Farmworker Gardens: "Not for Money"
Potatoes, blueberries, Brussels sprouts and cabbage, beet and spinach seed are the best known crops grown on Skagit Valley’s 89,000 acres of farmland.
Chilacayote on a fence
On plots tended by farmworkers, that list is completely different. Visit one good-sized garden on the Skagit flats, and you’ll find ejotes (beans), tomatillos, chiles and chilacayote squash growing alongside corn, tomatoes, onions, and yes, some potatoes.
At this garden, the crops are tended after-hours by men and women who work for the vegetable farm that owns the land. Everything harvested on this acreage ends up in their kitchens, not the farm’s processing facility.
“People want their own gardens, so wherever there is a little corner that is not needed, we let them use it,” says the farm owner.
Fernando preps the garden in May
Each spring, workers sign up for garden space. Fernando, who has been driving farm equipment for his employer for 28 years, rototills the soil with his tractor, then creates a couple dozen rows four feet wide by 150 feet long. About 20 employees decide themselves who gets which rows.
Using their own seeds, vegetable starts and tools, they tend their plots weekday evenings before driving home to apartments in Mount Vernon or Burlington, or return on Sunday with their families. The farm pays for water. In very dry summers, plot owners chip in $20 apiece towards the bill.
On a mid-September Sunday, gardeners are focusing on their harvest. They are picking beans and wondering when the corn will be ready. Voices speaking Spanish and Mixtec drift over the rows.
“Which one is my mom’s row?” asks a young girl as she and her sisters step out of a white minivan.
Mom is busy, so dad has brought the girls out to pick some beans. Margarita takes the girls through the gardens until they find the right one.
Many of the Latino farmworkers in Skagit County come from the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico. They are employed by farms that grow specialty crops, defined by the U. S. Department of Agriculture as “fruits and vegetables, tree nuts, dried fruits, horticulture, and nursery crops” that are primarily used for food or medicinal purposes. Most of these crops are harvested by hand, not machine.
They grow in their gardens what they would grow in Oaxaca, often using seeds sent by family members there. You can buy seeds for beans in Skagit County, but “they taste different than the ones from home,” says one woman.
Rain in early and late summer 2024 were a boon to the farm owner’s lettuce and kale crops, well suited to the Skagit county climate.
Native Oaxacan crops that thrive in a hot, dry climate didn’t benefit.
“There wasn’t really a summer, because it wasn’t very hot,” says Margarita, another long-time farm employee. “We had rain in August, and the temperature rose and fell.”
Tomatoes and Red Oaxacan Corn
“This is the first day we have picked beans,” adds Teodora.
The women waited until June to plant them “because it was raining and the land was cold.”
Everything is late. Some beans have developed mold.
The round, sweet chilacayote squash cooked into a pudding or candy or blended into a cold drink are much smaller than usual.
Few tomatillos are visible. The cempasúchil—marigolds—growing in another employee garden at a nearby blueberry farm are only finally budding.
They may not bloom in time for the annual Day of the Dead celebration—and if they do, they will need to be covered, so that the first frost doesn’t decimate the flowers a few heartbreaking days too soon.
When the corn ripens, corn kernels on majorcas or corn cobs that are damp may become atole, a yummy and nutritious hot corn beverage as comforting as hot chocolate. Kernels from other cobs will be cooked in lime, dried, and eventually ground into masa or dough for tamales and tortillas. The dried beans will go into burritos or side dishes, and the tomatillos will become salsa verde.
What Fernando, Teodora, Margarita, and their co-workers harvest this month will feed their families for a few delicious months. Then it’s back to the grocery store, and long dark winter days when they long for evenings and weekends in their gardens.
“It’s good for people to de-stress,” says Fernando. “I do this so I can spend one or two hours here watching the plants grow, not for money.”
No cempasúchil blossoms at the blueberry farm employee garden in September 2024
Cempasúchil flourished in hotter, drier 2023
Picking beans
Story by Anne Basye: info@skagitonians.org