Many years ago, when Jackie Mendizabal was just a small girl, her uncle Francisco took her into her backyard in Southern California and pulled some leaves off a lemon tree. “Let’s make some tea,” he said.
“I was like, ‘What? Can you do that?’” Mendizabal remembered. “It made an impression on me, for sure.”
Thus began a lifelong love of plants, specifically the kind of plants with medicinal or aesthetic properties, the kind we call herbs.
Of course, many people have an abiding love of plants and gardening. Many people cultivate herbs. But precious few of them are able to make that passion into a viable business. Jackie Mendizabal and her husband Rey are doing exactly that with their small herb farm called Foxhollow.
Situated just to the southeast of Hollister, Foxhollow is nobody’s idea of Big Ag. It is, in fact, only five acres. The farm’s range of products—bath and skin-care products, soaps, lotions, dried herbs and essential oils—are sold primarily at farmers markets, at a handful of retailers and through the farm’s website (www.foxhollowherbs.com). The Mendizabals run the whole enterprise themselves.
Foxhollow grows any number of herbs but at its center has always been lavender, the flowering plant famous for its namesake pale purple color.
“I use it because it just seems like the world needs it,” said Jackie Mendizabal. “It really has healing properties. I know it sounds corny, but it’s good for the soul.”
Back in 1993, the Mendizabals were living in Morgan Hill, and Jackie was working as an administrator at Good Samaritan Hospital in San Jose. Even then, she was growing herbs in the backyard, and she came up with a salve to treat diaper rash in babies. A local health-food store bought her healing baby salve and a business was born.
Jackie grew up in Santa Barbara County, the daughter of a man who was master gardener. “Our backyard was filled with beautiful exotic plants,” she said. “I planted my first garden with him. He taught me how to irrigate and to harvest. So the appreciation of plants comes from my father, for sure.”
Every Sunday, after church, her dad would take her out shopping and she would always opt for a potted plant or an herb, until her bedroom was filled with plant life.
So, making a baby salve came naturally, and when the salve proved to be a popular seller, she and Rey decided to scale up.
It was two years, in ’95, when the Mendizabals began looking for acreage in San Benito, founding Foxhollow. They grew mostly lavender and calendula, a marigold that has been used as a culinary and medicinal herb for centuries. Eventually they took on other herbs: rosemary, St. John’s wort, elderberry, sage. The Mendizabals are careful not to make specific health claims about their products or the ingredients in them. But many of the herbs that they work with have been used for a variety of therapeutic purposes since prehistory.
For a while, Foxhollow had a wholesale operation going, but the Mendizabals decided to scale back, and now they sell their products at the weekly Morgan Hill and Mountain View farmer’s markets and a few retail outlets across California. Much of their business is now done on-line. “Sometimes,” she said, “I’ll deliver locally. I tell people I’ll drive it to their house. As long as you don’t live in Panoche, you’re OK.”
The product line is diverse and features everything from aromatherapy roll-ons to carpet deodorizers to “chakra balancing sprays” to “clear the mind and energize the spirit.” (Since 2014, Jackie Mendizabal has been a practitioner of the energy channeling technique known as Reiki).
In a culture dominated by Western medicine, the medicinal properties of common herbs and plants are often overlooked, ignored or met with skepticism. But, said Jackie, in recent years, the potential of herbs and essential oils have entered the mainstream, and she’s now finding the market coming to her.
“I have people—usually young people—come up to my booth (at the farmer’s market) and say, ‘Do you know about essential oils?’ I just laugh. I mean, I’ve been trying to tell you about them for years.”
Lavender remains a central player on the Foxhollow product line and is sold as an essential oil, in dried bunches and in sachets. It’s the main ingredient in pillow sprays and dream balms.
Life at Foxhollow is also very much in tune with the seasons. Winter is a quiet time, but in the spring, work in the fields commences, leading to the cutting of the lavender in mid-summer. Jackie said that the Mendizabals use no pesticides or weed killers. “We don’t spray anything.” Every weed, she said, “is pulled or burned.”
When she’s not in the field, she’s making products, creating labels and packaging or overseeing orders online.
The 2018 legalization of cannabis for recreational purposes has created a market that the Mendizabals have yet to get into. But, the cannabis craze has many more Californians willing to look at plants for their therapeutic uses.
The Mendizabals have certainly not built an herbal-product empire from their base at Foxhollow. In an entrepreneurial culture where everyone is looking to “scale up,” Foxhollow has remained a small and manageable business. The farm’s small size keeps Jackie doing what she loves best, working with the plants, both in the fields and in her herb “kitchen.”
Working with herbs, in fact, is very similar to cooking, she said. In both, working with what surrounds you naturally is best.
“There are a lot of kids that are getting into herbs from other countries, or other parts of the world, Chinese herbs or Ayurvedic herbs. But as a general rule, I always promote utilizing the plant life in your own environment. That’s always better, to use plants that have taken the same water, the same air.”
For more information on Foxhollow Herb Farm, go to foxhollowherbs.com.
