Home Grown

Jujubes in the Desert
by Gail Snyder

The unfortunate thing about words is how quickly overuse can render them powerless. (Could that TV show or that new flavor of ice cream really live up to being awesome?) These days it's beginning to seem like the word "sustainable" is meeting a similar fate. We're starting to get a little vague on its actual meaning, and that makes me extremely crabby because being sustainable is an incredibly exciting prospect--it means we can stop contributing to this downward global warming spiral by unplugging ourselves from our fossil fuel-dependent lifestyles, making our own power instead. So you can imagine how truly awesome it was for me to go visit SunStar Herbs, aptly described on their website as being "a family-owned and -operated farm dedicated to the old idea of sustainability; producing much of our own food and medicine and trading the excess for goods or dollars to purchase whatever we cannot produce ourselves."

Not that it's any easy feat to get there. The farm, some 40 acres west of Madrid, east of the Santo Domingo reservation, is hard to get to even with four-wheel drive, and I just have a modest, low-to-the-ground little Suzuki Esteem. So David Thorp came and picked me up at the head of their five-mile unpaved, crater-filled road, and, as he gently careened and rocked the truck over ruts and boulders like some ancient mastodon in slo-mo, David gestured widely at the stunning 360-degree desert landscape opening before us.

Across and down and over the arroyos and vistas, he pointed out, is the Galisteo Dam where starting last year The Thorps have leased out their herd of some one hundred or more goats to eat the tamarisk trees. "The Army Corps of Engineers was going to have to poison the tamarisk trees to remove them from the basin in front of the dam, but were able to go green by hiring our herd," Dave said.

When David and his wife Becky first moved out here, almost 30 years ago, there were very few neighbors aside from the bison, deer and pronghorn antelope who used to roam the area. As more houses were built over the years and more people moved in, dogs have eventually chased all the wildlife away. David and Becky are themselves refugees from elsewhere--David was working in a bicycle shop in Washington, D.C., where he grew up, when Becky came in one day to buy a bike. "It was love at first sight," David said. Soon afterwards, they left their old lives behind to find somewhere that together they could live a simpler life. And that place turned out to be this wild and rustic wilderness some 40 minutes drive from downtown Santa Fe.

The farm is completely off the grid, with solar panels backed up by generator to pump water from the well. Until two years ago, they hauled most of their water from Cerrillos, supplementing with an intricate rainwater banking system. They built their woodstove-heated house one room at a time, and kerosene lamps were originally their sole source of light. Becky even gave birth to one of their four children in this house.

Nowadays, with their last daughter about to graduate from high school, David and Becky's other daughter, Amanita, who took a vacation from school in the middle of 5th grade and stayed home for the next two years to help around the farm, milk the goats and learn to cook, is their chief goatherd. She leads the ever-curious, smart and social herd, mostly by horseback these days, out onto the range every evening, where they browse for tumbleweeds, juniper, mistletoe, goatheads, sage, snakeweed, elm saplings and yellow dock to munch. David swears that, as a result of their goats' browsing habits over the past 30 years, the soil on their land has become moister and richer, absorbing water better and allowing for increased vegetation. The family sells kids for milking as well as goat meat, but their real claim to fame is the herb farm, which is Becky's specialty. They grow countless varieties of native and naturalized herbs appropriate to New Mexico's arid environment without the use of chemicals or any commercial fertilizers, which they've sold at the Santa Fe Farmers Market since 1996.

It's year-round work keeping the garden going, but no one in the family is complaining. In fact, when giving this part of the tour, David and Amanita proudly defer to Becky, whose knowledge of the medicinal qualities of each of the plants is encyclopedic. Beyond her kitchen garden, growing basil, parsley, garlic, calendula, chamomile, rosemary and other culinary herbs (which they sell both fresh and dried at the market), lies a whole world of medicinal herbs.

It's the jujube trees that David describes as their bread and butter, the single thing they sell the most of. Dr. Mai Ting, M.D., a local medical doctor and founding president of the New Mexico Herb Growers Association pointed Becky's jujubes out to Jean Giblette of High Falls Gardens in 2005. Dr. Ting brought a sample bag of dried jujubes from Sunstars' 2004 crop to a workshop at Jean's farm in Philmont New York. Jean has done a lot of work promoting the growing of Chinese herbs all over the United States through the Medicinal Herb Consortium and includes a sample of Becky's "da zao" in her yearly sample packs. A Chinese herb for building chi within the body, this small date-like edible relieves stress, calms the nerves and purifies the blood. Being mucilaginous, the jujube fruit is also very soothing for treating sore throats. SunStar Herbs ships the jujubes to customers around the world and here in New Mexico.

Becky pointed out and named each of the medicinal plants, among them vitex, good for women undergoing menopause; wolfberry, high in carotene, making it an excellent promoter of night vision; mullen, good for the lungs; mugwort, used in Chinese medicine for sinus headache, sore muscles and colds; and stinging nettles for allergies. Continuing along the various beds, Becky identified an Asian pear tree, elderberry rose bushes, hollyhocks, licorice root, a quince tree, lovage plants, a Siberian pea tree and so many more that my pen couldn't keep up with the flood of information. When I asked how she learned all this, Becky said, "Some from books, some from my own experimenting..." Amanita broke in, "And she had kids!"

SunStar Herbs sells sage smudge sticks at the farmers market, wild-crafted each year in the fields of Taos, as well as certified organic catnip cat toys, each one individually designed, hand-stitched and finished off on a solar-powered sewing machine. When they have a surplus, the family also sells eggs at the market, laid by their guinea hens. They also raise turkeys and peacocks.

Is there anything they don't grow? I asked. "Vegetables," Becky answered. "Especially lettuce. Some vegetables take way too much water for us to grow. We trade for those at the market." Intentionally minimizing interaction with the federal government since coming to New Mexico from northern Virginia in the 1970s, David and Becky have worked to not owe any federal income tax since 11 Sept 01 and have tried to teach their children to live simply and modestly for the pure enjoyment of knowing they can. The family's engagement with the life around them is palpable.