Katie Kaboom

I wrote this post wayyy back in October, a short lifetime ago when this farm tour actually happened. I expect plenty of eyerolling, headshaking, and dissaproving looks at this point. I was just… ya know… busy.

Once upon a time when we used to have a thing called seasons, we used to have a little thing called the “harvest” in the Fall. While it does still get cold(er) in the Fall and Winter, even if marginally here in California, we surely don’t see that much of a seasonal reflection in our grocery stores unless you look really, REALLY hard. Strawberries in December? You got it. Apples in February? Sure thing. We’ve traded away regional specialties and diverse varieties so that even when apples are in season (like right now), we still only see a few, mass produced varieties because farmers are shipping them all over the globe to cover other areas that have opposite seasons than here in California.

It’s always a happy day for me when I get to visit farms that don’t really subscribe to that type of farming (i.e., mass, mono-culturing). I got a chance to take some folks up to Cuyama, California to kickoff Fuji apple season with a special Fuji farm tour. Harold got into farming late in life because he, “Wanted somewhere nice to go on the weekends. So I bought some land.” Which cracks me up for several reasons, one being that he’s the second farmer that’s told me a similar story about wanting something “relaxing” like farming to do. Quite an oxymoron. Oxymoron or not, I tend very much to like older people that have that sort of outlook on life. The ability to just go with it and do what you like to do until you don’t like it anymore is so appealing to me. And two, farmers are just crazy people to begin with.

Up the grapevine we drove until Fraiser Park. We continued down through the canyon almost 40 miles into the interior of California. Beau-ti-ful. Looks like Spain. (Or does Spain look like California?) Anyway, the other produce buyers and I walked through Cuyama Farm, which is one of the remaining apple farms local to LA county. We were all similarly refreshed to hear about the heirloom varieties they were growing (including the Spitzenberg, which was Thomas Jefferson’s favorite apple), marveling at the Fuji, and googling at the deepening rouge of the Arkansas Blacks swelling on the tree.

The day pretty much went like this:

Walk. Pick apple off tree. Munch. Talk about it. Have more questions. Ask them. Walk. Munch. Get in the car, drive to a different part of the orchard. Walk. Munch. Talk. Repeat.

Speaking of which, I had no clue that there were numerous varieties of Fujis. Did you? The Standard Fuji and the New Zealand Fuji make their way into most American homes and you can distinguish them by the faint lateral stripes found on the Standard Fuji. The taste profile is a little different too but I won’t go into that. But how crazy that there are multiple varieties?

Walk. Munch. Talk. Nice little mantra for life, eh?

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 7th, 2008 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.