Hoping for ‘Chokes

Around Castroville, the artichoke fields are dark gray-green, and you can see the ‘chokes forming at the end of long stalks like upraised fists. Even though the peak of the spring harvest is still a month away, there is an air of expectancy.

It was just about this time last year when the skies opened and the nearby Salinas and Pajaro rivers flooded, washing away as much as 15% of the surrounding artichoke fields and as much as 40% of the crop.

There’s been rain lately in the Salinas Valley. Nothing like last year, but enough to slow picking.

“We actually got a lot of picking going on in February, then the rains hit and slowed everything down,” says Mary Comfort of the California Artichoke Advisory Board. “When the fields get soggy, it makes it tough to get in to harvest. And cold, wet weather makes the plant shut down, so we could have a shorter season than we originally anticipated. But I don’t believe we’ll have any Hindenberg-type disasters this year.”

Last year’s harvest of 57 million pounds was the smallest in almost 20 years. It was nearly half the size of the huge years of the mid-’80s, when a combination of big yields and increased acreage resulted in harvests of as much as 1 billion pounds.

This year, growers are looking for about 65 million pounds--still 20% less than the last pre-flood harvest. “For whatever reason, ’92 to ’93 was one of the biggest years on record,” Comfort says. “It’s hard to say whether it was the lack of rain or if it was a culmination of a series of years when conditions were just right. It certainly wasn’t too much water.”

In addition to the extended rains, this spring--especially the last couple of weeks--has also been unusually chilly in the Castroville area. Fortunately, there were no hard frosts--another of the artichoke growers’ worst nightmares.

“We did get a little frosted, but not as much as could have been expected,” Comfort says. “We’ve put our boats away and put our ice skates away. And we’re hoping to put our umbrellas away pretty soon.”