Afoot in a Brentwood Garden of Eden

A visit to Knoll Farms

By Cheryl Koehler

 

 

As a casual Westerner, I always feel an odd sense of awe when visiting a home where the convention is to take off one’s shoes at the door. The custom implies a certain honoring of the space within the home. It was a similar feeling that arose on driving up to Knoll Farm in Brentwood. Within the densely planted strip there is little room for a motorized vehicle to maneuver, and although there are no instructions to abandon all cars on the farm’s narrow Byron Highway frontage, it feels like the right thing to do.

Kristie and Rick Knoll bought this 10 acres of Brentwood farmland in 1979 with the intention of living alongside their chickens and their large biodynamic kitchen garden. Since then, the garden has morphed into a 10-acre edible forest supplying specialty produce to Bay Area markets and restaurants like Chez Panisse. And while those lovingly tended crops would seem to be that which is now most honored here, even the famous Knoll figs, green garlic, and rosemary play but a single part in the big Knoll Farm dance of life. They share the stage with all manner of weeds (important to the biodynamic balance), cover crops (some of which are sold as food), the dirt, the weather, the workers, the chickens, a pot-bellied pig, and especially the myriad of worms, insects, and microbes that carry out the farm’s most specialized duties.

 

 

 

“We always try to have something blooming to bring in the nectar gatherers,” says Kristie Knoll as we take an early summer walk through a plum grove where a wide patch of rosemary twinkles with little white blossoms. Indeed, there are flowers everywhere for the nectar gathers to ravage: cosmos grow thickly between the fig trees; flowering peas twine through a patch of red chard, over a rose bush, and around a gigantic prickly pear cactus. The amaranth, with its gaudy magenta plume-like flowers, looks like it’s trying to upstage the demure silver foliage of a small olive grove. Artichokes as high as an elephant’s eye proceed into full purple bloom.

Wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Dirt First” Kristie Knoll details the effort that they put into a daily rebuilding of the farm’s soil, working it with compost, chipped stone and oyster shells, and, no doubt, the manure from their small menagerie of beasts. “As plants take nutrients out of the soil you need to put them back,” she says. “It’s like a savings account.”

She describes the role of the ants: “they aerate the ground and take nutrients down deep into the soil,” and she even honors the wasps for their role in decomposing creatures that happen to take their last gasps somewhere on the acreage. “We struggle with them,” she admits, but as she outlines the challenges of biodynamic farming, it seems that the only true pests in the vicinity are the conventional farmers working the cornfield next door. “They aren’t supposed to spray next to us,” she says, implying that sometimes they do anyway. “The chemicals drift through the air and pollute the groundwater. It’s a problem for everyone.”

 

 

 

Still the Knolls go to great efforts to keep on friendly terms with the conventional farmers—they understand that the farmers all are partners in the larger cause of keeping agriculture alive in Brentwood. “This is some class-one soil for farming,” says Kristie Knoll. “It would only take three or four supervisors’ votes to change the zoning.” Her words reverberate out on the roads where the relentless incursion of subdivisions and strip malls has changed the sleepy, rural byways into a raging stream of oil-swilling metal beasts. Even at midday, getting onto Byron Highway from the Knoll Farm parking strip can involve a long wait for a break in the traffic.

As we walk past a patch of lemon verbena, Kristie Knoll notes that the aromatic herb was used to flavor ice cream made up for a recent Brentwood Agricultural Land Trust (BALT) fundraiser. Like land trusts springing up all over the country, BALT is in business “to create agricultural conservation easements that provide farmers with an economically viable alternative to selling their land for development.” The BALT website explains that when the organization buys the zoning easements, it allow farmers to “continue to own and farm their land while receiving compensation for the development value of the land, as well as significant tax benefits.” It’s a reasonably simple equation that is being applied more and more as communities begin to recognize what is being lost to urban sprawl.

Perhaps the more complex equations are the one calculated every day within a finely tuned agro-ecosystem like Knoll Farm, or the one we each consider daily as we make our seemingly simple food buying decisions. Acknowledging that the Knoll Farm produce may seem expensive, Kristie Knoll points out some of the hidden costs we bear through our taxes and health insurance when we buy into the conventional food production system: farm subsidies (that go mostly to large agribusiness), treatment for chemical induced illnesses like cancer, environmental cleanup, and the heartbreakingly inadequate social services that prop up our nation’s underpaid farm workers.

 

 

 

Out in the agro-forest that is Knoll Farm, the workers hand pick the figs for our Chez Panisse salad wearing surgical gloves and using a knife that Rick Knoll designed to protect against the skin-burning liquid that oozes from each cut fig stem. The precautions add to the cost, but the Knolls have understood from their own experience that their pickers could not continue to work if their hands were damaged.

“The choice is ours,” the Knolls often say. “We must remember: things of value are not attained cheaply or easily.”

The yard around the Knoll’s living and working quarters exhibits a similar haphazard aesthetic to that of the full 10-acre farm, but yet many of the Knoll’s friends and acquaintances opt to hold weddings and parties here, taking advantage of Rick Knoll’s hand-built outdoor oven where various foods get wrapped in leaves of fig, grape, horseradish, and artichoke, or skewered on twigs of rosemary and then roasted over wood pruned from the shrubby herbs and fruit trees.

Such lively cooking makes for a daily celebration of food at the farm, except for about one day a week when the Knolls make their way to a Brentwood eatery. Kristie Knoll says that they rarely go further because they don’t like fighting traffic and trying to park. “Our favorite places to eat when we feel like making a federal case outa getting there and back are Oliveto and Dopo in Oakland; Chez Panisse and Eccolo in Berkeley; Blue Plate, Greens, Le Petit Robert and Incanto in San Francisco; Va de Vi in Walnut Creek.

I didn’t check, but I suspect there’s a good chance the Knolls would be eating some exceptional produce at these places. Shoppers who want to find Knoll products can go to Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco, Monterey Market in Berkeley, Market Hall Produce in Oakland, Raley’s in Brentwood, the Brentwood Farmers Market, and the Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market in San Francisco.

 

knollorganics.com. The Knoll Farm website includes many pages of fascinating information and a long, passionate essay on the philosophy behind the Knoll’s work at Knoll Farm.