This past week at Molino Creek Farm has been a busy, busy, busy one: harvesting, cover crop sowing, pressing apples, burning large areas of wildland, and getting ready for rain. This is the beginning of the final push for getting ready for the more sleepy winter.

A Pressing Affair

One of the products of the Molino Creek Farm Community Orchard is hard cider – a way to preserve apples and provide the Community a beverage that many enjoy at our gatherings (and beyond?). This past weekend, members of the community held the second large and fourth of the total apple pressings thus far. We use a big electric grinder that pulverizes up to 40 pounds of apples a minute…the apples going into the hopper are rejects from sales and have too many blemishes for provisioning our favorite charities. The apples get cleaned and trimmed and then ground up. The pulp goes into the hand-press ‘basket,’ the spindle gets turned by one person, and the clear golden juice sluices out into a shoot, into bottles and pitchers. The sizeable crowd this past week bottled and drank 10 gallons of fresh juice and the Cidermakers took home 12 more. Not a huge juicing…pretty small by comparison, but ‘enough.’ Hard cider is on its way, bubbling vigorously in carboys, changing sugars to alcohol. One knows the hard cider is being enjoyed in our weekly ‘under the tree’ gatherings as the volume of revelry gradually increases and cheery voices can almost be understood from the other end of the Farm. We must create 80 gallons of hard cider to keep up with the weekly demand between Valentine’s Day and Thanksgiving.

The fresh juice is in freezers or refrigerators to be cherished by many.

Eva and Jen have been the Conveners of Juice this season, and all hail their sheroism! Organizing these things is actual hard work. The question is…will there be one last apple pressing of the year?

The Burning Question: Answered at Last!

Speaking of praise of our fellow humans – the biggest of awe-filled thanks goes out to the innumerable volunteers that followed Central Coast Prescribed Burn Association Staffers Jared Childress and Spencer Kleinfelter up onto our Farm last Sunday to burn, baby burn! Some may recall that this laudatory group pulled off such miracles last in 2024 and here they were, re-burning the same areas, again. We set fire to 3 big spots with varying South, West, and Northern facing slopes. Folks fanned out: ‘holders’ who kept an eye on the boundaries; ‘lighters’ who used drip torches to start the fires; ‘observers’ from UCSC’s City on the Hill Press and other media outlets as well as folks who just wanted to see, and; lots of folks helping to direct, plan, track, and log what was being done. And, oh boy! There was CAL FIRE providing wisdom, expertise, and support!!! The weather was dreamy-good. Hourly, one of the crew would read current weather conditions into the radio and everyone could hear. It seemed to vary very little: wind from the S, SW 2 mph, gusting to 4…71 degrees F…58 percent humidity.

We were watching flames, each other, wildlife, and smoke all day long. Sometimes there was a woosh and lots of cracking as the fire lines hit larger patches of dry fuel. Sometimes the flames walked slowly across big short-grassy areas. People were beaming, sweating, and working hard. One herd of fence-trapped deer scooted alertly away from the flames and may have even left out a gate, but one doe was seen clambering ‘into the black’ (burned area) at the end of the day still in the fence. We shared stories of legions of rats running from wildfire but only saw a few rodents scurrying. Ma the Raven caught on quickly and was wake hunting the fire line, cawing excitedly; Caw is being a bit lazy, concernedly lazy, these days. Sparrows were put out of home but somehow were seemingly excitedly flocking into the freshly burned ground. The smoke stung our eyes but mostly we could get out of it – up it went and off to the North, away from neighbors and larger communities.

Holly and Rebecca followed the burn with seeds that Judy, Sylvie, and Grey collected earlier in the year from around the Farm. Blue wild rye, California brome grass, and purple needlegrass seeds got scattered through the burn, offering some healing and restoration.

Slowly, with many peoples’ help, we are restoring the Old Ways and coastal prairie. It is amazing how many ‘first timers’ there were watching and helping with the burn. We are turning the tide of our relationships with each other, with partner fire, and with the non-humans and landscape around us.

Apples to School

We delivered another 60 or so pounds of mostly Fuji apples to the Pacific School’s newish walk-in cooler. Now the test begins, how long will they last in 38F? They have quite few boxes! The news: the kids love the flavor of our apples – they are appreciated. We love providing the fruit to the youngest in our community, to the school food program that teaches children how to make healthy meals. What a great place!

The Greening

We’ve had just over an inch of rain in three bouts, the latest .78” not long ago. Now, we get the greens reappearing. The wild oat seedlings are 3” tall and the summer’s dry thatch is getting buried in renewed life.

This is the new, climate change rhythm: hot-hot-hot then wind then plummeting temperatures and a bit of rain. We are in the hot period: it was 75F + today, cooler than the last heat wave. The rain is due to land and the temperatures to drop starting late tomorrow. Three waves of storms are predicted, the first with an inch of rain and a total of probably around 4” of rain for the entirety of the systems.

What the Rain Means

The coming rain means it is time to scurry. When the last fire was coming, we scurried. This is similar, but different. The coming rain means we need to get all of the cover crop into the ground. The earlier we get the seed in, the bigger the cover crop, the better the soil is held in place. This year (knock on wood as we are in the middle of it), it looks like we’ll get the entire orchard cover crop planted before the onslaught of rains, early in the season. This is because folks stepped up. Holly, Rebecca, and Jen were the seed throwers. Sylvie, Bodhi (especially Bodhi), and I are the tractor wranglers.

Can’t wait until the bell beans sprout, big juicy leaves unfurling and covering the ground…big rains will be a delight, too.