tomatoes

Equinox

Three layers of clouds moving in different ways for different reasons woof in the soon-to-be rainy season. Time to put up firewood and stuff.

Sunset peach clounds dance above the barn, fields falling into darkness. The day’s last colors.

Another cool night pinches the sweetness into the many ripening apples.

This week spells big transitions for the Farm in another way. Day by day, each morning the chainsaws got closer and finally they emerged from Above to Here this week.

Burned Tree Control along Warrenella, Thanks to San Vicente Redwoods Conservation Partnership, photo by Sylvie Childress

Changes on the Land

We have made great progress each year after the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex Fire blasted its way into our lives and across the property. The Big Leap recently was the clearing of hundreds of dead trees along the most proximate stretch of Warrenella Road. Our Good Neighbors have found the capacity to clear the trees that were killed or badly damaged by the fire…each and every tree that could have otherwise fallen across our road is now on the ground. Massive numbers of tree skeletons suddenly lying on their sides. (that particular area carpeted with a kind of yellow-flowering groundcover deer brush last spring).

Several close calls with waves of rain from the North this past week help the Fear of Fire fade, but it hasn’t yet become wet enough to allow the relaxation of winter rains’ wildfire reprieve.

Tomatoes!

The lack of rain relieves the tomato growers because wet tomato plants can undergo late season fungal and other blight disease melt down. The acres of tomatoes lie heavy with juicy red ripe fruit that we can’t really keep up with harvesting: too many tons all at once, and where would we sell them all anyhow? Pots full of sauce ladled into canning jars. Humming hot blowers from dryers, trays of tomatoes shrinking. Sweet, sweet tomatoes! Our favorite season. Comparing what each other can DO with them: a tasty half-dry/reduced chopped tomato relish brightened with Calabrian pepper oil a recent favorite from fabulous cook Mark Kuempel (thanks!).

Sunset on the Farm

The Deer

The Deer are (still) busy eating up apple culls. A GIANT buck proudly stands tall with excellent contrasting patches of remarkable white and black. Sylvie’s ear caught the Most Curious of Deer noises: ‘a whirly-gig’ she said. Here’s a link to the surprising noise, in the first few seconds. OH! How odd the rutting season!! We have never had so many bucks so close up; perhaps the fire made a lot of deer food and the population is headed high.

Apples

During our regular, well-attended working bee, we had an ad hoc apple tasting last weekend and found some pretty surprising results. The Cox’s Orange Pippin was almost ripe and ripe enough to cause yummy noises as well as some picking. An offspring of hybridization of that one, the Rubinette, also to a lesser degree caused some ‘oohing’ and taking of almost ripe fruit home. Areas of Fuji were getting nearly as ripe as the Galas, both at least a week away. The frightening part of this news is….there is a good chance that most of the 9,000+ pounds of fruit we have in front of us will ripen nearly simultaneously. Here comes the juice….a jolly pressing matter.

Harvest

So, yes, this is the season of harvest. Out in the fields gathering, hauling boxes and buckets back to the Barn for packaging for market, driving vehicles weighted down with food miles and miles to sell. Out early back late, hefting sore muscles balanced by glowingly thankful faces, friends, strangers all in awe of the best food on Earth. Molino Groupies. Two Dog Groupies. Unbelievable! People with Molino Creek Farm Tee shirts from years and years ago, hefting Molino Creek bags. Cheering friends welcoming the food we continue to produce from this verdant land. The harvest won’t last long. We are lucky if the food keeps coming in until Thanksgiving: just 2 more months if the weather holds! This is why we try to preserve the season’s flavorful foods by straight up canning, or roasting and then canning. Dried or canned tomatoes shifting to dried apples or canned applesauce. The prunes, however, aren’t so numerous and the competition for the best prune desserts is ON around the Farm.

Harvest Company

Whatever one does outside, one has company. Face flies and other summer flies are at their zenith. The newly born and mother cows on our drive out are covered with them, but we are just annoyed. The buzzing buggers dive over and over into your ear or make your eyes continually squint and blink as they bombard, zig-zag, or dive for a taste of you. Battling those annoying flies are the legions of dragonflies patrolling the air in patches; we could use more to vacuum up the more annoying flies.

Full Moon, Equinox Coming

This coming Sunday at about half past 5 in the morning we will cross the line where day length is equal to the hours of night. Fall Equinox marks the turn towards night, towards the long cold, onto California’s rainy season. One more month, October 15 is the date of the average commencement of rainstorms. Sometimes we can get a lot of rain just before then. Approaching this High Holiday was the Full Moon we just passed making the sky glow like day all night long.

We hope you had a Good Full Moon and will take some time on Sunday to reflect on the changing times.

The Storms Passed

Hurricane Hillary made national news. Many people have little idea of the geographic scope of California, so they assume all Californians are in trouble. The last Big Fire here, part of a state-wide tangle of epic lightning-sparked fires in 2020, was from half of a hurricane that peeled off our direction from landfall in Baja Mexico. A Pacific Ocean guardian low pressure gyre nudged Hurricane Hillary eastward. So, Molino Creek farm was cloudy with the tiniest of sprinkles and some brief gusts of wind, but that was that. Oh yeah, and it was muggy: weird! And the smell of rain, so delicious after months of nothing, just dust. Still, the anticipation of another hurricane was awful.

Solanaceous Aftermath

Post post-Hurricane Hillary, the farm is warm, awaiting the restarting of the upwelling and onshore breezes due in a few days. The warmth is perfect for tomatoes and the lack of much rainfall helps a lot too: they hate wet leaves! The sprawling tomato vines are loaded with big, pale green fruit. Soon, there will be so many tomatoes that it will be difficult to keep them harvested fast enough. For now, we eye each ripening fruit with glee: there aren’t that many! It is also the time when Maw and Caw, our big black farm ravens, are frequently seen carrying red, cast off tomatoes happily to some perch where they feast with gusto.

Molino Creek Farm’s dry farmed tomatoes…for the first time Not On Trellis!

Night Walks

This part of the year takes me on night walks to turn off the orchard irrigation. It is too hot during the day to run micro-sprinklers, an invention that gently eeks out water at a rate so that it soaks well into the soil without waste. The micro-sprinkled amounts would mostly evaporate in the heat of the day, so we wait until the cooler evenings and nights. That takes me abroad just before bed time on a stroll that is always full of discovery. Each year, on the warmer summer nights, I am delighted to experience the return of the Night Ants. These are big, glossy, dark brown ants which hang out in families, venturing just a few square yards from their hole. They have several morphs- some are large and powerful looking, some are more dainty, and some in between. I’ve seen them carrying their dead, so they’ve got at least one social ceremony. I don’t know what they do for a living. I’m seeking the black widow spiders I spied last summer at the mouth of some colonies of roadside gopher burrows. A few nights ago, I started a harvest mouse who decided to crouch in the grass until I passed, allowing me a good look at that tiniest of rodents. The prettiest of things on night walks: the spectacularly silver-sparkly eyes of wolf spiders, which dazzle and spark from just about everywhere. They are so very numerous. I like to check out the biggest more closely in hopes of finding a female with a hundred of her young on her back: extra creepy! The headlamp isn’t so much fun these evenings because of some flies and moths that want to crash into my glasses constantly, attracted to the light. So, the headlamp goes down to waist level, but the spider eyes don’t reflect quite so nicely from there. Owls hoot, coyotes yip, and the beautiful crescent moon barely lights the fields and ridges. Yes, it’s a chore to turn those late-night valves, but I’m happy for the motivation to get out of doors.

OH PEARS!

They won’t take care of your children for more than a few moments, but they sure are tasty. It’s pear time! Pears precede apples in our harvest cycle and the comice pears are dropping and juicy and irresistible. You can’t stand under the old pear tree or you are going to get bonked in the head by a falling pear: dangerous! I still don’t quite know when to harvest pears from the tree, but I do know that the fallen ones ripen quickly, like within a day or so. Soon, there will be 300 pounds for the orchard volunteers and Molineros to gather. The dehydrators start humming and the pots of pear butter will soon be bubbling. Yum!

What’s that Smell?

The farm is full of scent. With the storm’s weird warm winds from odd directions (east!), came the resinous, sweet smell of ceanothus…but only briefly. The orchard smells of damp earth with hints of fungus. Passing the vineyard, the smell of the devil: sulfur! Then, there are occasional sweet smells…surprising sweet smells. The latest nose candy is emanating from the Surprise Lillies aka ‘naked ladies.’ Some prior farm denizens took a liking to these Amaryllis and planted them hither and yon. They are impossible to get rid of and they smell of pink candy. But, they make striking cut flowers if you don’t mind the sweet, sweet smell.

Naked Ladies are named such because of the lack of leaves when they bloom

-this post also simultaneously posted at Molino Creek Farm’s equally amazing website.