Charles Martin and his wife, Catherine, ran a small, organic/biodynamic farm for many years near the coast in Comptche, supplying their neighbors and local restaurants including Cafe Beaujolais. They also operated a nonprofit health foundation. They co-founded the Ecology Action/Golden Rule Bio-Intensive Intern/Apprentice training program with John Jeavons, and Charles was active as Vice-President and Farm Reviewer for the Mendocino Renegade eco-label program of the Mendocino Organic Network. They now live in active retirement near Willits, California.
Posts tagged as “Mendocino Talking”
Margaret Fox, proprietor of the legendary Cafe Beaujolais in Mendocino for over 20 years, and author of two cookbooks, is now the Culinary Director of the Harvest Markets in Fort Bragg and Mendocino. Here is her story.
Since early in High School, I have been involved with a variety of social issues. However, prior to moving to Mendocino County in 1999 those efforts were limited to non-working hours. My first full-time job was as a communications technician for AT&T in the Bay Area. Twelve years, and lots of experience later, I left AT&T as a Manager of State Government Affairs for California to become the second member of a consultancy firm that focused on working in telecommunications reform and regulation on a more national level. During that time I moved to Mendocino County.
I grew up near Cleveland, Ohio in Seven Hills and received my Journalism Degree from Bowling Green University in Ohio, worked for the Plain Dealer as a reporter, but didn’t want to live in Cleveland, so I moved out here during the seventies and worked at the Santa Rosa New Herald, a weekly now gone… then the Cloverdale Reveille, which is still around… then the Mendocino Grapevine which some people remember.
I grew up in Santa Cruz. My dad was in mid-level management at a disk manufacturer in Scotts Valley. We lived in a suburban neighborhood that was fortunately across the road from Henry Cowell Redwood State Park near Felton, which I really treasure. Most everything I understand about our relationship with ecosystems I learned from the redwood forest. My mom was a stay-at-home mom for a big part of my child, an incredibly sharp, intelligent person who went back to school when she was in her 40s and got an advanced math degree. Now she’s a community college instructor. So I had a caring and intellectually-oriented mom who had a big influence on me.
I was born during the last part of World War II, in a town called Oostvoorne, The Netherlands on the North Sea along the English Channel in 1944 during the Allied invasion and bombings of Germany. The anti-aircraft guns and German bunkers were set up on our shore to shoot down Allied planes, and we lived right there. A Canadian pilot was shot down over the town and got hung up in a tree, and before the Germans could get to him, Dutch people who lived nearby rescued him and brought him to my father and asked to hide him.
The Decater family runs Live Power Community Farm in Covelo, a diversified, solar-powered CSA farm that for 27 years has supplied its 200 member families here in Mendocino County, and the Bay Area, with fresh, high-quality biodynamic/organic food. They plow and till the land with their six draft horses. Besides growing almost fifty varieties of vegetables, they raise sheep, cows, chickens, and pigs.