A Tale of Two Homesteads
(Page 2 of 6)
August/September 2007
By David Cavagnaro
One of the things we visualized doing on our new homestead was teaching. I’ve always thought that people teach best at the threshold of their own learning, so we started teaching gardening and homesteading skills even as we were learning them ourselves.
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The first order of business was to start an orchard. We chose the only arable land on the property, a fertile swale at the bottom of a side hill, and constructed an 8-foot deer fence with posts, hand split from redwood. We drilled a well and installed a water system, but water is always precious in the summer-dry California hills, so we opted for a multiuse plan. We decided to use the orchard and vineyard as our vegetable garden until the growing trees gradually shaded the garden out.
I gathered scion, or grafting, wood from the fruit trees my family had harvested since my childhood. I used a grafting technique my grandpa had taught me, and seedling trees I propagated myself, to start about 75 fruit and nut trees. Digging that many holes in unbroken ground would have been an arduous task, so we devised our first Pippindale class, “Orchard Propagation.” Everyone went home with a successfully grafted rootstock of their own, and they left us with 75 holes dug, planted and filled almost effortlessly. We laughingly called it our “class in graft!”
We knew it would take about 10 years for these newly planted trees to bear fruit, so in the meantime I located abandoned orchards in the Santa Rosa Valley. Tons of Bartlett pears and French prunes lay on the ground unused every summer, more than enough to use for canning and drying. I also discovered abandoned vineyards, which Italian immigrant families had used to make their own wine. I began collecting grape cuttings for my own vineyard, and by the time my terraced hillside vineyard began bearing fruit, I had amassed 42 grape varieties — an almost complete representation of the history of California viticulture.
FRUIT, CHEESE AND MEAT
When the Pippindale garden was complete, it included the vineyard plus an additional 150 fruit and nut trees of 100 varieties. We had plums, pears, apples, cherries, persimmons, quince, peaches, figs, walnuts and almonds — as well as 10 kinds of berries. Among the trees, we grew vegetables, flowers and most of the fodder for our small milk goat herd.
Our new garden prospered. We filled the basement with canned fruit and juices, often as much as 400 quarts a year. A large tin barn roof made a perfect stage for drying pears and peaches on original redwood drying trays we got from an old prune ranch. We learned how to dry our own prunes and how to make our own raisins from seedless grape varieties.
As the food began pouring in from our garden, the familiar flavors rekindled rich memories from my childhood family gardens. There are qualities of flavor, aroma and sweetness which only can come from fruits and vegetables that are lovingly grown and freshly picked.
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