Santa Monica Farmers' Market Farmers: Shu Takikawa

Shu Takikawa is a lettuce wizard. He started farming at age twenty-six, when he left Hokkaido and arrived in Southern California with two pairs of jeans, two T-shirts, and a clean pair of underwear in his backpack. Pretty soon he figured out how to read plants by watching for subtle shifts in the leaves’ color spectrum, the way a psychic reads an aura. He’ll joke that he taught himself to read English by reading seed catalogs, and he continues to pore over them in search of the best varietals, like curvy Japanese cucumbers in the summer and perfectly knobby carrots in the winter. Every Wednesday he and his wife, Debby, show up in Santa Monica with a mosaic of twenty varieties of greens—some sturdy, plump, and freckled, others yielding, curly, and neon green. The ellipsis at the end of their name is a promise that we’ll never know what Shu will plant next.

From “How to Do the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market (@smfms)” by Gillian Ferguson for Lucky Peach, 2016; Photo by TJ Tambellini

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