My Field Boss

I’ve been lucky to have a fine crew of advisors. Tom Mayhew is the field boss for my packing house, Oxnard Lemon. His bother Sam is the manager. They and their late father Wilbur have been a huge help. Tom came by this morning looking for some lemons to pick. He says the price is high and it would pay to have a fall pick. Tom is the one who walks the orchard and tells me when it’s the optimal time to pick. I always trust his judgment. He and Sam are also giving me a lot of good advice about replanting the orchard.

A Typical Irrigaiton

I may have given the impression earlier that all the farm work was done for the year. Not so. Today was irrigation day, which occurs about every four weeks throughout the year unless it happens to rain, which sometimes it does. Doing irrigation means: ordering water, getting water, getting the pump to run, visually checking about seven miles of irrigation hose and sprinklers and repairing or replacing all malfunctioning sprinklers and hoses. Seven miles is no exaggeration—the ranch is almost a half mile deep and there are 14 rows of trees with a sprinkler between every one. 14 rows x .5 mile = 7 miles.

A lot of different things can happen to irrigation hose and sprinklers. Sprinklers get stepped on, run over, stopped up, have snails on them or in them, or they just flat don’t work. And the lines get chewed up by thirsty coyotes. We cure that by putting buckets of water out for them so they’ll leave the lines alone. When we irrigate after a pick we’ve sometimes replaced more than 200 sprinklers that have been stepped on by the pickers. That’s just unavoidable.

Then there are days like today. The pump started perfectly and ran perfectly, something it hasn’t done in years, but that’s another story. But then the piping coming out of the pump started blowing water fifteen feet in the air.

It leaked a little last time we irrigated and I called the pump man to come fix it. There was plenty of time before the next irrigation. But he had problems and it didn’t happen. To get the picture, the pump was putting out 350 gallons of water a minute. That’s a lot of pressure on the pipe. The fix is a major job: to replace the short piece of cracked PVC will require dismantling several connected pieces and taking it all into the shop to duplicate it. This can’t happen on irrigation day. And the dilemma this time is that I irrigate today or a month from today (because I’m exhibiting the prints and maps at a book fair this weekend and then take off to Europe for three weeks). The trees can’t wait. I had to continue the irrigation.

I called the pump man who was working at the other end of the county and couldn’t help. Then Rudy, the waterman who works for Farmers Irrigation, stopped by to take a look. I assured him we had it under control. Then Nick, my neighbor, called to ask what was going on. I reassured him we had it under control.

Matthew and I wrapped the pipe with a tarp so that the water would be directed down and away from the electric pump motor and the electrical box. A huge amount of water ran a quarter of a mile down the orchard to the road. A terrible waste. We continued with the irrigation.

The pump man says he will come tomorrow.

Raisins--Final Report

I did dry the grapes. I must admit that there was an aroma of fermentation in the kitchen before I got around to it. But when I finally did it was easy and fun. I had enough to cover two and a half cookie sheets, which I put in the oven to dry. I turned on convection heat at 200 degrees for a couple of minutes every few hours and left them for two days. It was going along pretty good until I forgot to turn the oven off. They probably cooked for an hour before I smelled something strange in the kitchen and realized what I had done. Most of the grapes in the tray on the bottom shelf were dried to a carbonized crisp. Fortunately, the top trays were mostly unaffected. However, I lost sight of my goal and dried them too much so they are more than a little chewy. I ended up with about two cups of raisins. They are a bit tart, maybe because I didn’t rinse them after I took them out of their lemon juice antimicrobial bath. But they’re edible. And I will do it again next year. I hope I’ll have enough to share.