Epicenter Orchard
We are currently selling fruit at the Santa Cruz Westside Farmers’ Market on Saturdays.
We will be at the farmers’ market this Saturday, November 16th, and all the following Saturdays until December sometime.
https://santacruzfarmersmarket.org/markets/westside/
We are getting through the mid-season apples. Karmijn de Sonnaville, Belle de Boskoop, Rubaiyat and others are all gone until next year. We are solidly in the late varieties, with Allen’s Everlasting, Brushy Mountain Limbertwig, Pink Parfait, Calville Blanc starting to really shine. Stardust has hit its prime, with perfect light, crisp, snappy texture and zingy sweet flavor. Sierra Beauty has started to earn its name, with its bright scarlet over yellow/green signaling sugar and an aromatic intensity enough for any apple purpose. Tydeman’s Late is in perfect form, with high sugar and tangy tartness.
Waltana is a special treat right now, being richly aromatic, fully ripe, big and beautiful.
For pears, we are still moving through our harvest, but really down to the last. If you want pears, arrive early.
Tomatoes are done for the year, but citrus are starting.
Our Desert King is ripening some jammy, beautiful figs right now. Early-birds at the market will have a shot at the few baskets we can manage.
We will also have our curated apple tasting boxes available for purchase.
About our operation
Our orchard in Larkin Valley was planted in 2005, as an outgrowth of a runaway hobby/obsession with apples that hasn’t quite run its course. The land was a wet meadow-turned orchard in the 20s, became a horse pasture in the 60s, reverting to wet meadow in the late 80s. It lies along the bottom of a narrow north-south running valley, bordered on both sides by walls of redwood and oak. Up watershed a rangy tangle of willows divides it from hundreds of acres of rolling wild land.
Ours is a little one and a half acre plot on the edge of a huge block of fairly pristine native habitat that supports a lot of wildlife. We see cougars, coyotes, foxes, bobcats, deer, wild turkeys, eagles, cooper’s hawks, red tailed and red-shouldered hawks, 3 kinds of owl, and lots of gophers. We can trap the gophers, and fence out the deer, but the coyotes are smart. They help with the gophers, but love pears a little too much. A battery of perches and boxes turn the bluebirds, swallows, chickadees and raptors into charismatic farm laborers.
Deep distrust of chemicals leads me to avoid them on my farm and elsewhere, but we do use OMRI listed pheromone ties against codling moth. No synthetic fertilizers or pesticides, no sulphur, copper, neem, or dormant oil, as all these agents kill unintended, innocent organisms. We do use mountains of composted tree chips to conserve water and suppress weeds, and composted animal manure for fertility. We don’t plow or disc between our rows, using instead a walk-behind high-weed mower to maintain a year-round mixed grass/weed/flower cover instead. What this means is we spend a lot of time crawling our rows, hand weeding to keep the bindweed from swallowing our trees.
Getting down to the apples, we try to grow European style, high flavor types that nobody’s ever heard of unless maybe they happen to be from Europe, or had occasion to haunt their farmers markets. These differ from Gala, Fuji, Cosmic Crisp, or what’s commonly available, and could never be confused with a sweetened jicama. They’re endowed with acidity, astringency, and aromatics (flavor) to enhance their high sugar, making for an intense, complex, high-impact eating experience.
Not everyone shares our preferences, but luckily, there are many places to buy normal type apples. After 25 years of running public apple tastings, we’ve seen how people respond to high-flavored apples, and feel relieved and delighted to finally be able to provide the kind of fruit we love, directly to the public. We hope to attract an enthusiastic following of avid apple lovers, who will enable our behavior.
Since farming is about enormous amounts of boring, repetitive, and hard work, if we didn’t love our fruits, it would feel like a complete waste of time.