Esparto, CA, Posted March 28, 2003: It’s
fitting that you couldn’t whiz by Guru Ram Das Orchards
even if you tried. Sure, you can blast down Highway 505 at
65 mph and still identify the orchards blurring past by mere
color. In March, green means almonds, bright white indicates
apricots, and bare brown is peaches, waiting patiently to
bloom. Passed by so fast, the precisely planted trunks beat
out a visual rhythm like a stick running over the slats of
a picket fence.
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Didar
Singh Khalsa selecting lemons: Chez Panisse’s
pastry chef, buys from Didar twice a week because
he knows he can rely on his fruit’s perfection.
“He takes the time to pick them when they’re
ripe, and he tastes critically before he brings
anything to market. That makes the difference.”
PHOTO BY LISA M. HAMILTON
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But exit at Highway 16 and you slow to 50 mph, down to 30
through the tired town of Esparto—and that’s still
fast. Road 22A challenges you to go above 20 mph, and Guru
Ram Das Orchards sits one road further off the grid, on a
bend that demands first gear. Turning onto the driveway you
come to a rolling stop, left with no choice but to contemplate
the puddly stream that marks the crossing into this whole
other world.
In this orchard, you can’t see to the end of a row.
Citrus anchors the hillside, standing like fantastically bushy
Christmas trees hung with fat orange ornaments. Before them
spring lithe green almonds; behind them arms of hot pink blossoms
reach wildly toward the sky. The understory flows from low
clover to grass high enough to tickle branches, and the landscape
above changes literally from tree to tree. Here is a meadowlark
atop a regal walnut, next to it a young nectarine tree girdled
with compost. The wind is harsh here, but in the thick grove
of Valencias two rows over it is merely a rustle, leaving
the air draped with the perfume of nearby Meyer lemons. From
any perspective you might see the mingling branches of plums,
pears, persimmons, and peaches. It is syncopation no Highway
505 orchardist could fathom.
But then, who among them could fathom making an annual pilgrimage
to the Great Smoky Mountains, just to stand breathless in
front of the massive Carolina silverbell trees? Who among
them has a Chinese wingnut tree in his front yard, much less
a pair? And who among them, when he talks about his trees,
holds the tips of their thin branches with his fingertips?
At the top of the hill, Didar Singh Khalsa stands in the
shade of the smaller Chinese wingnut, showing me a string
of blossoms. His words might describe how the seeds make a
decorative chain, but the real message—told by his upcast
eyes, his lilting voice, his fingers delicately rolling the
flowers—is what he said an hour before: “It all
has to do with this unworldly love I have for deciduous trees.”
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Farm-at-a-glance
Guru Ram Das Orchards
Location: Near Esparto, about
75 miles NE of San Fransisco and 25 miles west
of Sacramento
Total acres: 16 1/2
Years farming: The orchard was
planted in 1981
Crops: A huge mix of fruit and
nut trees that produce fruit throughout the year:
lemons, oranges, plums, cherries, pears, kumquats,
almonds, walnuts, figs, apricots, nectarines,
etc.
Marketing: farmer's market, direct
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I had come to Guru Ram Das Orchards to hear how spirituality
influences Didar’s farming. Knowing he is a diligently
practicing Sikh, I expected to uncover a formal structure
for applying sacred beliefs to the profane world of commercial
farming. But here on the hilltop my questions are dead ends,
and the conversation always turns back to the trips Didar
takes to see the world’s great trees—the yellow
buckeye tree with its candlabra flowers, 300-year-old boxwoods
in France. As we walk into the orchard, Didar’s excitement
only rises; for him there is a direct correlation between
number of trees and adrenaline.
”I love talking about them because I love their stories,”
he says. “And every tree has a story.”
For instance this fig tree. Ten years ago a customer from
the Berkeley farmers market brought Didar cuttings from a
white fig tree in Greece. The customer believed (and many
agree) that it is the best fig variety on earth, and for that
he thought Didar must have one. The cuttings were crude, imported
as bare branches in a garbage bag, but Didar rooted them in
sand and one took. Today it is enormous, limbs sprawling into
the air. “We’ve even been pruning the hell out
of it,” he says, “but it’s still huge.”
The trunk has even split from the weight of its fruit, yet
the tree shows no hesitation.
Which is good, considering it stands white and bony in that
dense grove of Valencia oranges. It was planted here the way
most trees have arrived since the 16 ½-acre orchard
was planted in 1981: something else died, and the hole it
left was filled with Didar’s fancy. He has no master
plan—the orchard map hanging on the packing shed wall
looks like a puzzle.
Still, the decisions work. The fig tree is bold enough to
reach for the sunlight it needs, yet its thin foliage never
threatens the neighbors. A tiny kumquat tree hides in the
same dark grove of Valencias, but it is so small that the
bigger trees’ spacing affords it the air and light it
needs, while their bulk protects it from the wind.
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Myrobalan
cherry plum: The most spectacular and beloved
tree in the orchard, it doesn't produce a single
sellable fruit. But in March, it's electric with
bees, assuring that surrounding trees will not suffer
for pollination.
PHOTO BY LISA M. HAMILTON |
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Most advisers would frown on such seemingly haphazard interplanting,
warning of inefficiency, but this complexity is exactly what
Didar values. In fact, tree fanatic that he is, Didar has
never seen the giant redwoods a few hundred miles north because
the forests are too homogenous to enthrall him. Likewise,
his plantings almost intentionally defy the uniformity standard
to most orchards. “I like formal gardens planted informally,”
he says. “Formal gardens alone are like a piece of music
all in major keys—there’s no contrast.”
Along the same lines, he chooses tree varieties not for early
maturity or other market considerations, but for their taste,
their color, and their intrigue. As those choices start to
bear fruit, he chooses to keep trees according to an equally
special set of priorities.
Take his Keiffer pears. He planted the trees as an experiment,
but for a while had no idea how to ripen the fruit. So he
had someone graft a California pear onto one of the Keiffers,
and found a mixed blessing: the fruit was “amazingly
good” but terribly unvigorous.
“Still,” he says, “after 11 years, I get
one box of fruit from the whole tree. I should have left it
as a Keiffer, because since then I’ve figured out how
to ripen them. But the Californias are the best pears I’ve
ever tasted. A few of my customers know that and they alone
will buy almost the whole crop. Even selling them for $2.40
a pound, though, I still make nothing off of them. And that’s
okay. They don’t make me any money but they make me
friends.”
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"As we walk into the orchard,
Didar’s excitement only rises; for him there is
a direct correlation between number of trees and adrenaline.
‘I love talking about them because I love their
stories,’ he says. ‘And every tree has a story.'
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Sometimes even the trees themselves seem to become friends.
On the east side of the orchard is one that’s irresistible
in spring, its mass of blossoms so round and thick and white,
like a thin cloud in front of the sun. Even when eyes are
closed and backs are turned, the scent sweetly coerces attention.
It is the most spectacular tree in the orchard, perhaps the
most beloved (though such favoritism seems unlikely), and
yet it produces not a single sellable fruit.
This Myrobalan cherry plum started as a sucker from the rootstock
of a neighboring Blenheim apricot, which Didar’s former
partner cultured accidentally. Full-grown now, the tree’s
crop is excessively heavy and negligible in quality. Didar
doesn’t prune it regularly, but still he must do enough
cutting to get a tractor under the robust limbs. A money pit,
it would seem.
But on March 17, the tree is electric with bees, assurance
that the surrounding apricots and nectarines will never suffer
for pollination. And that’s not all. “It has the
best flowers anywhere,” Didar says, smiling proudly
at this shocking white tree. “Even better, it has red
color in the fall.”
Most farmers would be skeptical of making choices according
to an unconventional set of priorities, and rightly so, considering
this industry’s thin margins. Looking down the hill
and across the stream to his neighbor’s conventional
almond orchard, Didar says that in recent years he hasn’t
seen the rented hives that used to appear there each year
during bloom time. “The prices kept dropping and I think
they decided it just wasn’t worth it anymore.”
Didar’s decisions, too, have tangible results, good
and bad. Because of the varied layout, tasks such as harvest
and spraying take more time and attention. Today the farm
is applying sulfur to the peaches, but must stutter its application
so as not to harm the sulfur-sensitive apricots in their midst.
This kind of particularity requires that Didar be personally
involved in the farming, physically present and making decisions
about individual trees. And because his workers can know the
layout only after a few seasons, he must offer incentives
to retain them. (Thanks to climate and wise planting, the
orchard produces fruit throughout the year, which keeps workers
in town.)
But for what the diversity demands in attention it pays back
in vitality. With habitat so scattered, diseases don’t
mushroom out of control and insect populations never reach
threatening numbers. Plus, the deep and varied ground cover
hosts plenty of predators. Walking through the orchard you
feel the ground change by the yard, now lush then muddy then
solid again. Such complexity means a thriving underground
world of microorganisms that control perennial threats such
as Phytophthora and Verticillium.
Marketing decisions follow a similar balance. Didar takes
incredible care to assure his product is optimal at the point
of sale. The process is time-consuming, but it pays off. A
loyal customer is Alice Water’s Chez Panisse, the celebrated
Berkeley restaurant that began the revolution toward eating
food not for what culinary alchemy makes it, but for what
it is to begin with—namely fresh, local, and carefully
grown. Their standards are uncompromising.
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"Usually the discussion of a
farm stops here, after you’ve satisfied all the
traditional considerations of what makes a successful
business: good pest management and fertility, a product
matched to its market, a reliable customer base. But there
is something more to Guru Ram Das Orchards—namely
love." |
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Chez Panisse’s pastry chef, Alan Tangren, buys from
Didar twice a week at the farmers market because he knows
he can rely on his fruit’s perfection. “He takes
the time to pick them when they’re ripe,” Tangren
says, “and he tastes critically before he brings anything
to market. That makes the difference.”
Usually the discussion of a farm stops here, the evidence
having satisfied all the traditional considerations of what
makes a successful business: good pest management and fertility,
a product matched to its market, a reliable customer base.
But there is something more to Guru Ram Das Orchards—namely
love. American agriculture is uncomfortable talking about
this other, it being impossible to fit into an equation of
input and return. Yet while love might be less official, it
is no less important.
Most growers feel this other—they wouldn’t be
in the business if they didn’t. But Didar is special
in that he has gone from treating love as a nice side effect
to acknowledging it as a powerful principle. At his orchard,
alongside considerations of money, vitality, and long-range
planning, love makes decisions.
To the untrained eye the decisions love makes might seem
frivolous; just as we don’t have words to quantify love
itself, we don’t have words to quantify its effects.
We could legitimize love by how it promotes other goals—generous
watering means a heavy first crop of figs when the market
is good, for instance, and keeping the Myrobalan means healthy
bee populations. But going beyond that, to validate love on
its own, requires a whole new plane of thinking.
As Didar sees it, it’s no different from his faith.
He explains, “To create a holy place, people get together
and bow in reverence. That act of reverence is what makes
something sacred. You can feel it when you go into a place
like a cathedral. People have had a devotional attitude about
it, and the place keeps that and reverberates it back.
“It works with a farm, too. If you love it and have
a reverential attitude toward it and are grateful for what
it gives you, ultimately it works better. Things taste better,
and ultimately you probably make more money.”
It certainly feels true at the farmers market; Alan Tangren
is one of many customers to note that there’s something
different about Didar’s fruit. Back at the farm, looking
through this lush, multi-colored landscape and across the
stream to the neighbor’s acres of sad almonds, that
different thing is made clear. With my nose full of cherry
plum perfume and ears full of bird songs, I’m left to
wonder only why this beauty is so rare.
Lisa Hamilton is a freelance ag writer from Mill Valley,
CA.
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