Those dings and brown spots on the fruit are all a result of the hail, the scars of which will continue to grow with the fruit as it grows. As a result, even the ones that survived will be unmarketable, even though for the most part they will still grow to be perfectly healthy, healthful, and great tasting.

The light at the end of the tunnel, though, is that the storm didn’t hit everybody, some of the damage can be managed with close attention to thinning, and some farmers will be able to have their losses covered by insurance.

It’s another reminder that we all are very much connected to our natural world, and the small pleasures, like enjoying a piece of perfectly ripened, organically-grown tree fruit, is truly a gift made possible by the partnership of man and nature–something you will be reminded of if any of this hail scared, battle worn, flavorful organic fruit makes its way to you via your subscription box later this summer.

Follow the peach hull road to see the partnership between organic fruit farming, animal husbandry, and ingenuity.

The peach hulls in the picture above have seen a lot more of the world of agriculture that you might think.
The journey of these seeds started in the orchard. For one reason or another, maybe it was hail, birds, bugs, rot, they weren’t good looking enough to be sold at market, so they became culled peaches. Culled, but far from wasted.

The culled peaches belonging to these pits were collected by a very nice man with a freight liner and taken to a very nice dairyman’s farm, where they were mixed with hay and served as a quick energy source for hungry heifers. The seeds, not quite as appetizing or digestible as the flesh of the fruit, were culled again, so to speak, by the cattle on the feed line. They spit them out when they’d had all they wanted of the fruit.

From there, the nice man with the truck came back to get them, and laid them down here, nice and picturesque, to pave the road right outside the the peach patch so his big truck, and tractors, and other vehicles won’t get stuck in the mud.
“Peach hulls make the best roads,” he said.

If you haven’t already seen Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead, a 2010 independent film following Aussie Joe Cross on a two month juice fast and road trip across the United States, it’s not a surprising spoiler to find out that Joe saw a dramatic change in his physique and health while he was drinking only juice. It’s a go to pop culture example of the effects of a mega-juice craze. You can watch it for free on Hulu.com if it sounds interesting to you.

But you wouldn’t have to go so extreme to reap the benefits of juicing for you and your family.
We put up a video from one of our community hosts last week demonstrating an end of the week way to use the week’s left over veggies (or the ones your family just doesn’t seem to like as well). It’s a great way to get the nutrients from those fresh AHO veggies into your kids and you in a quick easy punch.

You’ll need a juicer. You can spend anywhere from fifty dollars to five hundred dollars, and of course the more expensive ones are going to give you more juice and less waste, but the hundred dollar variety will probably do just fine for a beginning juicer.

Lemons, apples, and ginger do well to ease the grassy flavor of straight greens like kale, collards, spinach and chard.

six varieties, six different colors, six different flavors (That's not even all of them, not even close!)

Just wanted to get a quick post in while my hands were still sticky from the several shades of  orange and pomelo juice dripping I had down my arms earlier today at Cliff McFarlin’s sixty-five acre organic fruit ranch. Being from flat West Texas, I continue to be just as impressed at how quickly a you can end up in the foothills as I was the first time I drove east from here. We had a nice low cloud cover this morning to lend to the atmosphere.

Cliff was nice enough to give me a driving tour around the ranch and a smorgasbord of citrusy taste experiences. Today I tried the flesh of yellowy-green (tasted just like a margarita!), pink, dark red and of course orange colored oranges and grapefruit. It was like wine tasting, only a lot stickier and way more colorful.

He even turned on the wind machines for me (and eventually you-when the video is up) to experience what the ranch is like on freezing weather days. His wind machines came with the ranch and were put up first in the sixties. And I thought, even though it was a self-created wind, a wind invented by a propeller at the flip of a switch, it still felt a little mysterious seeing it rustle the leaves of the trees in the orchard blocks, like it does when the winds change naturally.

Cliff does a lot of farmer’s market sales down south. He has my vote too. Cliff really struck me as a friendly, honest, hard working man, the kind of guy you’d want to do business with if you care about where your food comes from. If you’re down that way do what you can to him and then buy from him every week! He’s got multiple varieties of all kinds of fruits (apples, blueberries, citrus, jububes, persimmons, pomegranates, to name just a few) and he’s harvesting something all year long.

Among the less consequential observations of the morning: Cliff had a great knife for in the field fruit slicing, things like that might be run of the mill for a farmer, but I was sure impressed. And he cleared up a subject that had been troubling me for a while. What’s the difference between a tangerine and a mandarine you ask. Nope! No difference. A mandarine is anything smaller than an orange so, a tangerine is a mandarine.  The word tangerine is kind of like a brand name that started being used more generally, like a kleenex or a zip-lock.

More on the meaningful, educational aspects of the visit in the upcoming In the Field farmer video and Cliff’s profile on the AHO website. For now, enjoy the pictures here and on our Facebook page!

Cliff slices open one of the three varieties of blood oranges at his ranch in the foothills.

It’s amazing.

The trees themselves don’t look like anything special necessarily, they’re a bit thicker and more hardy looking than their younger companions, but it would be totally possible to walk out in the midst of them and not realize that your great great grandfather would have been taking in the same view 100 years ago.

Dave stands among some of his younger trees on his Lake County farm.

Other fruit trees, like peaches and nectarines for example, exhaust their productivity in a mere decade. But hardwood pear trees, so long as they are pruned hard and well, Dave said, just keep on going.

Dave’s full story is up on the AHO website:  http://www.abundantharvestorganics.com/farmer.php?farmer=21

Dave with some of the older trees in his orchard.

The full profile of Llano Seco can be viewed at the AHO website here, but here a few of the really notable take away points that AHO subscribers should know (in order to appreciate the taste of that bacon all the more!)

1. A lot of hands on research goes into the recipes for the hams and pork products. The Llano Seco team has interviewed folks in their 80s and 90s about butchering and curing practices of generations ago as well as has done a hefty amount of library research using books that were written before the modern additive-oriented philosophies became prevalent.

2. The design of the barns for the hogs as well as the birthing stalls the mama pigs use for giving birth are out of the park exceptional. The hoop barns enable the pigs to go inside to escape the sun or outside to bask in it as they please. They always have thick straw as bedding rather than cold hard concrete. And there is no comparison between the Llano Seco birthing stalls and a conventional birthing crate, which in many cases would not even allow the pig to stand and turn around. The Llano Seco sows have a bed of straw, plenty of space and the mama pigs can get up, walk around and go out in the big barn to get some sun or camaraderie any time they want while their babies stay warm under a heat lamp, free to run around in the stall. Seeing as I don’t have a ton of experience with hog farms, I didn’t realize how good those mamas had it until I debriefed the visit a bit with Uncle Vern.

I was impressed to say the least, not to mention I did go home with some of the best thick sliced bacon I’ve ever had. And I didn’t even have to eat it in Alaska to know that. I hope y’all enjoy the pictures and definitely give some of that bacon a try!

Welcome to the Rancho Llano Seco in Chico, California!

I'm telling you, this place is beautiful! This is a shot of one of the waterways on the property.

It had been raining before my visit and the pigs were loving it!

A new mama and her piglets enjoy the comforts of the special birthing stall.

How fun is this? Martin Hernandez showed off the talents of this mama pig. She gave birth to both a piglet costumed as a Jersey and another as a Holstein cow in the same litter.

Dedicated hog farmers Martin Hernandez and Troy Caldwell. Troy, on the right, is the Hog Production Manager at the ranch.

Leafy starters waiting to be planted at Rancho Piccolo

AHO vegetable supplier Rancho Piccolo brings a little flavor of the old country to the Central Valley. Farmer David Silviera grew up in Portugal and the name of his farm, Rancho Piccolo means “small farm” in Italian.

It comes out sing-songy every time I think it. RrrrancHO pICcolooo.

Try it. It’s fun.

Farmer David

An early November view of Rancho Piccolo's organic green beans.

I never ate an artichoke until I moved to California. It’s the same for a persimmon. The first time I ever saw one on my friend’s kitchen counter I made an amateur mistake and told her it was the strangest tomato I had ever seen.

I’m looking forward to all the persimmon cookies that will be rolling out of the oven once the ones sitting on my counter are mushy enough to bake with. But what inspires this post is something that I’m enjoying about them right now this very day: the fact that they are still hanging around on the trees, even after all the leaves have bid the branches adieu.

Those golden orbs on the bare grey branches look so surprising, so out of place. But if you think about the season, they fit right in as bright orange ornaments just in time for Christmas.  It makes me happy and I  wanted to share that with all you folks out there who haven’t yet had the chance to drive past rows of persimmon trees this time of year.

A shot of Glenn and Neng Vue in action with the Sierra Nevada foothills in the background.

The first farm I had the chance to visit this year was Highland Organics, a small 5 acre farm next to the foothills near Reedley, California.  It’s been a few weeks since my first visit. I came away with armloads of greens!

You can’t help but feel great about your life when you’re eating that many big servings of fresh green plants. Seriously. I even ate some for breakfast a few days the week of Thanksgiving.

It is obvious that Boua and Neng Vue, the Highland Organics farmers, work really hard (I mean REALLY hard) and take a lot of pride in the quality of their final product. They showed me how to find the you choy stalks that were just right for harvest and the differences between lemongrass varieties.

(By the way, I have also formed a new addiction to lemongrass and ginger tea since this visit. Just about an inch of lemongrass stalk, a little cube of ginger and boiling water is all you need for about 4 cups of spicy tea.)

We updated the Vue’s farmer profile a few weeks ago and you can read more about them here.

FARMER VIDEO UPDATE: On my latest visit, Boua and Neng were planting the field with sugar snap peas. We caught part of that process for you on film and you can watch it here.

What the video doesn’t explain outright is the effort and creativity that goes into creating and using Boua’s self-made tools in the planting process. The seeding bottle you see in the video and the way Boua rigged the chains he uses to bury the seeds were made from the resources he had available to him.  I found that pretty inspiring and I think it easily fits with the themes of ingenuity and problem solving that I have encountered thus far here in Ag-Land.

Farmers make it happen.