The club leaders were the wives of the wealthiest and most successful farmers, the ones who raised turkeys, row crops, wheat, berries, or tree fruits. No one would have guessed, then, that within twenty years all the turkey farms, and most of the orchards and berry fields, would be gone, and nurseries and vineyards would be the area’s primary agricultural industries. By the turn of the twenty-first century, not a single turkey was being raised for sale in the county.
At the Unity Ladies Club in the 1970s, we weren’t looking to the future. We savored the moment, gossiping, exclaiming over the hostess’s culinary skills, drawing names for our “secret pals” each year, and exchanging homemade Christmas and birthday gifts. There was no reason to think our world would be any different in years to come. We could not have imagined how significantly the landscape would change over the next two decades.
AFTER BUYING TED AND Verni’s orchards, summer and fall turned into a continual harvest. We needed whatever income we could generate, so we kept the producing orchards going until we could afford to replace them with grapes. Life went like this: cherry harvest in late June, peaches July through August, prunes in late August, grapes in September and October, and walnuts in November.
The best part of our newly acquired orchards was that tree-ripened fruit introduced me to delicious new tastes. Before we owned the orchards, for example, I had only eaten canned Royal Anne cherries, which my mother would serve as a special dessert. How much better they were fresh and ripe off the tree. The whole family would go down after dinner and wander from tree to tree, plucking the biggest ones and popping them into our mouths for dessert. “Let’s go down and graze in the cherry orchard,” one of us would suggest and we’d all troop down the hill. I had also never eaten a tree-ripened peach. I couldn’t believe how much more flavorful it was than any I had bought in a store.
I felt it my duty not to let anything from our orchards go to waste. We were overloaded with fruit, even though I canned, froze, pickled, and made jam, preserves, and brandy. It became too much of a good thing. After about two years I admitted defeat. Worn out, it was a relief to finally accept that I simply could not use, or give away, all the fruit, and that I would have to let some drop to the ground.
The first orchards we took out were the peaches. They were the most difficult to grow and we didn’t have a secure market for them. Even after we had taken out all our trees, I liked to help Ted and Verni pick and sort their peaches for the fresh market. It was too big a job for the two of them, and they were so good to us that I was glad to help. Harvest started about five in the morning, while the peaches were still cold and firm and wouldn’t bruise from handling. We strapped on harnesses attached to large aluminum buckets so we had both hands free to pick. Unlike cherries or grapes, which could be harvested all at once, peaches had to be picked as they ripened, every few days. Everything about growing peaches was difficult, from fighting disease to propping up the trees laden with fruit, to the ordeal of picking. After experiencing a growing season, Bill and I concluded the only reason to go through all this was to enjoy the taste of a fully ripe peach. Besides being sweet and juicy, a tree-ripened peach has a perfume, intense and captivating. No other fruit we grew enveloped the senses so completely.
This was one place I couldn’t include the kids. Alex wanted badly to help me pick, but his hands were too small to get around the whole peach and twist it off without either bruising it or tearing the skin. Sometimes he would walk down to the peach orchard, about a quarter mile away, to find me when he got up. I think he knew we would be close to finishing and Verni would have something good for him to eat. We always finished the picking morning with freshly baked coffee cake. We sat as long as we could, until finally someone would say, “Well, guess it’s time to get back to work.” Alex and I would trudge back up the hill.
Cherry season had rituals of its own, from bringing in the bees in March to delivering the harvest to the processor in early July. There was nothing easy about any of it with the big old trees that comprised our orchard. Work began in the spring, as soon as we had a few dry days and could get in to work the soil. When the trees bloomed in March, we brought in beehives to pollinate the blossoms. We hoped for sunny days, but too often it was so cold the bees wouldn’t come out of their hives, and the beekeepers had to come to the orchard to feed them.
Full bloom in the cherry orchard enchanted me. Delicate white blossoms with a touch of pink covered the trees, giving them a gauzy, ethereal quality. Standing in the middle of the orchard surrounded by twenty-foot trees with frothy white, sweet smelling blossoms, listening to the steady hum of the bees doing their job, the cares of daily life receded.
Our aged cherry trees had thick trunks. Their branches hung low, making picking from the ground easier. The Latino crew we hired to harvest arrived early to cook breakfast before work. The smell of tortillas and onions greeted us as we came down to start the day. These men worked hard but still had time for animated conversation and jokes, and the sounds of their lively camaraderie filled the air. Each picker worked with a two-gallon aluminum bucket, a harness, and a wooden ladder. After the cherries were dumped into large wooden totes, we loaded them on our truck and took them to the brine plant at the end of the picking day.
Delivering handpicked cherries was a ritual of its own. After I got proficient driving our twenty-foot flatbed truck, I would make the trip with one of the kids—Alex always wanted to come—and our dog, Bagel, who was willing to go anywhere as long as she could ride. Thirty totes, three layers of ten totes each, put our truck at its maximum load. I tied the cargo down and drove slowly to avoid sudden stops.
During the peak of harvest, there would be a string of trucks at the cannery at the end of the day, waiting to be unloaded and sampled. Small pickups, straining under the weight of one tote, alternated with large flatbed trucks carrying many layers of totes. We sat in the long line, with the doors open to catch the breeze, and waited for our turn. The slow-moving line of trucks laden with fruit moved in a choreographed dance with the fast-wheeling forklifts unloading totes.
Payment depended on how well our cherries fared in the grading, which took place while we watched. The forklift brought several totes over to the grader, who put handfuls from random totes into a small bucket, and then examined each cherry. I held my breath with every one. Perfect cherries with stems went to the drinks-cocktail market, fetched the highest price, and went into pile number one. The second pile was perfect cherries without stems, suitable for the baking market. The third pile was rejects—cherries that were split or showed any rot—for which there was no compensation. My heart sank at every reject. After sorting, the grader weighed each pile, calculated its percentage of our sample, and applied that percentage to our whole load. Growers tried to top-dress their totes, putting the best cherries on top, but the graders knew to dig down to get the samples. During cherry harvest, the cannery stayed open to receive cherries long past dark, often until midnight.
We farmed the cherries longer than the other fruits. In 1987, with relief but also nostalgia, we took out the last cherry trees. Finally, we could give our entire focus to our vineyards. But alas, there was no more grazing in the cherry orchard after dinner.
BILL AND I WERE on a steep learning curve. From the time we cleared our first piece of land in 1971 to building the winery in 1977, everything we did—starting a family, farming orchards, building a house, planting a vineyard, starting the winery—was a new experience. As soon as we put the vines into the ground, we were on an express train, with nature at the wheel. Everything needed our