An early love of plants turns into a blooming business for
Foxhollow Herb Farm owners
It all started with a little case of diaper rash.
Not too many businesses would want to make such a claim. But the
1985 birth of Jackie Mendizabal’s son
– and his inevitable rash – led to the creation of Foxhollow
Herb Farm, an organic herb farm in Hollister specializing in soaps
and salves.
An early love of plants turns into a blooming business for Foxhollow Herb Farm owners
It all started with a little case of diaper rash.
Not too many businesses would want to make such a claim. But the 1985 birth of Jackie Mendizabal’s son – and his inevitable rash – led to the creation of Foxhollow Herb Farm, an organic herb farm in Hollister specializing in soaps and salves.
“I wanted something natural,” Mendizabal said. “But there wasn’t really anything. I looked into it, and from there made my first salve. It was olive oil based, with calendula, comfrey, chickweed – which is really prevalent out here – and some goldenseal. And it worked.”
Mendizabal’s fascination with plants took root at an early age, when, at age 5, her uncle showed her how to make her own tea leaves from her family’s lemon tree.
“That was a big, big deal for me,” she said. “My dad is an amazing gardener, and when I was growing up, we always had all these exotic plants and flowers around. After I made my first tea, I’d pull flowers off my dad’s plants to make more teas. He’d get so mad.”
She shared her dad’s love of gardening, and when she left to start her own family with husband Rey, one of the first things she added to her new home was a garden.
“I just love to see plants when they are first starting to sprout,” she said. “To this day, I cannot walk past a plant and wonder what it can do, or what I can make with it. All plants are beneficial in some way – except maybe poison oak and poison ivy. I haven’t figured those two out yet. But even when I go out – we go camping quite a bit – I’ll look around at my surroundings and wonder ‘if we got stuck, what plants could we eat? Which plants could help me survive?'”
Mendizabal and her husband were living in Morgan Hill when their son, Nick, was born, and she created her diaper rash salve from the huge herb garden in their back yard. It worked so well she began giving it away in jars to friends who had newborns. At the time, she was working at Good Samaritan Hospital in San Jose, while Rey worked with the Santa Clara County Corrections Department at James Boys Ranch.
In addition to the diaper rash salve, Mendizabal had created a hand salve, made with virgin olive oil, calendula flowers, comfrey, chamomile, plantain, St. John’s Wort and essential oils such as tea tree, rosemary and lavender. A co-worker of Mendizabal’s insisted the salve was good enough to be sold commercially, and took several jars to a nearby store.
“She just went into this store and asked if they would sell it, and they did,” Mendizabal said. “I’d been making these salves for a while, and giving them away, and quite a few friends said I should start selling them.”
Mendizabal began looking for property to expand her garden, finding her way into San Benito County.
“I thought it would be cool to have my own little farm,” she said. “We were working with John Brigantino to find a few acres, and I was thinking maybe two acres. But land was much cheaper back then, and John told me, ‘you know, you could buy five acres for not much more than you’d pay for two.’ So we went ahead and purchased five acres.”
Today, Foxhollow Herb Farm specializes in organically grown herbs, which are cut and dried and then turned into various products. The largest crop grown at Foxhollow is lavender, which blooms in June and July on two wonderfully scented acres. The remaining three acres are filled with the experimental herbs and medicinal plants Mendizabal uses in her products.
“What’s nice is that to make salves and tinctures, I don’t really need a lot of plants,” she said. “If I’m making a comfrey tincture, I’ll just pull off a few flowers from a plant, put them into a gallon jar and soak them in water for a couple of days. I tend to make things in small batches, so that I know they are fresh.”
Two of Foxhollow’s hottest items, Mendizabal said, are the herbal soaps and her original hand salve. Other specialty items include dried herbs, bath and spa items such as herbal bath blends and exfoliating salt and sugar scrubs, skin care items such as a lavender facial cleansing cream and a rose/chamomile facial serum, lotions and creams, massage oils, laundry and linen items, lip balms and even herbal teas. Theitems are all natural, containing no animal or man-made products.
Mendizabal sells most of her products at various farmers markets in central California, and online via Foxhollow’s Web site, www.foxhollowherbs.com.
“It’s really easier to make the products than to market them,” she said. “But I enjoy the creativity. Also, I’m starting to do some private label items. I’m making lip balms for a company in Florida which will put their own labels on them.”
In spite of her success, Mendizabal said she still considers Foxhollow Herb Farm a small, family-run business.
“Rey is very supportive of what I do, and he keeps the lavender watered and keeps it trimmed for me. He helps me hang it to dry in the garage, which makes our garage smell wonderful,” she said.
Mendizabal has slowed down just a bit in recent years, cutting back on the number of farmers markets she attends and trying to take weekends off.
“I used to work every day,” she said. “I had a few local high school girls helping me out for a while, and then as they graduated, and become moms and teachers, I decided not to fill their spots. I wanted to calm down a little.”
But even as she slows down, Mendizabal’s desire to make things out of nature continues to grow – to the point where she is now passing her knowledge on to son Nick.
“Nick’s very open to all of this,” she said. “He was already identifying plants when he was 4 years old. After we moved out here, there was a time where I came across him sitting at the top of the field. He was just about 4, and I noticed he was holding his foot, and had plantain leaves across the bottom. I asked him what he was doing, and he said a bee had stung him. Here was this little boy who remembered plantain was good for bee stings. It was amazing.”
