The missus and I, again with our Garifuna cat-sitter friend, took a quick trip to the hills north of Simi Valley, about even with Ventura in the grand scheme of things, but farther east by about fifty or sixty miles.
Bardsdale is the site of a Farm Fresh to You satellite farm sporting both orange and avocado trees for a U-Pick. Farm Fresh to You is the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) that delivers produce to our door at 6 am every Friday.
They hosted a get-to-know-your-farmer event this past Saturday morning, everyone interested was invited. There was a lecture by one of the members of the family that runs the business, a shaded market stall, a kid's corner for craft activities, an acoustic band, and a U-Pick. A U-Pick, if you've never heard, or can't imagine, is where you are allowed to pick as much fruit as your bag allows. Now, they gave guests a plastic bag, but we brought our own.
Here there were two types of orange trees: navel and Valencia. The Valencias were smaller but came from much larger trees. Valencias are used for juice mostly, and this small orchard space, newly acquired by the business owning family as an event space, was thought to be mainly a juicing concern, before the main juicing orchards were transferred to Fresno.
The avocados were about 85% harvested by the tine the family got control, and they asked the workers to hold off the harvesting and leave something for the guests (us) to pick.
They were unripe, but you can accelerate that at home.
I got to talking with Thaddeus, one of the sons of the family and the writer of the newsletters that are delivered each week with the box of produce. It turns out we were at Cal Poly, SLO, at the same time. He had some interesting things to say about their business model. He says that he could grow some great vegetables, and that would be fine, but today he is focusing on growing new
farmers.
Part of their business plan that's radical is that they're both a produce growing concern, and a produce delivery organization. Long ago those two things had been separated, and today it's revolutionary to try and grow produce close by and then take it to the consumers. How far have we gotten?
This model is the important part, and they're doing their part to change the world. Not too many companies can say that.
Here's a picture of a typical small bag-in-a-box of produce:
They have different choices of boxes; some fruit, some vegetables, some able to eat raw, all seasonal...many, many choices.
Here's a copy of a newsletter: it has news from the farm, information on some of the produce, and recipes. Next to it is the list of the box's contents.
The oranges were everywhere, and the wonderful scent of orange blossom was succulent and overpowering. Here's a Valencia tree.
Another thing that was as omnipresent as the beautiful smell of blossom was the unmistakable hum of bees. Seriously, the buzz of the hundred of thousands of bees created a constant hum in the air that you quickly forgot about, but constantly dodging bees was an activity that you didn't take for granted. Strangely, it didn't scare anybody; all was calm in the bee-dodging game. Here my camera caught a bee leaving a blossom. Thaddeus said these blossoms will produce oranges by September.
In this picture you can see the navel orange trees in the foreground and the larger Valencias in the background.
Here's a walkway through the avocado trees. Since the harvesting of the avocado was nearly completed by a crew recently--a fact we didn't know until later--the first forty-five minutes of the walk through the avocado rows was frustrating and literally fruitless. Eventually we found the row that wasn't touched by the crew, and loaded up on rock hard avocados. We've got our accelerating methods at home.
Here's the bag I used to fill up on oranges (and about four avocados, the missus got about ten). I'm not sure how much it weighed, but it was between twenty and thirty pounds. Still eating and juicing them, I'll have Vitamin C poisoning soon enough.
