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The
K.B. Hall Apricot Ranch - an Ojai Legend
Ojai Pixie Tangerines: Bringing a New Fruit
to a Crowded Market A Case Study
Edible Plants of the Ventura River
and Ranch Property
THE
K.B. HALL APRICOT RANCH - AN OJAI LEGEND
By Steve
Fields
Over
the past century, Ventura County has seen waves of change
in its local agriculture. At one time the Oxnard plain was
filled with lima beans instead of strawberries. And before
the region became a haven for oranges and lemons, there were
44,000 acres of apricots commercially grown in the county.
Now, there are just 20 acres. And 87-year-old K.B. Hall isn’t
quite sure how long these 20 acres of nearly 90-year-old trees
can keep up.
But,
while the trees are still producing, Ojai residents have the
opportunity for a precious few weeks sometime in late June
or early July (depending on the weather) to drive up to the
Upper Ojai Valley and taste a bit of history. You won’t
regret it.
Throughout
the coastal valleys of California before the middle of the
20th Century, apricots were one of the leading agricultural
crops. They were shipped back East either fresh, dried, or
processed into jams and preserves.
Later,
many of the best growing areas (like Northern California’s
Silicon Valley), were lost to suburban housing tracts. Now,
most of California’s crops are grown in the Central Valley
and the modern commercially-grown varieties don’t match
up to what was originally planted.
K.B.
Hall grows what are frequently known as Royal Blenheim apricots
(there is some confusion about the name since sometimes this
variety is also called just Royal or Blenheim). The fruit
is often somewhat smaller than the commercial varieties, but
they are packed with intense apricot flavor. They are wonderful
for almost any use–drying, making preserves, canning
or eating fresh.
Apricots
are one of the trickiest stone fruits to grow since they bloom
earlier than all other stone fruit, usually in late February
or early March. And after blooming occurs, growers hold their
breath for almost a month because a variety of weather conditions
can devastate the crop.
The
K.B. Hall orchard has suffered some weather-related problems
over the last few seasons, including a torrential hail storm,
gale force winds, and last year’s draught. At press time,
they were still uncertain about this year’s crop. The
trees had started to bloom in early February after the unseasonably
warm January. Then there was a cold, wet snap which stopped
the process. The trees have had to restart their flowering
process and as a result it is not certain how the ultimate
crop will turn out.
While
the small crop may not be good financially for the Halls,
it can be a treat for the consumer. Frequently, the remaining
fruit receives all of the energy generated by the trees and
produces exceptionally sweet fruit.
The
history of K.B. Hall’s orchard is almost a condensed
history of Ojai itself. The orchard was started by Henry Hess,
who was a part of the German immigrant community that settled
the Ojai Valley. He planted the original apricot trees plus
20 acres of almonds and some grape vines (to make wine for
himself and his workers).
Harvest
times were a combination of hard work and big fiestas. Entire
families from Los Angeles would come and camp on the property.
They would pick and process fruit during the day and drink
Hess’s wine and celebrate each night.
K.B.
Hall was an oil industry geologist who moved his family to
Ojai in 1947 to work in the Upper Ojai oil fields. His office
was just down the road from the orchard and he and Hess became
friends–probably over some glasses of wine from Hess’s
vineyards.
When
Hess died in 1955, Hall decided to buy the property and move
his family of 7 sons up to the Upper Valley. He quit his full-time
oil company job in 1966 to devote more time to farming. Now,
the farming operations are run by K.B.’s son Tom (who
splits time between farming and going to farmers’ markets
with a career in Hollywood as an actor). Another son, John,
who operates a tractor service business, helps maintain the
orchard throughout the year.
The
property (which is now a registered historic landmark) features
a board and batten main house originally built around 1870,
smaller houses brought on to the property to use as bunkhouses
for the boys, a windmill used originally to pump water from
a well, and, in essence, a factory to process apricots for
drying.
Originally,
the fruit was picked and brought to a covered area in the
middle of the orchard where it would be washed, cut in half
and put on redwood trays. The trays would then be stacked
on trolleys that would be rolled down tracks into the sulphuring
house (until the 1980’s, all of the apricots were treated
with sulphur dioxide in order to kill any worms in the fruit).
Then, the trays were carried out to the fields were the fruit
basked in the sun for a few days until they were dried.
The
process today no longer includes sulphuring. As a result,
the dried apricots are darker and smaller than you normally
see, but are bursting with sweetness.
The
orchard has always been completely organic, for a variety
of reasons according to Hall. First, the trees seemed to do
all right by themselves. Second, pesticides and commercial
fertilizers were just too expensive. The only "additive"
used is a deposit of manure from a local horse ranch.
In
addition, the crop is dry farmed, which means that it isn’t
irrigated. They are able to grow the fruit without extra water
for two reasons: apricots ripen early, before the weather
turns sizzling in the Upper Valley, and the water table underneath
the orchard is quite high. Generally, whatever water the ancient
trees require they can get through their extensive root systems.
In
its heyday, the orchard produced 60 tons of fruit a year.
Recent harvests have been fractions of that. But, thankfully,
there is still enough for locals to enjoy. June is the expected
harvest time. Stop by this year and enjoy a bit of history.
OJAI
PIXIE TANGERINES:
Bringing a New Fruit to a Crowded Market A Case Study
By Jim
Churchill
Forces
out there in the world could well mean an end to citrus growing
here. If you’ve driven out Highway 126 along the Santa
Clara River Valley any time this year you will have noticed
many hundreds of acres of valencia oranges bulldozed and stacked
in piles waiting to be ground up or burned. The forces which
have driven valencia orange growers out of business threaten
all Ventura County citrus growers, whether growing lemons,
valencias, or tangerines.
Those
forces are, briefly:
- consolidation
of the food retail industry
- globalization
of agricultural markets
- quality
of fruit
There
are a number of other on-going threats to local agriculture,
among them the ever-present threat of exotic insect pests
and development pressures, but let me just explain what’s
going on with Ventura County valencias.
First:
Santa Clara River Valley Valencia growers have faced fruit
quality problems for more than a decade – small size,
depressed sugar content, and "puff and crease" (a condition
which causes harvested fruit to degrade quickly), causing
it to be downgraded in price. As such, even in a good market,
Santa Clara River Valley Valencias fetch less than top price.
However,
the forces which guaranteed that valencias couldn’t survive,
and which threaten not only local citrus but all local agriculture,
are consolidation of ownership in the retail food business,
and globalization.
Here’s
how it works: Wal-Mart, Kroger, Albertson’s, Safeway,
and Ahold — five companies — account for a very
substantial percentage — probably 50% – of the groceries
sold in the United States. Ahold, a Dutch company, owns Stop
& Shop, Giant Foods, Bi-Lo, and Tops Markets; the Kroger
organization owns Dillions, Gerbes, King Soopers, Jay C Food
Stores, Foods Co, Cala Foods/Bell Markets, Owen’s, Hilander,
Fry’s, City Market, PriceRite, Kessel, and Payless; you
get the idea. This buying up of regional chains by the mega-grocers
occurred in the past decade or so as part of the big boom
that made all of us so rich. Remember? Similar concentration
has not yet occurred in the wholesale food distribution industry
so far as I know, but I’m sure it threatens.
Consolidation
at this level means that those of us growing and selling fruit
have fewer outlets to sell to, those outlets wield enormous
market power over sellers, and they’re making nation-wide
deals. Put it this way: in order to sell to Wal-Mart, you
have to be so big that if Wal-Mart decides not to take your
fruit, you’re totally screwed. Plus, if you’ve ever
wondered why the Ojai Von’s carries those unbelievably
awful looking, awful tasting tangerines from Florida, here’s
why: some produce buyer in Chicago is making a helluva deal
for VonsCo on a system-wide season-long buy.
Now,
with respect to valencia oranges, the conventional wisdom
in the produce business is that the consumer — that’s
you, madame, because the consumer of groceries is always a
woman — prefers a navel, which is seedless, to a valencia.
It
doesn’t much matter whether or not you yourself, Madame,
prefer a navel or a valencia: they’ve done focus groups
and they know what the consumer wants.
It
used to be that the valencia grower could survive this focus-grouped
preference, because navel oranges had a pretty short season.
Washington navels were available basically in the winter and
early spring, and the rest of the year belonged to valencias.
But then two things happened: (a) the citrus variety breeders
developed early navels and late navels, thus extending the
season of the navel orange (you can see a young planting of
late navels on Grand Ave. just west of Gridley Road —
watch when they get ripe), and (b), globalization brought
us southern hemisphere fruit, which is, of course, counter-seasonal.
So
bye-bye valencias: with a longer navel season, and with southern
hemisphere fruit to fill in the gaps when northern hemisphere
fruit isn’t available, there’s just no reason for
the big boys to purchase valencias any more. Especially if
the consumer doesn’t know the difference between fresh
fruit and fruit that’s been on a ship for three weeks.
(Ojai
produces an exceptional quality orange, eligible for export
to Japan and Hong Kong, which is one reason why not so many
valencia orchards have been pushed out in the Ojai Valley
—— yet. But go out Grand Ave all the way to the
east, and turn down McAndrew, and see what you see).
Now
what does all of this have to do with pixie tangerines?
We,
the folks in Ojai who are growing and marketing pixie tangerines
(most of us are gathered informally into a loose association
known as the Ojai Pixie Growers Association), are trying to
do things differently.
First,
orange growers marketed a product that they themselves would
never purchase from a store. This is a result of having millions
of tons of oranges every season, and of handling them as a
commodity, that is, as something sold by the boxcar load,
and that any consumer anywhere in the country can get almost
any time of year, and it always tastes uniformly bad because
it has been harvested before its time, gassed to induce a
bright orange rind, and held in cold storage.
If
you’re reading this in Edible Ojai, you know the difference
in taste between a fresh orange and a Vons orange. However,
you can see that this leaves the local orange industry no
line of defense against southern hemisphere fruit based on
flavor: the consumer has been educated not to care about flavor.
So
as pixie growers, we sell flavor. Pixies grown in Ojai taste
good partly because they are harvested to order, they’re
picked on Monday, packed and shipped to the wholesaler on
Tuesday, reshipped to the retailer on Tuesday, and available
for purchase Wednesday.
But
the first trick is to get a market for the fruit at all. It’s
not easy getting shelf-space for any new product, and the
pixie is kind of counter-intuitive: it’s small, it’s
color is pale, it doesn’t leap out and grab you. There’s
plenty of California citrus competing for that shelf space;
in addition to regular navels, late navels, early navels,
and pink navels, there’s a raft of competing tangerine
varieties: satsumas and clementines, tangelos and those nasty
Honey tangerines from Florida. Plus citrus growers all over
California are not just lying down and dying from mortification:
no, they’re looking for new crops. A lot of them are
planting tangerines: Clementines, TDE’s (three new, big,
seedless, deeply colored varieties recently released by the
University of California), Gold Nuggets (another comparatively
new UC release), and "Delites," with others on the horizon.
So
the first part of what Ojai pixie growers are trying to do
is develop a market for pixie tangerines: in all that welter
of citrus and berries and mangos and stone fruit we’re
trying to create a recognition that the pixie tangerine, though
small and pale, tastes good. To do that we have to first convince
grocers to carry it, then we have somehow to get consumers
(that’s you, Madame) to try it. We believe that if they
try it once, they’ll probably come back and buy it again.
But getting it on the grocery shelf is in itself a non-trivial
accomplishment.
But
we’re also trying to do something more. We’re trying
to navigate our way through the developing nightmare of concentration
and globalization by asserting a value attached to a place:
we’re trying to get recognition for the claim that not
only are pixie tangerines good, but that pixie tangerines
grown in Ojai are especially good.
It’s
true. Our climate and topography allow us to produce a particularly
delicious pixie tangerine. It may be the same characteristics
of the Valley that allow us to produce a terrific valencia
and a terrific navel. Whatever it is, we grow wonderful fruit
and we not only want consumers to recognize that the pixie
tangerine is delicous and works wonderfully well in a child’s
lunchbox or a salad, but that pixie tangerines from Ojai are
especially worth buying.
To
accomplish that we have developed our own little marketing
tools: we have a carton; we have a bag; we have just had a
contest for a slogan/bumpersticker (the winner, by the way,
was "Sweet, petite, and great to eat: Ojai Pixie Tangerines";
my wife is really ticked off that "Pixie Tangerines –
Too good to throw at cars" didn’t win). We avidly seek
coverage in the consumer press in towns where the fruit is
sold.
And
that, ladies and gentlemen, is the story of what we’re
trying to do with Pixie Tangerines grown in the Ojai Valley.
Please come by the Friends Ranch or Churchill Orchard stand
at the Ojai Farmers Market, or the Timber Canyon Ranch stand
at Ventura, Thousand Oaks, and Santa Clarita markets, and
pick up your free bumpersticker. And a couple of pounds of
Pixies. Help Ojai citrus survive.
EDIBLE
PLANTS OF THE VENTURA RIVER AND RANCH PROPERTY
By Lanny
Kaufer
Need a
hero? There’s no shortage these days, from U.S. soldiers
in combat to local heroes Bobby Houston and Robert Hudson,
Oscar-nominated for their film about civil rights heroine,
Rosa Parks. My nomination, however, goes to Jim Engel, executive
director of the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy. Jim is the driving
force behind the acquisition of the Ventura River and Ranch
Property, formerly know as the Farmont project, 1,566 pristine
acres straddling the Ventura River near Rancho Matilija.
So when
Jim asked me to hike some of the property and write an article
on the edible plants to be found there, I quickly overcame
my trepidation and agreed. I say "trepidation" because
the thought of surrendering my beloved plant friends to the
healthy appetites of Ojai’s foodie community stops me
in my tracks. After 25 years of leading Herb Walks around
the Ojai Valley, I still expect to open the latest journal
from the California Native Plant Society and see my face on
a "wanted" poster. So you may continue reading this
article on the condition that you pause right now and solemnly
swear that you will observe the OVLC’s rules for picking
plants (no flowers, very small quantities of other plants).
Now that
we’ve taken care of that, let me tell you: there’s
some good eating out there. I’m going to focus on a few
indigenous plants that can be gathered with relatively little
environmental impact or, better yet, cultivated in your own
native plant garden.
The trail
begins on the east side of the river near Rice Road. Traversing
a river bottom meadow, you’ll come across a Holly-Leaved
Cherry shrub (Prunus ilicifolia). Bears and coyotes love the
sweet reddish-purple 3/4 inch diameter fruits and so do I.
True, they’re mostly pit but, hey, they’re free.
Be careful not to swallow the uncooked pits, though. They
contain hydrocyanic acid, a natural form of cyanide found
in the seeds of most members of the Rose family, including
the commercial varieties of cherries. My Chumash teacher,
the late Juanita Centeno, said a coffee was brewed from the
ground, roasted kernels which release their poison gas in
the heating process. The fruits can be pressed to make juice,
jelly or syrup and the bark is a well-known ingredient in
wild cherry cough syrups and teas, having a relaxing effect
on the nerves that trigger coughing.
Holly-Leaved
Cherry is a versatile garden plant. Its glossy dark green
foliage makes an attractive shrub or it can be pruned into
a hedge which will grow to 20 feet if desired. Both the white
flowers of April-May and the shiny Fall fruits add color to
the landscape. It can easily be grown in sun or partial shade
from ripe seed once the fruit pulp is removed.
A bit
further up the trail is an Elderberry tree (Sambucus mexicana).
Yes, it’s the one that produces elderberry wine, elderberry
jelly or jam and elder flower fritters, among other wild delicacies.
Recipes abound in native plant books. This tree can be propagated
from seed in flats, then transferred to cans or pots.
Once you’ve
crossed the river to the west side, you’ll walk through
an open meadow before entering the oak woodland habitat. This
meadow is home to one of my personal favorites, Squaw Bush
(Rhus trilobata). The species name refers to the red-tinged
three-lobed leaf that closely resembles Poison Oak. Both plants
are members of the Sumac family although Squaw Bush has none
of the irritating oil found on the leaves of its unpopular
cousin. The sticky red fruits have a unique taste that is
at once sweet, sour and salty. Lebanese and other Middle Eastern
cuisine would not be complete without ground "sumak,"
the local version of this berry. Propagate this one from seed
also.
If you
enter the oak forest in the spring of the year, look down
and you’ll see the unique round leaves of Miner’s
Lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata) sitting atop their succulent
stems like little lily pads. Its Northern California cousin
is named Indian Lettuce which makes more sense to me. Where
do you think the gold miners learned about this juicy salad
herb used to ward off the scurvy? While it makes a great salad,
especially when combined with stronger-flavored greens, it
also can be cooked like spinach. The seeds are an important
food source for several songbirds including the Mourning Dove.
Now look
up and be greeted by the king of local edible trees, the Southern
California Black Walnut (Juglans californica). While it never
produced for the Chumash the abundant quantity of food supplied
by its neighbor, the Coast Live Oak, the Black Walnut’s
sweet oil-rich nuts have no equal in the wild food world.
Fortunately for the species, the walnut shells also have no
equal – in the hardness department – protecting
these magnificent trees from being eaten into extinction long
ago. Try slowly cranking down a vise on them. A nut pick is
useful for extracting the meat. Sadly, our native Black Walnuts
are facing endangered status in some areas because their riparian
habitat, becoming increasingly rare in Southern California
with every drought, is under constant pressure for development.
And thus
we return to my hero, Jim Engel, who must raise the remaining
few hundred thousand dollars by June to complete the most
important protection of undeveloped natural habitat in Ojai’s
history. C’mon, put your money where your mouth is, food
lover! Why, I’ll bet if all the foodies in Ojai substituted
sunflower seeds for pine nuts in their pesto for one month,
we could close the deal.
The property
is not presently open to the general public, however the Conservancy
is offering walking, driving and equestrian tours for those
interested in helping protect this wonderful property. Contributions
and pledges can be sent to: The Ojai Valley Land Conservancy
P.O. Box 1092 Ojai CA 93024. For more information call (805)
646-7930, email them at ovlc@ojai.net or visit their website
at www.ovlc.org.
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