Trendy? It Grows in Malibu : Business: A TV writer whose career is fallow at the moment turns his hand to organic farming. His crops: herbs and glamorous greens and edible flowers that are served at fancy restaurants.

Forget Old MacDonald.

Michael Bendix is a farmer, Southern California style.

No John Deere reapers for him. No chemical pesticides. No corn as high as an elephant’s eye. Bendix is in the boutique end of the agriculture business. He raises glamorous greens, pesticide-free herbs and edible flowers for restaurants with names that sound like sports cars and chefs as famous as their celebrity customers. The only corn he raises produces tiny, trendy ears the size of his pinky. Nor does Bendix toil in one of California’s scorching interior valleys. Bendix tills the virgin soil of Malibu. You should have as good a view of the Pacific as his 22 varieties of lettuce have.

“This is one of those amazing success stories,” said Bendix, 42, whose business has grown in a couple of years from a back-yard herb garden to a flourishing specialty produce operation whose high-profile clients include the Hard Rock Cafes.

A graduate of Beverly Hills High School (“the Class of Richard Dreyfuss”), Bendix became a farmer the Hollywood way. Until 1988 he was a full-time TV writer: His recent work included last year’s short-lived “Dolphin Cove” series. Then the writer’s strike struck. Hard-pressed to pay the mortgage on his acre-and-a-half Malibu mini-estate, Bendix and girlfriend (now partner) Robin Elmasian put 12 pounds of home-grown basil into his VW Rabbit and pitched it to a nearby restaurant. Heartened by that first sale, Bendix and Elmasian took their basil to a dozen upscale eateries in the Los Angeles area, 10 of which are now regular accounts.

From the basic “Scarborough Fair” herbs--basil, thyme, rosemary, dill and tarragon--that are a fixture of every newlywed’s spice rack, Bendix has expanded to 110 different products, including such rare and exotic herbs as caraway thyme, curry plant and Joseph’s coat, also called Chinese spinach. Basil is still an important part of his business, especially since the recent hard frost in the Southeast destroyed Florida’s basil along with its citrus crops. But Bendix’s basil includes such uncommon types as cinnamon and a large-leaf variety that is good for stuffing. One of his chef clients wraps the big, fragrant leaves around mozzarella and prosciutto.

To guarantee freshness, Bendix said, “We have guys who go out to pick at 3 o’clock in the morning with miners’ lights on.” Occasionally, Bandit or the other burro on the farm packs herbs up and down the hills.

In addition to baby corn and other miniature vegetables, Bendix raises baby orchids and other edible flowers. Personally, he likes small, unusual flowers--pansies are little too obvious for his taste. He prefers to see food decorated with tiny sprays of lavender flowers (“they look almost Art Deco”) or the pretty little lilac-tinted flowers cilantro gives forth (they taste like cilantro, he pointed out, just as the star-shaped purple flowers of garlic chives taste like their pungent namesake). He also raises nasturtiums that can be whizzed in a food processor to add spice to a salad dressing as well as used as a garnish. And for the host who wants to end his or her barbecue with a flourish, he has peppermint geranium leaves. Guests can use them instead of disposable towels to wipe the sauce from their hands.

One of the reasons Bendix likes this business is that he likes to eat. When he talks about salad, for instance, it is with the enthusiasm of a true foodie. “You have your crunchies. You’ve got your soft lettuces, you’ve got your buttery lettuces, and then you’ve got your spices like the cresses.”

Bendix, Elmasian and a third partner--Robin’s sister, Susie Elmasian--actually have two companies, Malibu Herb Farms, where they raise their organic produce, and a distributing arm, Malibu Farms. The business includes Bendix’s Malibu property, 20 acres of rented fields elsewhere in Malibu, a 60-acre organic farm in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and space in downtown Los Angeles where the produce is prepared for delivery. Malibu Farms supplies its customers, most of them restaurants and hotels, with such edible exotica as truffles, Tahitian pineapples, cherimoyas and quail eggs in addition to foods grown on the company’s farms.

Bendix believes that his produce has a special quality as a result of being grown without chemicals on Westside real estate. As a student of environmental management at USC, he saw the way smog stunted the growth of spinach. “We basically get no smog here, and there’s a breeze every day,” he said. “I think our products reflect that nice microclimate we have.”

To some extent, boutique farming is a fashion business. Nobody wants to be seen eating last year’s produce. What’s hot is anything the chefs haven’t seen before, Bendix said. Currently, miner’s lettuce--a spade-shaped green indigenous to North America--is moving well at $10 to $12 a pound. Radicchio, on the other hand, only recently omnipresent, is out, out, out, so out that Bendix doesn’t include it in his popular lettuce mix (a “fave” of Liz Taylor, he said). Instead, he adds color to the melange with red-and-green Chinese spinach. In search of tomorrow’s trends, Bendix attends growers gatherings in the Netherlands and elsewhere. In the near future, he promised, “I’m bringing back two potatoes that have never been seen in Los Angeles before.”

Bendix, who has 40 employees, sees continued growth in the future: new products and new lines, including seasoned oils and vinegars. But just in case the bottom drops out of the arugula business, he has options. The Malibu farmer currently has a TV series in development. It’s called “Capers,” and the protagonist, who gets in and out of scrapes as he travels around the world, is, of course, a chef.