Furthering its strategy of promoting the Coastside as a destination eco-tourism, the Half Moon Bay Coastside Chamber of Commerce is promoting an eco-tour package for the weekend of Friday March 30 to Sunday April 1 [pdf of brochure].

The package includes lodging at Costanoa lodge or Green Oaks Creek Farm, tours of habitats and farms, whale watching, kayaking, and more.

The Chronicle has a nice story on the struggle by customers of Coastside Gourmet Coffee and Chai to save a local Coastside institution.

“He makes the best chai this side of Jaipur,” said Kathy Rehm, referring to India’s fabled Pink City. “You ain’t going to get the likes of that at Peet’s, I tell you that.”

Teens from Half Moon Bay High School throng the shop after class, hanging out, doing their homework and seeking advice from Bechar and his son, Raj, a teacher at nearby Cunha Intermediate School. A local hardware store worker and an aging surfer swap tales with techies and real estate types under Tibetan prayer flags and the watchful eye of the Dalai Lama, whose photo is perched above the counter.

More than a dozen customers have vowed to appear at next Tuesday’s city council meeting.

Coastside Gourmet Coffee, near the old Albertson’s site, may soon be pushed out to make way for a Peet’s Coffee, and their customers are steamed, reports Julia Scott in the County Times. The shop is well known for serving an uncompromising cup of traditional chai.

Bechar himself only found out Wednesday that his cafe, which he rents on a month-to-month basis, would be closed. That’s when Half Moon Bay Mayor Naomi Patridge, a customer of Bechar’s for more than a decade, told him about the building permit submitted by landlord Maher Shami and asked him whether he was going out of business.

“I was totally taken aback. This was my livelihood,” said Bechar, 67. “The first thing (Shami) should have done is to approach me and say, ‘I need to raise the rent or give you a lease.’”
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“What we want to be able to do now is upgrade the entire center so it’s a little more consumer-friendly and tourist-friendly,” said Shami. Bechar’s space, he added, is “run-down” and needs major capital improvements to bring it up to code — improvements he didn’t think Bechar would be able to afford, especially as Shami also plans to bring his rent up to market value after years of giving him a discount.

Customers are circulating petitions to the city council to do something about the situation.  As a sign of the solidarity Coastside’s coffee house culture, the petition can be found in M. Coffee on Main Street.  At M. Coffee this morning, I overheard one customer suggest that it might be a better idea to replace the Half Moon Bay Starbuck’s with a Peet’s.

The Rotary Club and Chamber of Commerce are sponsoring a six-week program on small business.  The program meeets Tuesdays and Wednesdays beginning tonight, January 23 until February 28, from 7 to 9pm at Cunha Middle School. The class fee is $60 for registration and materials.  To Register Call (650) 712-7224

Twelve two-hour classes taught by successful business people will cover:

• Program Intro / Deciding on a Business


• Developing a Business Plan


• Basic Computer and Communication Tools


• Organization and Insurance


• Location and Leasing


• Accounting and Cash Flow


• How to Borrow Money


• E-Commerce


• Buying a Business or Franchise


• Preparing to Open and How to Merchandise


• Expanding and Handling Problems


• Business Plan Presentations / Wrap-up Party

Cisco Systems has acquired Tivella, a Half Moon Bay company that makes network-connected sign systems, reports InfoWorld.

Through Tivella’s technology, Cisco can bring that kind of content to monitors and TVs in stores and other public places, Wyatt said. The company’s Piccolo Media Players are small, lightweight devices with a wide range of display interfaces for use with different kinds of screens, including analog TVs. No PC is needed and they can be powered via Ethernet, without a local electrical socket. Linked via an IP (Internet Protocol) network, they could display constantly updated messages or video tailored to the place where each is located.

Tivella was founded in 2001 and has 10 employees, most of whom work in Milpitas, near Cisco’s headquarters.

But Pfluke and his wife, Stephanie Jennings, have operated Green Oaks Creek Farm in Pescadero since 1999, and they plow their fields with horses, reports Julia Scott in the County Times.

“I like the idea of not using fossil fuels,” said Pfluke of the horse team he purchased a few years ago. “Plus, you’ve got manure out the back. They don’t have any parts to replace, and they make their own little tractors.”

The couple has used Mack and Margarita, their draft horses, to push vegetable seeds into the ground and to help dig a ditch for potatoes. This weekend, they will help distribute cover crop seeds in preparation for winter on their 3-acre farm. They have an orange tractor parked in the barn, but they’re trying not to use it; this coming spring will mark the start of their first growing season driven solely by horsepower.

Most of their equipment comes from Amish farmers. The couple buy it at auctions in California that are attended more by antique collectors than farmers. This is a fascinating story. 

Saturday is the final day of the Coastside Farmers Market at Cetrella for 2006.

The crab season began today, once crabbers and processors agreed to a market price of $1.85/lb, reports the Santa Cruz Sentinel. The Sentinel is also reporting that more fishermen are turning to crab to offset their losses in the salmon business.

Crab fisherman are deciding whether to hold out for more money from processors, reports the Chronicle.

Local crab fisherman this morning are deciding whether to accept the $1.75 per pound price being offered by processors. Dungeness crab season legally begins Wednesday, but fishermen are allowed to start throwing out their pots today.

The groups that represent crab fisherman in San Francisco, Bodega Bay and Half Moon Bay were weighing the offer, which is 40 cents less than they originally asked for and 15 cents less than what they say they now want.

Last year’s negotiations delayed the start of the season by two weeks.

Don’t like artichokes as much as you used to?  Maybe it’s because the ones you’re likely to get at the store are the new, cheaper, tasteless variety, reports Julia Scott in the County Times.

The board introduced the first annual seeded artichokes, the most popular of which is known as the imperial star, to farmers in the early 1980s. The new plant had a lot of obvious benefits. The annuals could be planted closer together than the globes, producing double the amount of the globes at 900 cartons per acre. Whereas globes took a year to reach maximum yield, the seeded chokes could be harvested in six months, leaving space to grow lettuce and other cash crops on the same land for double the profits. They weren’t dependent on the cooler, Mediterranean climate globes need to thrive.

The only difference was quality. The seeded chokes were cheaper, but far less tasty. Their leaves were thinner than the pulpy globe’s. But over the years, geneticists have worked hard to change that and to replicate every other aspect of the globe artichoke, down to the thorns that crown each leaf.

The article includes interviews with Coastside farmers John Giusti and Joe Muzzi.  Muzzi spoke on this topic at the Committee for Green Foothills event a couple of months ago.  It was one of many eye-opening things we learned that day.