The chefs knew wasabi needs year-round cool weather, takes at least two years to reach maturity and is more vulnerable than most crops to pests, viruses and root pathogens. Hall and Roller just took that as a challenge. So, even though Roller had no farming experience and Hall didn’t have any other than working summers as a youth on an orchard, they decided to give it a try. Rocky start Roller, of Oakland, and Hall, then of San Francisco, found land in Half Moon Bay, a small San Mateo County coastal town with a climate similar to the region in Japan where the crop flourishes. The site also came with
greenhouses, a huge plus since wasabi prefers indirect sunlight and needs controlled moisture. In 2011, they launched Half Moon Bay Wasabi and planted their first crop in a 4,000-square-foot space. They soon would be glad they had kept their day jobs. They had so many problems that they had to pull up and throw away all 800 plants and start over. “It’s not like there’s a guidebook on how to grow this stuff and there’s not much information coming out of Japan,” Roller says. “We learned everything the hard way.” One of the biggest hurdles is the lengthy growing cycle. “Stresses just manifest themselves into diseases a lot easier when plants are older,” Hall says. “You’ve spent all these resources—water, fertilizer, rent—and so when you start losing plants after a year or 14 months, it can be pretty devastating.” Through a process of extensive trial and error, they had a tiny bit to sell after two years and got their first real crop after three. Success at last The upsides to growing wasabi are the perennial plants can be grown and harvested year-round and can be multiplied. “Mature plants put off shoots. You can pull them and replant them,” Roller explains. “Sometimes we do that and sometimes we purchase plant starts.”
At left, Jeff Roller harvests wasabi from one of three greenhouses at the Half Moon Bay farm. Above and right, he and Tim Hall remove the leaves and stems from each rhizome to prepare the wasabi for shipping.
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