Happy Thanksgiving

Behind the palm trees are the orange trees. At this time the entire area was covered in orange groves for miles and miles. It smelled heavenly when the trees were in bloom and it stuck like hell when the farmers ignited the smudge pots and burned oil to keep the threat of frost at bay.

If you know where to look there are still tiny fragments of the past clinging on to the present in the Inland Empire- an old orange tree in a yard here and there, an building that was once a fruit packing shed etc. Mostly you can read about the past in the street signs, where citrus themes like “Valencia St.” or “Orange Show Speedway” point to the past.

Happy Thanksgiving and thank you for supporting our farm this year. Thanksgiving always marks the end of a season and a moment of rest before we commence a new year’s production schedule, so it’s a good time to look back and reflect. This year wasn’t the easiest of years, with a cold, wet, and late start for planting, and the cool weather continued, punctuated with heat spells that were hard on the tomato crop. But we made it through. That another year has passed by, and so quickly, has me thinking about time.

The horse in the top picture was named Fanny. The boy in the woman’s lap is Jack, Fran’s father. Fran is my mother in law.The woman holding Jack is her grandmother, Magdalena. They were posed in their orange orchard in Colton, California, at the corner of Olive and Rancho, in 1924. This last week, Fran, my mother in law, and I, drove out to Colton, a hundred years later, to revisit the scene. Thankfully, the palm tree is still there. Everything else in the neighborhood has changed dramatically for miles around. Millions and millions of people now live where the orange groves once carpeted the valley floor. “Time waits for no one,” I’ve heard. The traffic certainly wouldn’t wait for me either, so I wasn’t able to stand in the street to recapture the precise perspective of the old photo. I wanted to hug the old palm tree and hear it tell me a hundred years of stories.

I decided to go home and look through my own photographs to see how well my family has documented the changes on this little patch of ground we’ve called home for the last 120 years.

The picture below was taken sometime in the 1930s when the farm was being used to graze livestock. This field is where we have recently situated our lavender labyrinth. You can see that my family kept cattle at the time, not sheep as they did later on, because the coyote brush in the field would have been nibbled back by sheep, whereas the cows prefer to lick up grass. If I stopped farming the field tomorrow the coyote brush, Baccharis pilularis, would promptly pop up again. Time doesn’t wait but Baccharis has the patience and persistence to wait and wait and wait for its chance to return. Sometimes I get distressed when I see how aggressively stupid we humans are about fouling the natural world we’re born into, but then I remember that nature has all the time in the world to heal itself. I’m thankful that I’ve had the opportunity to farm this land that my great grandfather worked on 100 years ago and hopefully “do it right.”

Only the barn at far right of photo is still standing, albeit remodeled on the same footprint. The other outbuildings are now gone and our present day home is just off the left hand side of photo. My grandfather built it with the lumber he re-used from the old house that is in this photo. And the “old house” had been built using the wood from the “old, old house,” which had been built from the redwoods logged on the property in the 1860s.

Here’s the corner of the field on a quiet Sunday morning in 1987 when a hot air balloon landed after it ran out of gas overhead. The pilot gave us a bottle of champagne which he kept aboard for emergencies like this.

Our lavender labyrinth is now mature. This perennial lavender planting occupies the emotional center of the field and around the margins of the labyrinth we plant our other crops. During our 2025 growing season we intend to plant 18 beds of herbs, ranging from anis hyssop, thru a spectrum of basils to lemon thyme, marjoram, nepitella, oregano and zaatar. We rotate crops, so where the pumpkin patch grew this year we will plant our sacramental marigold patch next year. We look forward to inviting you all to herb and flower U-Pick events when the crops are in. 

In the 2025 season many more of the citrus trees that we planted on the slopes of the field will be maturing and giving their first, meaningful crop. Besides Lisbon and Meyer lemons we have planted Buddha’s Hand citrons, Limequats, Kumquats, Finger limes, Thai Limes, Makrut limes, Yuzu limes, Sour Oranges, Blood Oranges, Sudachi, and Assadas citron. Keep an eye on the newsletter for updates on mid-winter citrus theme pop-ups. And coming up soon, on December 7th, from 11am to 5 pm, at the Corralitos Cultural Center, 127 Hames Road, we will be participating in the 2024 Holiday Sip & Shop with a wide range of other local vendors. There will be music and wine. We’ll be bringing seasonal farm goodies, citrus products, herbs, veggies and gifts. Swing by and visit us.

The field on a quiet, damp morning years ago when a large flock of wild turkeys showed up. They’ve never really left, though their numbers go up and down. A turkey gobbling outside my window woke me up this Thanksgiving morning.

Graydon and Gerardo enjoying the spectacle of a large tractor hauling a laser-leveling rig when it got stuck in the field, circa 2001

Samson keeping an eye on me and snoozing as I worked to construct what would become the lavender labyrinth. You can see the young citrus orchard on the slopes. This was sometime during Covid.

A recent drone shot of the labyrinth.

Alexis and I inspecting the lavender crop last year with Green Oaxacan corn on right.

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  Looking up the slope from the field towards the farm gate and the house during peak marigold season.

  
  
  

  Somethings about farming are universal and timeless, lol. Here’s my dad with a tractor stuck in the mud on some ranch in the Salinas Valley circa 1946.

  

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