kind of in-between, white bell peppers. And there are tomatillos, and also more varieties of heirloom tomatoes, some of which are just starting to ripen and soon be ready to taste for the first time. “It’s so exciting,” she says. “I really like it.”

“With heirlooms,” she explains, “they are the true, naked, ancient seed, so they don’t have anything built into them as far as resistance. Some turn out to be just too much trouble. It’s all about trying them out.”

She explains that her job is to figure out which of these experimental crops grows well, how to water it, what each one’s obstacles are and how to overcome them. She grows a crop for at least one cycle, makes adjustments to her methods as needed, and then grows it out again.

“It’s so fun to grow something for the first time,” she says. “It’s all this different, funny-looking stuff, like stripey vegetables. A lot of these carrots we’re growing are higher in Beta-carotene and Vitamin A than the usual. In the stores, a lot of farms tend to do just one variety based on performance and disease-resistance, rather than color. We will be accomplishing the goal of getting more nutrients out to people by growing these varieties.”

She’s even got really sweet poha berries (“husked tomatoes”) growing in the Variety Garden. “They’re one of those things that has kind of disappeared as people have built where all the wild bushes used to be,” she says.

Charlotte explains that the goal to try different crops and be able to provide more diversity locally, as well as supplying produce to chefs. The plan also includes selling some of these seasonal products in our open-to-the-public farm stand, which is coming soon. More details about that here soon – stay tuned! – posted by Leslie Lang