I’d personally like to introduce you to our newest member of the Frog Hollow Farm – Kimi Owens. Kimi will be your Customer Care guru – helping you with orders and shipping. Here’s Kimi’s great narrative of her first week at Frog Hollow Farm.
Enjoy!
Jeff Bordes
First Day on the Farm: Touring the Orchard
Kimi Owens
A cool April morning in Brentwood is a rarity, Farmer Al tells me. While we’re touring the orchard, ambling our way through rows of Frog Hollow’s legendary peach trees, the breeze does its best to sneak in between the weave of my sweater. I didn’t dress for this. I’m accustomed to coastal California chill, but had it in my head that my first full day on the farm would be an escape from the weather off the bay. Luxuriating in Brentwood’s mediterranean-style warmth is going to have to wait until the afternoon, it turns out.
Noci, Farmer Al’s friendly black lab, isn’t deterred by an overcast sky and a bit of a breeze. She races joyfully ahead as I get a hands-on lesson of the visible difference between a peach tree and a nectarine tree. (The difference, if you were wondering, is only in the fruit.)
The branches of the peach trees in the rows to my left are laden with dozens of tiny budding peaches. At this point in the season they’re about the size of almonds and are already covered in their signature fuzz. Farmer Al demonstrates for me how they hand-tend each tree so that the best fruit is given the space and nourishment to develop to maturity. He then has me compare the leaves of the peach trees to those of the nectarines on my right. Before the fruit arrives, there’s no telling them apart, but like their genetic sisters across the way, smooth-skinned nectarines are clustered thickly on the branch.
I was raised on a family farm, but it’s been fifteen years since I walked through a field and felt truly connected to crops destined to grace a table. The knack of growing things had all been in the hands of my grandmother and uncle. I preferred to help harvest and head straight to the kitchen. For entirely selfish reasons (spelled P-I-E), I find myself looking forward to the Frog Hollow fruits coming into season more and more as the tour goes on.
Farmer Al leads me through a field devoted to testing other varieties of trees to see how they grow here in Brentwood. He shows me the olive trees planted along the fence lines and tells me to look forward to their leaves in the winter season. We visit with a crew checking on the health of the trees and another crew busy cutting back the growth of grasses between rows by hand. I mention how a lot of the farms I grew up around—when they weren’t using herbicides—would thin down unwanted vegetation with a fire crew. Farmer Al assures me that here cultivation is king, and all the clippings will be hoed right back into the soil.
We turn and head leisurely through rows of pear trees where the blossoms are just now falling away from the bulbs, and finally we stop at the clusters of beehives to enjoy a quiet moment listening to their hum.
While I’m waiting for the fruit to ripen alongside the rest of the Frog Hollow fans, I know there’s a bottle of olive oil and a jar of chutney back at the packing shed with my name on it. What a great introduction for my kitchen and to life here at the farm.