Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
A change of life at Stone Farms
Life on the farm must include beer.
“When I moved onto the farm, it was me and my wife Jessica trying to find a change of life,” says David Solomon, manager of Stone Farms in Escondido. “I was in advertising. She was doing international sales. I couldn’t handle being in front of a desk — I felt like I was getting atrophied.”
David Solomon and Jessica Sanchez
This life-changing moment happened back in 2004, when the farmland in question still belonged to Milpa Organica. After “La Milpa” went out of business in late 2010, nearby craft-beer juggernaut Stone Brewing Company stepped in to take over the farm. Now David helms 19 acres of organic crops that range from arugula and potatoes to lemongrass and dragon fruit, produce that supplies the brewery’s bistros and select beers. Last June, the farm opened to the public. The property includes a store with four taps; in other words, you can sip a stout while touring the edible beds. Which is exactly what we did!
It was a cloudy Saturday in late October when we visited the farm, located about 16 miles from the coast and nestled between boulder-studded hills. The Indian runner ducks were quacking up a storm, and Stone’s Dandelion IPA was on tap. But Ryan and I were here to see about another kind of beer: the new Suede Imperial Porter. A collaboration between Stone Brewing, 10 Barrel and Bluejacket breweries, Suede incorporates local avocado honey and dried jasmine, and calendula flowers snipped right from Stone Farms, a few miles away from the brewery. The aroma is undeniably floral, and notes of jasmine and honey slide onto your palate in advance of the traditional coffee and cocoa. Calendula adds a bright bitterness.
The Farm Tour
Drinking from a pint glass of Dandelion IPA, David showed us around the farm, a paradise of agricultural diversity that also includes bull’s blood beets, rhubarb, spinach, broccoli, hydroponically grown microgreens, cabbage, butternut squash, lemongrass, shiitake mushrooms, echinacea, and herbs.
A crew of just seven people makes it all happen. What helps is that they’ve decided to play — and compost — by their own rules. “I like to say me and my crew reinvented farming for ourselves,” David says. “If you do farming, you have to adapt it to your own needs. I don’t want to break my back, I don’t want to get overwhelmed or burned out. It’s about learning what you really want to do and cutting out the unnecessary.”
A sense of generosity and community is a theme throughout the farm. “It was obvious we wanted to open it to the public,” says David, a lifelong vegetarian who was born in Caracas and raised in Los Angeles. “I didn’t want it to be a closed farm — one of my biggest things is inspiring people to do their own gardens. I want you to grow your own vegetables. Do you know how empowering it is to say, ‘Hey, I grew this tomato. I grew this cucumber, this salad’?”
A few years ago, the same philosophy inspired David and Jessica to leave La Milpa and move to Michoacán with the goal of raising an edible forest and building dome houses (using principles David learned at Cal-Earth) for impoverished communities. They stayed just a year because, he says, “They weren’t really accepting of us. They thought we were crazy: ‘These guys are weirdos, these guys must be CIA, DEA.’ The whole year it was this constant battle — I really wanted it to be an uplifting thing. So we said, ‘Okay, let’s go back to California and let’s try it all over.’”
By the time David and Jessica returned to San Diego, La Milpa had closed and Stone was expressing interest. And so a beautiful collaboration began.
About the sowing, germinating, thinning, weeding, harvesting processes he’s been honing for almost a decade, David says, “It’s a dance. We learned from our mistakes.” He names one of his farmers, Santiago Vazquez, as a source of unending hands-on wisdom. His nickname is the Maestro.
“He taught me so much, and he keeps teaching me so much,” David says. “Simple things, like how to harvest. People don’t realize harvesting is an art form — leaving enough leaves so there’s constant production. How to harvest salad — if you cut too low, you ruin the plant, if you cut too high, then you’re attracting insects.”
Post Title: Crops and Hops: Inside Stone Brewing’s Organic (and Public!) Farm
Blog: The Horticult | Address: thehorticult.com
Author: Chantal Aida Gordon and Ryan Benoit | From: La Jolla | Blogging since: March 2013
Here's something you might be interested in.
A change of life at Stone Farms
Life on the farm must include beer.
A change of life at Stone Farms
Life on the farm must include beer.
“When I moved onto the farm, it was me and my wife Jessica trying to find a change of life,” says David Solomon, manager of Stone Farms in Escondido. “I was in advertising. She was doing international sales. I couldn’t handle being in front of a desk — I felt like I was getting atrophied.”
David Solomon and Jessica Sanchez
This life-changing moment happened back in 2004, when the farmland in question still belonged to Milpa Organica. After “La Milpa” went out of business in late 2010, nearby craft-beer juggernaut Stone Brewing Company stepped in to take over the farm. Now David helms 19 acres of organic crops that range from arugula and potatoes to lemongrass and dragon fruit, produce that supplies the brewery’s bistros and select beers. Last June, the farm opened to the public. The property includes a store with four taps; in other words, you can sip a stout while touring the edible beds. Which is exactly what we did!
It was a cloudy Saturday in late October when we visited the farm, located about 16 miles from the coast and nestled between boulder-studded hills. The Indian runner ducks were quacking up a storm, and Stone’s Dandelion IPA was on tap. But Ryan and I were here to see about another kind of beer: the new Suede Imperial Porter. A collaboration between Stone Brewing, 10 Barrel and Bluejacket breweries, Suede incorporates local avocado honey and dried jasmine, and calendula flowers snipped right from Stone Farms, a few miles away from the brewery. The aroma is undeniably floral, and notes of jasmine and honey slide onto your palate in advance of the traditional coffee and cocoa. Calendula adds a bright bitterness.
The Farm Tour
Drinking from a pint glass of Dandelion IPA, David showed us around the farm, a paradise of agricultural diversity that also includes bull’s blood beets, rhubarb, spinach, broccoli, hydroponically grown microgreens, cabbage, butternut squash, lemongrass, shiitake mushrooms, echinacea, and herbs.
A crew of just seven people makes it all happen. What helps is that they’ve decided to play — and compost — by their own rules. “I like to say me and my crew reinvented farming for ourselves,” David says. “If you do farming, you have to adapt it to your own needs. I don’t want to break my back, I don’t want to get overwhelmed or burned out. It’s about learning what you really want to do and cutting out the unnecessary.”
A sense of generosity and community is a theme throughout the farm. “It was obvious we wanted to open it to the public,” says David, a lifelong vegetarian who was born in Caracas and raised in Los Angeles. “I didn’t want it to be a closed farm — one of my biggest things is inspiring people to do their own gardens. I want you to grow your own vegetables. Do you know how empowering it is to say, ‘Hey, I grew this tomato. I grew this cucumber, this salad’?”
A few years ago, the same philosophy inspired David and Jessica to leave La Milpa and move to Michoacán with the goal of raising an edible forest and building dome houses (using principles David learned at Cal-Earth) for impoverished communities. They stayed just a year because, he says, “They weren’t really accepting of us. They thought we were crazy: ‘These guys are weirdos, these guys must be CIA, DEA.’ The whole year it was this constant battle — I really wanted it to be an uplifting thing. So we said, ‘Okay, let’s go back to California and let’s try it all over.’”
By the time David and Jessica returned to San Diego, La Milpa had closed and Stone was expressing interest. And so a beautiful collaboration began.
About the sowing, germinating, thinning, weeding, harvesting processes he’s been honing for almost a decade, David says, “It’s a dance. We learned from our mistakes.” He names one of his farmers, Santiago Vazquez, as a source of unending hands-on wisdom. His nickname is the Maestro.
“He taught me so much, and he keeps teaching me so much,” David says. “Simple things, like how to harvest. People don’t realize harvesting is an art form — leaving enough leaves so there’s constant production. How to harvest salad — if you cut too low, you ruin the plant, if you cut too high, then you’re attracting insects.”
Post Title: Crops and Hops: Inside Stone Brewing’s Organic (and Public!) Farm
Blog: The Horticult | Address: thehorticult.com
Author: Chantal Aida Gordon and Ryan Benoit | From: La Jolla | Blogging since: March 2013
Comments