This is the farm stand, where you can buy jams, pastries, soup, and more. Our group enjoyed strawberry shortcake and a creamy soup made from cauliflower grown on the farm (more about the cauliflower later).

Jim Cochran is Swanton's founder. He's a pioneer in his field--not only was Swanton the first certified organic strawberry farm in California, but it was also the first organic farm to sign a contract with the United Farm Workers, and the first farm in the US to offer an employee stock ownership program.

We picked our own berries and learned a few things.

For example, did you know that strawberries are not a fruit? Botanically, they are considered a false fruit, with seeds on the outside.

If you were to plant strawberry seeds, you'd only get a 2% germination rate. For this reason, strawberries are bred vegetatively. Clones of the mother plant are produced by rooting the stolons (long running stems that grow from each plant). Swanton's strawberry starts come from a nursery east of Shasta.

Gophers are a pest on any farm, but Swanton's biggest concern is Verticilium, a fungus that stays dormant in the soil for 25 years. Most strawberry growers get rid of it by fumigating the soil with methyl bromide (developed during WW2 as a chemical weapon--pretty toxic stuff) or methyl iodide (used to induce cancer in lab experiments). These chemicals render the field devoid of all life--no fungus, no ants, no worms, no gophers, no seeds, no nothing. More info on these chemicals and how to stop their use is available from the Safe Strawberry Campaign.

They were also growing cauliflower. This baby was smaller than a golf ball.

This field has several varieties of cane berries, including blackberries, olallieberries, and raspberries. (These are either tayberries or olallieberries, but, while the distinction was easy for Bear to see, such subtleties eluded us.)

Both tayberries and olallieberries are blackberry-raspberry hybrids, but tayberries are half loganberry (which is a blackberry-raspberry cross) and half black raspberry, whereas olallies are a cross between a loganberry and a youngberry, which is a dewberry-raspberry hybrid. Got it?

We learned that profitability can be challenging with cane berries. There's only about a six week window of harvest each year, but they're in the ground for 10 years (and it takes a few years for them to start producing). The farm has to make all its money during that six-week period.

They also grow kiwis. These weren't ready to harvest yet. We learned that the kiwi was previously called "sun peach" and "Chinese gooseberry," but sales didn't take off until they got their current name.

Kiwis ripen off the vine. They are harvested hard and only ripen after going through a "cold event" (which means sitting in the refrigerator for two weeks) and finally ripening on the counter.