vegetables | Backyard Roots

Chef/owner Christian Caiazzo at his old Pt Reyes farm.

A trip to Pt Reyes is always about landscape. The rugged wind swept fields, the farms, the ocean, it’s always the experience of the place that you remember. Osteria Stellina is about place too but the experience is more on the savory side. 80-90% of the food on the menu is grown nearby. From Bill Nimans organic, pasture-raised beef to local cheeses, oysters from Drake’s Bay, and specialty crops like broccolini from Fresh Run Farms, everything featured on the menu is local. Chef Christian Caiazzo is so serious about local he’s taken it to the next level, growing food for the restaurant at a farm nearby. He began growing produce back in 2010 just a year after he opened his restaurant and the reason he started is probably not what you’d expect. Osteria Stellina was producing a lot of vegetable scraps and there was no service to recycle the trimmings. He ended up taking it home and composting it himself. Not long afterwards he had some excellent soil amendments, and growing greens on the quarter acre behind his house near Pt Reyes seemed like the natural next step. When I visited his restaurant and farm last year for a Wall Street Journal restaurant review, I was impressed with the beautiful organic vegetables.

Since then the farm has moved to West Petaluma where the weather is better and the farm is bigger: tomatoes, peppers eggplants can grow during the summer as well as greens. During the growing season up to 35-40% of the fresh produce comes from the farm, with food delivered fresh 4 to 5 times a week. He works closely with farmer Molly Myerson and they are able to experiment. This year they had amazing luck with sunchokes; he uses them in soups, purées and roasts them. On the other hand, the 1500 strawberries they planted this year did not produce nearly the amount they hoped for. They also raise quail for eggs and meat and hope to start experimenting with shiitakes and oyster mushrooms. So next time you’re in Pt Reyes taste it, as well as see it. Support a local restaurant and farm with some seriously delicious food at Osteria Stellina.

The old farm was just a couple of miles from the Pt Reyes restaurant.

Kelli Barram, center, with fourth graders in the edible garden at Washington Elementary School in Richmond CA.

What kid wouldn’t want to hatch chicks from eggs? The lucky fourth graders at Washington Elementary school in Richmond, CA get to learn everything about chickens firsthand in a program called “An Eggucational Experience.” From watching the embryos develop in eggs (they use flashlights in a darkened classroom to look through the eggs), then witnessing them hatching and then helping them raise them into chickens, they do it all. It’s project-based learning that excites kids to become responsible and engaged. The chicken program is also a springboard for other core curriculum subjects from essay writing and anatomy lessons, and it’s so popular Kelli has had younger kids tell her they “can’t wait to be fourth graders.”

The program didn’t even exist before Kelli Barram began volunteering at the school back in 2009. She was an urban farmer between jobs who worked as a therapist to pay the bills. She found her own best therapy was working in the garden so naturally, when Washington Elementary, the school her kids attended, had a garden that needed help she volunteered. It was a niche that wasn’t filled and the school was thrilled to have someone interested enough to take over. Kelli found that when many kids had the option to be in the garden, they would take it. The principal was so impressed she helped find funding to pay “Farmer Kelli” to stay around. She also was eventually able to find additional funding through Urban Tilth, a local group that cultivates agriculture in West Contra Costa County. She now works with all 21 classes of kids at the school and the teachers incorporate the outdoor classroom in all kinds of lessons. Her three day a week job is very busy but she’s not complaining. “Of course it’s a great job, she says, “I made it up.”