Grower describes how he grows and markets 1,000 bunches a week

By Andy Griffin

Basil, if you believe what is written in books of herb lore, is as good for attracting lovers as it is for warding off flies. Steeped a bit in hot water,basil makes an excellent herbal tisane with curative properties. And, of course, basil is the key ingredient in rich, luscious pestos. So I grow basil – lots of it – and sell it at the farmers’ market to folks who need good loving, good health, and a good meal. As for me, I need a good income and I’ve found that basil can be key in boosting my farm’s market receipts. The efforts I’ve made to have a steady supply of basil all season long have focused my growing practices on the farm and my marketing techniques in town.
If you are a busy farmer you might call my method of producing basil fussy, but I have sold as many as 1,200 bunches of basil in four hours, and that’s nothing for a small time grower like me to sniff at. Yes, to sell five bunches of basil a minute you need to start with a crowd of people. I sell my vegetables in San Francisco’s popular Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market down on the waterfront. But if I have a lot of potential customers streaming past my stall I also have lots of competition from other growers like yourselves. Strong sales is more than just location, location, location. It took me nine years of selling vegetables in a lot of different places before I ever sold more than a 1,000 bunches of basil in a morning. It also took me a while before I figured out how to grow basil that was cheap and attractive enough to generate rapid sales. What I discovered along the way is that the attention I put towards promoting basil helped boost sales of my potatoes, tomatoes, and squash, too.
The right price is important. I sell generous, plump bunches of basil for a dollar a piece. Other growers sell bigger bunches of the herb for $1.25 or $1.50, but I like simple round numbers I can add up in my head. Then, too, I’ve noticed that in big cities a quarter is often worth more than 25 cents. San Franciscans need quarters for parking, for bus tickets, and for the laundry mat and they are loathe to surrender them. Me, I’d rather occupy my hands plucking dollar bills than fumble with making change. Since people are often price conscious to a fault they also seem readier to spend a dollar on a smaller bunch than $1.25 on a bigger bunch. People still don’t cook a whole lot anymore either, and with a smaller bunch many single folks or childless couples end up with less waste. People who cook a lot are happy buying two bunches, or three.
Good presentation is essential for good sales. I have to stand out in a busy market crowded with many fine vendors so I heap up over a thousand bunches of basil onto my sales table at once. The strong, sweet fragrance that comes rolling off a mountain of fresh basil hooks distracted customers and pulls them towards my stall by their noses. Basil earned its reputation as an aphrodisiac precisely because its complex scent is so effective at evoking emotion and dissolving inhibitions. I think the same ganglia of nerve cells in our brain responsible for controlling our amatory impulses is also in charge of our spending habits. Customers under the influence of sweet basil fumes do seem suggestible. We do our best to inform them on how to use the herb. If my wife, Julia, is doing her job, the recipe sheets we have on hand to pass out marry basil to practically every other vegetable we grow. They might have come for the basil but they leave with a whole bag of veggies.
Careful postharvest handling makes a nice basil presentation possible. All basil is picked the day before market, hopefully in the early morning when the air temperature is cool. The bunches are packed loosely into recyclable plastic bulb totes which stack easily and have many openings, allowing for good air movement. Each tote of basil is briefly dunked in cool water to wash off any dust or insects, then set in the shade but never refrigerated. At market, if I notice sales flagging I make a big point of moving the pile around. Bunches of basil near the top which may have gotten slightly wilted from the sun (never a big problem in SF) or beaten up by inconsiderate shoppers (we have them too) are rotated under and replaced by bunches still shiny with residual moisture. All the movement not only creates the impression of freshness but also lets loose a new cloud of basil vapors, hopefully stimulating a mild euphoria in a new crowd of shoppers.
Planting the right varieties of basil is a key decision. While there are many wonderful basils in the world, I concentrate on Genovese basil. Genovese basil is the basil most people are looking for when they ask for sweet basil, normal basil, or regular basil. While I feel that sweetness, normality, and regularity are overrated virtues I pay my bills by selling people what they want. To add diversity and interest to my display I also plant small amounts of lemon basil, piccolo fino verde basil, napolitano basil, purple basil, and Thai basil. Each of these other basils have their afficionados. Taken together the varied scents of six different basils make for a potent olfactory cocktail. I have customers who buy a bunch of each type just so they can share a “sniff experience” with a friend. At times a boyfriend or husband, unsure about which basil his partner wants, will buy all six just to be sure of getting it right.
If I couldn’t produce basil cheaply, then selling lots of it at a reasonable price would soon run me out of business. I concentrate on growing practices that allow me to pick from the same basil plants month after month from May through November. Basils all originally came from India and southeast Asia so my intent is to give these frost-tender perennials an environment that is as tropical as I can. In central California that means I begin the plants as seedlings in a heated greenhouse, sowing the trays around the middle of February. While the seedlings are developing, we concentrate on preparing the seedbeds outside. I like to turn under our fava bean cover crops at the beginning of March, weather permitting. When the biomass of the cover crop has broken down we dust the field with a ton per acre of gypsum and then list up 40-inch beds incorporating 400 pounds per acre of pelleted 8-5-1 organic fertilizers. Because I believe that micro nutrients contribute to overall plant vitality I like to sprinkle 200 pounds per acre of seaweed meal onto the rows as well. Then we lay down drip tape, one tube per bed, and cap the bed off with a layer of black plastic mulch. To save money I buy 80 inch rolls and cut them in half with a wood saw. The mulch will suppress weeds and conserve water. Basil is a mint family member and it appreciates even levels of soil moisture. The drip tape will not only irrigate the basil but deliver soluble fertilizers like Phytomin should I see the plants begin to yellow. I’m careful not to over-fertilize basil for while it may grow lush, overgrown basil will be weak in body and in aroma. Good basil sales are all about smell – “aromatherapy for capitalism,” I call it.
Come the beginning of April we tuck the basil transplants into their new beds. Immediately upon transplanting we pop wire hoops over the beds, one every seven feet. The hoops are fashioned from #10 gauge galvanized wire cut into 10′ lengths and doubled over in a U, then shoved six inches into the moist soil of the field. On top of the hoops we drape row cover. At first, during April when frost still threatens, the row cover protects the seedlings from cold. Later, as the temperatures rise the row cover effectively fences out insects like cucumber beetle and whitefly, which are our biggest pests in basil. The row cover also helps protect the basils from wind damage. Stick your head under the hoops in July and you encounter an almost steamy, still, micro Asia just like the mother country basils come from.
Basils grown with wind protection are lusher in appearance with a softer, more pliant and luxuriant feel. But most important, the basil grown behind the veil is more fragrant than its wind-blown and exposed sister plants. Think about it. The essential oils that give basil its unique, almost intoxicating character are volatile, as in volare, the Italian verb meaning to fly. We want the basil’s volatile oils to fly, all right, but in the market, not in the field.
By May we begin the basil harvest, carefully clipping only the largest stems and leaving the rest to develop. Basil, like most herbs, smells most strongly right at the moment it is beginning to flower. If, for some reason, basil is flowering faster than I can sell it we will come in and clip the plants back to stimulate new growth. Over the years as I’ve sold more and more basil I’ve learned to plant a little bit less so that almost nothing gets past us. After each harvest we carefully replace the row cover. Depending on the weather the plants we cut from will be ready for their next harvest in a week to ten days. By moving about the patch methodically we can be assured of steady harvests until frost or heavy rains shut production down in November.
And finally, I’ve learned when to quit. After attempts to prolong the basil season by growing it indoors over winter I have learned the virtues of growing with the seasons. Our customers get used to plump bunches of basil at a good value. Some of them pay attention when Julia and I warn them that the season is drawing to close. They buy lots of basil and make simple pestos (just olive oil; no cheese) to freeze in ice cube trays. The frozen pesto block can be popped into freezer bags for use in the dead of winter when the days seem dreary and only a basil fix can help. Ice cube-sized blocks of frozen pesto defrost and can be used in single serving dishes, perfect for San Francisco’s singles and childless couple with competing dietary restriction, or expectations. The people who didn’t make a pesto stash get to go to a supermarket in the winter and pay a lot of money for a tiny tuft of basil; chances are they will get four little stems fanned out like a hand of cards wrapped up in plastic. Maybe they get to buy a thrashed bunch of herb that has traveled all the way from Baja in a jet. Either way the discerning basil customer finds the retail experience to fall short of their expectations and by February market shoppers start asking me “When is basil season?” “We’re just planting it now,” I tell them. “Save your pennies for the real thing.”

Andy Griffin and Julia Wiley are the owners of Mariquita Farm in Watsonville, California. They sell at the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market in San Francisco and through a CSA. Visit their web site, www.mariquita.com.