The Taste of Real Food

​​Interview with Umami Gardens’ owners Jessi and Hendrix Johnston.

​By Jessica Rath

Image credit: Umami Gardens.

Umami – you’ve probably seen the word enough times to have some idea what it means. But for this interview, I wanted to dig a bit deeper: did you know that it has been officially recognized as the fifth taste, distinct from sweet, salty, sour, and bitter? It has its own taste receptors or taste buds, which respond to glutamate, an amino acid, and several nucleotides, organic molecules which are the building blocks of all life forms. Usually umami (a Japanese word) is translated as ‘delicious taste’, is associated with a savory flavor, and is known as a flavor enhancer. But there’s another important aspect of umami that researchers discovered: it relies on the harmonious combination of several ingredients, all acting in concert. Take tomatoes and cheese, especially Parmesan cheese for example: the perfect pizza. Or the Japanese soup stock dashi, made with seaweed, miso, and dried Bonito flakes (katsuobushi): the result is a rich, satisfying, complex taste. I believe it’s this aspect of umami,  the collaborative, synergistic factor, that made Jessi and Hendrix Johnston choose the name.
 
Jessi grew up in Southern Illinois, she told me,  in an agricultural town among corn fields and soy beans.  Both her grandmother and her mother kept a garden.
“When I was in college, I was interested: what diet is trending among people my age? Is it vegan, vegetarian, or pescetarian? And I found that local food was the most environmentally friendly food. So I became really interested in local food because I tried to pick out what diet I was going to follow in college.”

Her husband Hendrix, on the other hand, comes from Abiquiú. His grandmother lives in Abiquiú, and his mother  lives right next door to them. He and Jessi met in Taos, where his Mom lived at the time, and where Hendrix farmed his mother’s land. But then she wanted to leave Taos, and Jessi and Hendrix decided to seriously get into farming, which meant that they’d need more land.  So they looked around Abiquiú, because it has a bit of a longer growing season, and also because that’s where his family lived. Eventually they all moved down here, and Jessi and Hendrix planned to farm a piece of land in Abiquiú, but there wasn’t any water. Their neighbors put them in touch with Lisa Faithorn and Djann Hoffman who own Farside Farm and were looking for somebody who could put their irrigated field and two hoophouses to use.

Image credit: Umami Gardens.

​When I interviewed Lisa and Djann about a year ago, they had told me about the young couple who had leased part of their land, was growing vegetables for the Taos and Santa Fe Farmers Markets, and was providing several restaurants with fresh produce. They had nothing but the highest praise for the two, who are actually three now – Baby Jet is part of the family, and I can’t begin to imagine how much work it all must be. Then again, when you enjoy what you’re doing, it’s also fun, and Jessi and Hendrix definitely love farming. The way they’re doing it also benefits the environment, which is a huge factor for them. Locally produced items are the most environmentally friendly, Jessi told me: “You hear about strawberries in California getting trucked to Northern California for the winter and then trucked back down south so that they'll continuously produce  fruit. And then they get trucked across the country. It’s pretty crazy.”

Image credit: Umami Gardens.

What kind of vegetables do you grow, I wanted to know.
“We do a variety: loose greens, salad, arugula, spinach, Asian greens; we do cooking mixes and raw mixes; we do bunch greens like chard, kale, different types of Asian greens like Tokyo Bekana, Bok choy; we do brassicas; we do cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage; broccolini is a really fun one that's a fan favorite, broccolini instead of broccoli. And then in the summer we do all the hot crops, like cucumbers, tomatoes, okra, and eggplant. And then we do roots: carrots, radishes, watermelon radishes, beets, turnips, squash –  we try to grow a little bit of everything.” Wow! What an amazing selection!

“This is our sixth year of growing, so we're starting to try some new things,” Jessi continued. “We have a base of established produce, we know how to grow this. And we're gonna keep growing this, but it's still fun to try some new stuff every year.”
 
Did you find any vegetable that was really, really difficult to grow and you gave up on, I asked.

“Winter squash,” Jessi answered. “We had too many squash bugs out in our field, and they're just killing the crop. In our first year we had a good crop, but then we got squash bugs towards the end of the season, and now we can’t harvest any squash. Last year I was pregnant with Jet, and I reseeded our winter squash three different times. It's 900 feet of squash, and we reseeded three times, but it didn't take. If we don't grow winter squash for a while, for a few years, they might die off, and then maybe we can try again.”

Hendrix had just joined us, and he added: “You know, farming is a gamble, it's a risky business. You're never really guaranteed a harvest.”

That’s not an easy way of life. How does it feel to be living on the edge, because you're never sure whether it will pay off, I enquired.
 
“A lot of the things we do, a lot of the infrastructure we put up, like the greenhouses and irrigation infrastructure, the insect netting, all the tools and techniques make it more probable that we're going to succeed,” Hendrix answered. “It's never a sure thing, though. Also, we're a ‘diversified vegetable garden’, and diversity is key. We're not counting on just the winter squash to pay the bills. If one crop fails, we just do something else. We've got 39 other crops out there.”

Image credit: Umami Gardens.

Next, I asked about flowers. Some farmers like to grow flowers and sell them at the farmers market.

Jessi answered: “I was just going to mention that too, for pest control, that's a goal we have. I've been planting a lot of perennial type flowers. But it's been a little tricky for us. We are a vegetable farm first. And flower farming is  a separate career. I would like to do more flowers but we're hesitant to go full force with them. I would like to invest more in perennials  because you plant them once and then you’re done. But we're on rented land. So there's a balance between how much we want to invest.”
 
“Also, flowers are a funny thing, especially right now, where we're at economically,” Jessi continued. “Money is tight and not many people buy flowers. I see a lot of bouquets go back home with the sellers at the Farmers’ Market on Saturdays. If we could sell flowers for five bucks, they would sell, but there's no money in selling  flowers for even $10.”
“I have a flower farmer friend in town, and I would like to model our flower business after hers. She does something like a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) with the restaurants in Taos. Every week she goes by and changes all the little bouquets on the tables, and then she leaves them with a couple of big bouquets for the host stand, for example. I would like to do something similar. And the flowers are good for beneficial insects and birds. That's part of the bio-diverse, bio-dynamic growing that we pursue. But how do we implement this in a financially realistic way on rented land?”

Image credit: Umami Gardens.

When Jessi mentioned biodynamic farming, I had to ask whether they followed any special philosophy or technique, like permaculture or biodynamic, or anything like that.
​
“We're not biodynamic in that sense, but we think it's a great set of words,” Hendrix answered. “The dynamics of the biosphere. But the terms we more identify with are No Till and Regenerative Agriculture. Like when you go in with a tractor, and you turn the soil six inches or deeper, you mess up all the worms, all the bacteria, all the mushrooms, everything that is in the top soil. No Till is a tool in the greater scheme of regenerating, to get the soil back to its more original state. We're really just trying to mimic what nature does. Nature does not till in the sense that we know it. Nature doesn't use big tractors and machinery that come in and turn everything to a pulp. It's more a style of layering organic matter and compost, and letting the worms, letting the biology, move that stuff throughout the dirt.”

Image credit: Umami Gardens.

​This reminded me of the understory, the layer of vegetation in a forest or wooded area which includes fungi and their root-like structure of mycelia. They form symbiotic associations with plants, and exchange resources. It means the soil is full of life, and if I understand Hendrix correctly, their technique not only  doesn't hurt the soil by breaking this all up and disturbing it, but they do more: they add compost so that it can regenerate. They want to help the soil, help the Earth. This seems so important.
 
Jessi confirmed: “It also eventually will cut down how many amendments we need to add. Regenerative agriculture really does have an effect on your local environment. And eventually it could go bigger than that. Less mining, less shipping, less trucking, fewer deliveries, this could have a huge impact.”

Image credit: Umami Gardens.

This seems like important work to me, work that matters and that makes a difference. Impressive, isn’t it.

“We can't fix the big problems that the world has, we can't,” Hendrix added. “But we can impact this little, tiny piece that we're working on, by growing healthy, nutrient-dense food for our family and our community. That feels incredible.”

Jessi agreed. “Learning from a lot of the conversations in our community, in every community that I'm a part of – like the city community, our farming community, the town community, – in all these  different little pockets that you're a part of in social groups, I sense that there’s a lot of hopelessness. But on the farm I can just be in our little bubble and know that this is a real thing. This is action that we're doing, it’s not radical, but it's real, it's something.”
 
“It's real, and it's definitely radical,” Hendrix confirmed. “The food system as we know it, is completely broken, it's out of control. Why are we shipping cabbages across the country, or strawberries, for example? Small scale growing is a really radical movement, I feel, and it has the power to change the world. Imagine if everybody was farming like us, if agriculture was based on small scale growers. And if everybody would shop at their Farmers’ Markets. If that's where you got your groceries, instead of driving to these big supermarkets, Kroger and Walmart and such. People are so disconnected from their food. They have no idea where it comes from, and they just expect it to be there.”

Image credit: Umami Gardens.

​​“The food system in America is so backwards,” Hendrix continued. “With monocultures like in Iowa where they grow the same thing over and over again. They go from corn to soy and then back to corn again. And all that stuff is getting sprayed with herbicides and pesticides, and the soil is completely dead. There's nothing in there.”
 
Jessi added: “The plant is only there because they’re giving it chemicals to sprout, and then they add hormones. Those are not nutrients, nothing like that. I hear all the time that the tomatoes taste like nothing, like cardboard. So this is another future goal of ours, and another passion that we want to bring to life: getting people to the farm for Chef’s Tables, and bringing people together over delicious food, and having beautiful conversations over this beautiful food. Just getting people to taste real food again. Giving recipes out and sharing recipes, having guest Chefs come in, having Hendrix's Grandma come in and cook a meal, or our neighbor's Grandma. Just having more community, based on real food and nourishment on so many levels.”
 
Isn’t that a fabulous idea! Jessi and Hendrix  show that there's value in good food, in nutritious food. When one buys  groceries at the supermarket, there's no real value, there's no care. There's no life in the commercially grown produce. It's all dead, really. And then people are getting more and more unhealthy.
 
Jessi continues: “If we have to spend our time doing something, we might as well eat good food and have good conversation and feel healthy and good about it! Maybe someday, who knows, this will become a bigger movement.”


How often do you go to the Farmers Market, was my next question.  I imagine all of that must be a lot of work. They do the farming, they do the harvesting, they prepare land, and then they drive to Santa Fe and to Taos for the Farmers’ Markets. And all this with a little baby!

Image credit: Umami Gardens.

“The market definitely feels like our whole life,” Jessi told me. “Our whole schedule, our whole home routine and everything revolves around it. On Saturdays I go up to Taos with Jet, and Hendrix goes down to Santa Fe. He goes year round. And the Taos market lasts six months, six months out of the year.”

I'm so glad I had the chance to chat with Jessi and Hendrix. They farm with a new sort of awareness, they’re  doing this with a purpose that goes beyond just making money or taking care of themselves. I think that's what we need these days: people who take the state of the Earth and of our environment seriously. Thank you for taking the time to talk with me. I want to close with a statement of theirs  which I found at the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market website: “We believe that happy soil leads to happy plants, and happy plants lead to happy people.” That’s it in a nutshell.