The Weather has Been Great!

We will be at the Ferry Plaza every Saturday from now on. This week we will have our first small pile of pimentos estilo de Padrón as well as a few pounds of our cucumbers!

Reserve Your Padron Peppers Today

Reserve your Padron peppers now, click here to place your order.

Every Other Week at the Farmer's Market

We  will be at the Ferry Plaza on alternate Saturdays for the next few weeks with a full assortment of dried and ground peppers, tobacco, a few eggs, and a couple hundred pounds of rhubarb.

Reserve Your Padron Peppers Today

I have decided it is vital to heat our Padron peppers during this early growth period, so I bit the bullet and turned on the heaters in our greenhouses at Happy Quail Farms.  I may run up a a big gas expense but last year we lost a month of growth expecting it to warm up, and consequently, weeks of early market sales.

Other growers are trying their hand with Padron peppers but few have been able to match our quality. Because of our Padron peppers' extreme popularity and limited availability, we have decided to offer Advance Reserve Orders. Place your order of 2 to 5 pounds of Padron peppers now and we will ship it right to your door. Orders will be filled on a first come first serve basis, each week, as we harvest the peppers. We expect to begin shipping in a few weeks.

Reserve your Padron peppers now, click here to place your order.

Our Many Tobacco Varieties

We have been growing tobacco here for the last 32 years. It has been our main ingredient in insect control both on our plants and chickens.  The tobacco straw keeps poultry mites off our chickens. We only grew Santo Domingo Ceremonial tobacco until two years ago.

Santo Domingo Ceremonial

Santo Domingo is a very old cultivar tracing back to cultivation by Western American and Central American indigenous tribes.  It was used in medicine pouches, and burned in ceremonies, or used by shamans for it's power.  It's growth is typically a small shovel shaped leaf though occasionally gets up to shovel size.  Often leathery, with a very strong and harsh smoke.

Connecticut Broadleaf

We added Connecticut Broadleaf two years ago.  It is a very old East Coast variety.  It is the original type settlers cleared entire forests to grow, the original greenback cash crop.  It's mild smoke and can make enormous leaves. It is a favorite rapper leaf for cigars and is still one of the major types grown for cigarettes. Much of the US crop is sold to cigar manufacturers.

Last year we added a couple more for a more complete assortment of tobacco types.

Russian or Black Sea Samson

This is one of the naturalized European heirloom types grown in the Baltic region famous for its rich, mild strength in pipe and Turkish blends. A medium sized leaf.

Havana Broadleaf

Another mild large rapper or filler leaf type made famous in Cuba's Cohibas, it is an heirloom type that traces back to pre-Columbus Caribbean cultivars.

Turkish Izmir

This old naturalized Turkish cultivar has been valued for the last few centuries as a mild type blended in the first cigarettes and  still blended in the original Camel straights. It has small leaves that look like a double edged knife averaging under a foot in length.

Restart Farming

The two questions we are always asked are "When does our season end?" and the converse, "When does our season begin?". To these questions there is never a simple answer.
We shut down our heating early January.  Early rains followed by an unusually long cool dry winter allowed us to pick peppers to the end of February, surprisingly once again.

Our seedlings are almost all up. We hope to see our first rhubarb and cucumbers in April and our first pepper types in May. This season we will have a full line-up of peppers if the weather permits. We are planning to harvest larger quantities of our Peruvian Ají Amarillo and Venezuelan Ají Dulse (sweet habanero). Both are very slow growing, we expect them to be producing by October.

Go Solar

Our new PV (photo voltaic) solar electrical system is up and running, thank you Real Goods Solar!

We are generating most of the electricity my wife  Karin's Nissan Leaf and my EV Ford Ranger use. PV solar and EV use make a great pair, especially as gas prices climb again!