Koji Pingry (left) and Lizzy Jansen (right) of Makanai Farm. Photo by Troy Osaki
The specialty vegetables that show up on many of Seattle’s favorite Japanese restaurant menus come to the city by boat. Not the container ships that arrive at Harbor Island, but a Washington State ferry that makes the 15 minute trip from Vashon Island to Fauntleroy. Each Friday during the growing season, Koji Pingry and Lizzy Jansen of Makanai Farm load up their 1998 Toyota Sienna with fresh produce and drive onto a Seattle-bound ferry. On the other side of the water is a day of unloading vegetables, hopping in and out of the driver’s seat of a temporarily illegally parked minivan with fingers crossed. It is a satisfying day of cross-pollination and sharing of culturally relevant foods.
Makanai Farm is a no-till regenerative farm located on Vashon Island. They grow over a hundred varieties of vegetables, including a breadth of Japanese and other Asian varieties. This diversity of offerings has garnered them a loyal CSA following, a booth at the University District Farmer’s Market and relationships with local chefs.
A century ago this movement of produce around the Puget Sound was commonplace. The Mosquito Fleet, an armada of passenger and freight ships, connected farms and towns across the Puget Sound. Many of the farms were run by Japanese and Japanese American farmers who produced three quarters of the produce in King County by the 1920s. Before incarceration, Japanese American farmers around the Puget Sound were particularly well known for proficiency at growing berries. While most Japanese Americans did not return to their farms after incarceration, the Matsuda family on Vashon Island was able to return to their land, in part thanks to their Filipino caretaker Mack Garcia. The Matsudas continued to grow strawberries until their final harvest in 1981 and in 2015 Vashon-Maury Island Land Trust purchased the property.
In March of 2025 the Vashon-Maury Island Land Trust sent out a request for applications for new tenants for the farm. Jansen and Pingry applied, nailed the landing and moved their farm operations from Sedro-Woolley to Vashon by the end of the year.
“There’s such a rich small-scale farming community out here,” says Jansen, who grew up in the agrarian Skagit Valley. “There’s less land in general on the island, so everyone’s farming on a small scale which makes it a good place for farm buddies.”
Jansen and Pingry attribute their understanding of Japanese vegetable farming to one of their early mentors, Wapato-based farmer Katsumi Taki. Today, their offerings range from Japanese cucumbers and a-choy to goya and chrysanthemum greens.
The 2026 growing season marks Jansen and Pingry’s seventh season of running a farm together, and their first on Vashon. The sandier soils and drier climate on the island have proven both challenging and rewarding. Compared to the heavier soils in Sedro-Woolley, the ground at the Matsuda farm is more friable. “It makes weeding a lot easier, and it’s great for our Japanese summer vegetables,” said Pingry, opening a delivery bin to show me daikon stacked like ivory. “This is by far our best daikon year too, it’s outrageous.”
“Learning how to adjust our watering was one thing, but living on the farm has made our work-life balance tricky. We could work all day if we wanted to and that’s something we’re figuring out,” said Pingry.
After they disembark in Fauntleroy and enter the fray of the city, their first stop in Seattle is the Asian Counseling and Referral Service Food Bank (ACRS) in the Chinatown International District. Makanai Farm is one of seven local BIPOC-owned farms that the ACRS purchases vegetables from for their food bank and meals programs. By working with local farms, the ACRS is able to source culturally relevant vegetables for their clients.
From the ACRS, the delivery route alternates between CSA dropoffs and restaurants. Despite spending the bulk of their time on the farm, Jansen and Pingry both feel a strong connection to Seattle’s restaurants. When they met at the University of Washington they were both working in restaurants.
“Selling to restaurants is a cool way to get our food to different people who wouldn’t otherwise want to buy whole box of veggies every week or who don’t have time to go to a farmer’s market,” says Jansen, “So it’s another way to reach more folks and grow a greater variety of fun vegetables.”
Their first restaurant stop is Sankaku in Melrose Market, where Rie Otsuka makes onigiri and bentos filled to the brim with Makanai vegetables.
“I love their veggies, especially the cucumbers, I make a simple salad out of them,” said Otsuka. “People ask for it every year! They wait for the season to come. I tried to do it with other cucumbers when it’s not in season, but it’s totally different.”
Where grocery cucumbers can be mealy and watery, the Japanese cucumbers from Makanai farm are prized for their sweet flesh and turgid crunch. “It’s just the best quality vegetables I’ve ever had before. You can tell how fresh it is once you cut into the cabbage or zucchinis and all of the water comes out,” Otsuka said.
Just up the street from Melrose Market is their next stop: Tamari Bar. Tamari Bar is a part of the restaurant group that once included Suika, where Pingry worked for several formative years. Like Otsuka, owner chef Makoto Kimoto loves the Makanai cucumbers the most but finds endless opportunities to create vegetable izakaya dishes. Depending on the season the menu might include grilled zucchini ohitashi, fried eggplant and shiso salad, or vegetable curry.
Makanai Farm is a no-till regenerative farm located on Vashon Island. They grow over a hundred varieties of vegetables, including a breadth of Japanese and other Asian varieties. Photo by Troy Osaki
Next stop: ShoMon Kappo Sushi in Belltown. The kitchen is helmed by Masaki Nishioka, the former executive chef at Shiro’s. Nishioka’s kappo-style restaurant is founded on provenance and seasonality, something that can only be achieved through relationships with local farms.
“I want to know where my ingredients come from and who is growing them. When I have a direct relationship with the farmer, I can understand the season, the challenges they are facing, and the story behind the ingredients,” said Nishioka. “Japanese cuisine is deeply connected to seasonality, so using ingredients grown locally helps me express Japanese cooking in a way that is connected to where we live.”
The vegetables that are available influence what Nishioka puts on the menu. If it’s zucchini blossoms, he might stuff them with ground Wagyu beef seasoned with white miso and serve them as tempura.
Conversely, working with chefs also allows Jansen and Pingry to grow different varieties of vegetables. “There are certain specialty things that we grow because chefs ask for them and I don’t think we would grow if we only sold them through the CSA or the farmers market,” says Jansen.
At their next stop in Wallingford, chef Mutsuko Soma of Kamonegi and Hannyatou has made use of their ability to grow specific vegetables.
“We asked Koji and Lizzy to grow a specific type of squash for us called Korinki,” said Soma. “It is special because it’s a type of squash that can be enjoyed raw.”
In 2022 Soma gave them the seeds to trial Korinki squash, which they’d never heard of before, let alone eaten. As that summer waned, they would drop off samples with Soma at varying states of ripeness before figuring out the right picking window. That first year they dropped off hundreds of pounds, and it’s a crop they continue to grow annually.
Soma marinates Korinki in chili oil and serves it chilled with bamboo shoots and chili crisp. She also buys many of the farm’s seconds for pickling or processing. “It’s really nice to have an outlet for vegetables that are a little funky looking or have bug bites so that they don’t end up in the compost,” says Pingry.
The last leg of their deliveries draws them north, to Edmonds and SanKai, one of their longest standing customers. The Nakano family formerly ran the beloved Kisaku Sushi in Tangletown and moved to Edmonds to open SanKai in 2019. Both Jansen and Pingry value the support and input that the Nakano family has shared with them since their early days farming.
Throughout the growing season SanKai serves a salad made from Makanai greens and blistered shishito peppers finished with dashi shoyu. When the growing season comes to an end, the farmers make an annual pilgrimage to SanKai to celebrate their year.
“We usually try to go to each of the restaurants that we sell to once a year.” says Pingry, “It’s really fun to get feedback from restaurants and to see what they’re doing with the vegetables, which can change how we harvest or grow things. It’s how we can keep improving on quality.”
At the end of a long day of playing Santa Claus across town, they pull their now empty minivan into the ferry line. To live on an island is to play by rules of the ferry gods. Sometimes this means a wait, or an extra long crossing that stops at Southworth before Vashon.
After seven summers working in the dirt and a long day of battling Seattle traffic, sitting still with nothing to do is fine with these farmers. They might pretend to read a book before falling asleep, or reflect with gratitude on the hands that keep the farm running while they’re away, or wonder who they’ll see at the Saturday farmers market. Will Pancita or Atoma come by again for vegetables? Will they get to practice haggling again with the aunties who always show up at the end of the day? Maybe more members of the Matsuda family will stop by and share stories of the old days of the land these young farmers now tend and the house they live in. As they pull vegetables from the ground they deepen their roots in a legacy of farming in the Puget Sound.
Dining and Cooking