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Greengrocer
to the Nation BY JAMES McQUILLEN Vegetable gardeners everywhere feed themselves from their backyards. George Weppler feeds thousands of people from his, and you might well be one of them. On five acres nestled against the Cascade foothills about 100 miles south of Portland, the former pro-football player, businessman, biologist and stonemason grows superior produce for restaurants all around the country, including some of Portland's finest. Weppler is an amiable, bearlike man with biceps as big as many people's thighs and a deep tan from years of working outdoors. Though he's only grown commercially for 15 years, he's had a garden since he was 8 years old. His first ones were in Winnepeg, where he lived just after World War II. His family was poor, and they cultivated what food they could during the brief growing season. The upper Willamette Valley is a long way from Manitoba both geographically and climatically, and Weppler's garden produces 52 weeks a year. He grows 250 kinds of vegetables, including 18 kinds of tomatoes and 50 types of lettuce, and he's always experimenting with new species from many sources. His wife recently returned from a trip to Italy with 50 packs of seeds for him, and one variety of potato he grows came via a friend from Indians in Peru. Weppler has no problem selling everything that he grows and feeding his family as well, so he can afford to experiment. "It almost doesn't matter what I put in the ground," he says. Connections he made helping a friend sell wild mushrooms enabled him to get a running start when he went commercial, and his first customers included New York's Tavern on the Green and the influential Chez Panisse in Berkeley. Last year his garden grossed $300,000--not bad for a patch of ground about the size of Pioneer Courthouse Square. But it's not connections that keep his vegetables in high demand all over the country; it's flavor. Just as winemakers know that good wine begins in the vineyard, Weppler knows that good gardening means good food. He knows a lot of tricks for getting the most out of seed and soil, some of them as simple as water deprivation. Giving plants a bare minimum of water can sometimes keep them from looking as good as the usual plump, photogenic produce, he says, "But it's just insane how much better the flavor is." He is also committed to growing "the purest food possible," with standards of organic gardening that make most commercial farms seem like Superfund sites. He knows the history of his land to 1870; it's never been exposed to chemicals, he says, and at least as long as he's around, it never will be. Want to savor gardening genius? Ever wonder what the Jeffersonian ideal tastes like? Go to Paley's, Paragon, Atwater's, Southpark, Fiddleheads or the Heathman and have yourself a salad. Supermarket produce will never taste the same again.
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