Leo and Suzette Overgaag own North Shore Greenhouses, which grows young, tender herbs, which are sold with roots still attached for freshness. Basil is the company’s top seller.
Herbs Continued from Page 4
you start a process where they start wilting, drying out, decaying,” Leo Overgaag said. While cut herbs may only stay fresh for a few days after purchase, living herbs can last an average of one to two weeks. “You can use fresh herbs in your salad just like any green,” Suzette Overgaag said. “There’s just so many different ways that you can use them,” she said, adding this includes chopping and combining herbs with butter or adding to vinegars, oils, cocktails or water. “We are trying to come up with some better ways of com- municating that.” Another bonus is that many herbs of- fer health benefits. Some herbs are load- ed with antioxidants, help with digestion and are flavorful alternatives to extra salt, fat or sugar. For the company, the most popular herb is basil followed by mint, rosemary, thyme, dill and chives. Those are the top sellers, but North Shore also produces herbs such as sorrel, tarragon, lemon basil and mar- joram. “We try to innovate all the time,” Suzette Overgaag said. One new innovation is a product line called Counter Culture, a trio of different herbs packaged in a waterproof container. Customers can display the collection on the windowsill or counter and use what they need. The three varieties of herbs are generally timed to the season, Suzette Overgaag said. “I really wanted this new product to be sustainable,” she said. “It will actually last a long time, but you can throw it away and it is recyclable. That’s really important to me. You want to be as good a steward as you can be in providing a product.” (Cyndee Fontana-Ott is a contributing writer for California Bountiful ® , where this article first appeared in the January/ February 2024 issue.)
greenhouse space for a small yearlong pilot. “I wanted to go through all four sea- sons to make sure we wouldn’t have any surprises when we started growing them,” he said. Based on that success, the couple scaled up production to sell to retailers. The busi- ness continued to grow as Leo Overgaag harnessed and adapted the latest in green- house technology for use in the company. They built the first greenhouse specif- ically for herbs in 1999, and cucumbers were retired about a decade ago. In ad- dition to Bubb, the Overgaags’ other chil- dren—Ashley and Tony—also work at least part-time for the company. Most North Shore herbs are grown in two highly automated greenhouses pow- ered mostly by solar panels and warmed on cool nights by geothermal energy. Beneficial insects such as ladybugs, rath- er than pesticides, are the soldiers in pest control. The Overgaags said such mea- sures make sense both from a business and sustainability standpoint. The company germinates plants from seed. In the two main greenhouses, seed- lings are placed individually into 25-foot- long gutters that move along a mechanized system. The plants are touched only a few times by human hands. Crops are grown hydroponically—in peat moss rather than soil—and use roughly 70% less water than field crops. Any leftover drops are recycled. During the growth cycle, herbs are tend- ed and slowly moved from one side of the greenhouse to the other signaling they are ready for harvest. They are then packaged, sorted and prepared for shipment. The Overgaags said there is plenty of difference between cut and living herbs. “As soon as you cut the stems off the plant,
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