Coastal Grove Farm
Book a free tour of Coastal Grove Farm!
All Open Farm Day visitors will join pre-booked guided tours of the farm. Walk-ins cannot be guaranteed a spot, so please book in advance and let us know if your plans change. Bookings open soon!
Coastal Grove Farm is the country’s only certified organic tea and saffron grower, using an ecological approach to food production. The farm employs geothermal greenhouses, permaculture techniques, and a small-scale field cropping system that harnesses natural processes to grow nutrient-dense products.
Tea is harvested from mid-April through October in their greenhouses. Based on their research, they may be the only growers in the world producing tea in greenhouses (not just high tunnels). They also maintain some outdoor tea plantings.
In addition to tea, Coastal Grove Farm grows a variety of vegetables both in greenhouses and open fields, including tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, lettuce, beet greens, summer squash, beans, peas, rhubarb, salad turnips, kale, and more. Each October, saffron is harvested from open fields, with plans this year to install a high tunnel for saffron production.
Located along the ocean, the farm benefits from a microclimate that reduces greenhouse heating and cooling costs. The cooling effect also extends the growing season for leafy greens, keeping them from bolting or turning bitter in summer heat. With this setup, the greenhouses produce crops for 11 months of the year—almost year-round.
Visitors to our Open Farm Day event are invited to book one of our free scheduled tours. We’ll share booking links here and on our social channels once they’re live. These guided tours of the greenhouses and growing areas will showcase the farm’s food production techniques and include a tea sampling.
“We’ll talk about how we mimic natural cycles in our growing areas, using microbes to provide a slow, constant release of nutrients from decomposing organic material. This reduces our need for added fertilizers. We’ll explain how we inoculate our woodchip walkways with an edible mushroom, which helps break down the woodchips and releases carbon dioxide to balance oxygen levels in the greenhouses—while also giving us another product to sell.
We’ll share how we grow tomatoes on strings up to the ceiling, how they’re pollinated, what’s required to maintain the plants, and when we harvest the fruit. We’ll do the same for cucumbers and peppers, and then compare those methods to our outdoor plantings.
We’ll talk about harvesting and processing the Camellia sinensis plant to make white, green, or black tea—all from the same leaf—and how we grow herbal components to blend with our teas.
We’ll also touch on saffron growing, including how the plants stay dormant all summer so we can grow vegetables over them. Finally, we’ll describe the saffron harvest and processing, which is entirely done by hand: picking flowers every morning and afternoon, and carefully separating the flower parts for drying.”
