Surf City Herbs opened in the spring of 2024 in a narrow storefront that had been a print shop, a surf repair bench, and briefly a laundromat. We kept the tile floor and built the rest out of salvaged oak.

The Shop

The room is twenty-two feet deep and lit badly, which we have decided is correct. A hundred and forty jars line the back wall on oak shelving we built from a torn-out lifeguard tower, and the labels are written by hand because the first batch of printed ones curled in the salt air within a month.

There is a counter, a scale, a mortar that weighs eleven pounds, and one chair for whoever is waiting. We scoop to order. If you want four ounces of chamomile we will weigh you four ounces of chamomile, and if you want to smell six tins first, that is what the chair is for.

The Work

Everything sold here is made in that room. Fronds are cut at low tide and cured before they meet a jar; tinctures sit four to six weeks and get turned by hand each morning; blends are mixed in ten-pound lots and not a gram more, because past ten pounds you stop being able to feel whether the ratio is right.

We do not use a mill on the seaweed. We do not buy pre-blended base and relabel it. When a lot runs out we take the tin off the shelf and wait for the season rather than sourcing around it, which is why the wall looks different in February than it does in August.

The Coast

We harvest under a California commercial permit and take no more than a third of any single kelp stand, cutting above the holdfast so the plant stays anchored and regrows. Sea lettuce comes off the rocks at Little Corona on spring tides only. The white sage in our infusion is cultivated, not wild-cut — the stands along this coast are under real pressure from unpermitted harvest, and we would rather buy from a nursery than add to it.

What we cannot get honestly from this coastline, we buy from people who can: bladderwrack from a licensed harvester in Maine, chamomile from a cooperative in the Nile Delta, roots from a certified grower in Oregon. Their names are on the jar.

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