The Sweet Spot: Stone Fruit Tour in the San Joaquin Valley
On a recent farm tour, CUESA adventurers journeyed to some of the sweetest farms in the San Joaquin Valley. At Bella Viva Orchards, they strolled through stone fruit orchards and got an up-close view of sun-drying cherries. Next, farmer John Driver gave a rare tour of CandyCot Fruit Company, where the group picked apricots right off the trees.
Bella Viva Orchards has two locations. We visited their organic orchard in Denair, about two hours east of San Francisco, where farmer Victor Martino invited us to pick as many nectarines as our two hands could carry.
Photo by Bowerbird Photography.
Victor is a third-generation farmer. He started converting some of his family’s land to organic production in 2003. The farm grows a variety of stone fruit, which it sells fresh at the farmers market, but it is more widely known for its dried fruit.
The Martinos grow a number of varieties of stone fruit, including the Honey Blaze nectarine. Each variety comes into ripeness successively, in order to provide a consistent harvest throughout the summer season. Bella Viva employs four harvesters to pick fruit the day before the market for optimal flavor and freshness.
Photo by Charissa Luke of Zest Bakery.
Victor and Angie Martino’s daughters, Belle and Vivian, grew up lending a hand at the farm. They are currently in school, but they continue to be an active part of the business during the summer. Bella Viva is named after them, with their combined names meaning "beautiful long life" in Italian.
Photo by Charissa Luke of Zest Bakery.
Bella Viva grows beneficial grasses in their organic orchard. On the day of the tour, they had just disked the grasses into the ground, a process that happens every three or four years. Vetch and clover are planted to fix nitrogen in the soil. The Martinos also apply compost to improve soil fertility.
At their organic orchard, Bella Viva practices sustainable pest control by using insect pheromone disruption. These small baits, attached to their trees, release a pheromone scent, confusing insects who are looking for mates and inhibiting reproduction. This allows farmers to control insect populations without resorting to synthetic pesticides.
Bella Viva builds houses for barn owls as an effective and sustainable means of controlling gophers, an especially damaging pest that likes to snack on cherry tree roots.
Victor explained that the workers who prune the trees leave six main stems in a bowl shape and tie the top of the tree with a rope or wire, so that the branches can bear the weight of the fruit. They thin out the fruit on the tree, removing 12 to 15 pieces from each limb and leaving only about two fruits. The remaining fruits develop superior flavor because there aren't as many of them competing for the tree's nutritional resources.
The entire San Joaquin Valley is basically a desert. Water gets pumped in through a canal system. When Bella Viva needs water, they must order it from the water department, then wait. The farm does not have control over the day or time the water comes, and family members often have to go out to the orchard in the middle of the night to crank open the valve that allows the water to flood the orchard.
Bella Viva has a second orchard that is not organic. Contrary to popular belief, Victor explained, spraying is an inevitable part of his regimen on both orchards. On the organic orchard he uses copper and lime sprays, substances permitted by the USDA organic standards, to prevent brown rot and mildew. These organic pesticides must be sprayed more frequently than their synthetic counterparts, so his cost per acre is three times more on the organic plot than on the conventional plot.
The farm also has a large sun-drying operation on site, where they dry fruit both from their own orchards and from other farms. Cherries are typically pitted the night before they’re put out to dry and spend about seven days in the sun. Here, we see Bing cherries, a variety that is red when picked but turns yellow when sulfur (a fruit preservative) is added. Victor noted that the cherries will turn red again as they dry in the sun.
The addition of sulfur dioxide gas keeps the fruit from oxidizing. This allows the fruit to retain more of its nutrients, color, and flavor and restricts yeast and mold growth. The Martinos also process some fruit in dehydrators, allowing them to dry the fruit without sulfur dioxide, which some people are allergic to and which is not allowed for organic products. Using dehydrators is faster than sun-drying, allowing less time for the fruit to oxidize and lose its nutrients.
Photo by Charissa Luke of Zest Bakery.
Our second stop of the day was Bella Viva’s store, located in Hughson, near their Denair orchards. We sampled dried fruit and browsed their many products.
The last stop of the day was CandyCot Fruit Company in Waterford, where we met John Driver. John is a farmer and plant geneticist who has been working on cultivating unusually sweet varieties of apricots, named CandyCots, for the last 15 years.
John has traveled extensively throughout Central Asia, learning about the apricots that originate there. He has collected genetically diverse seeds from a broad geographic range, and brought them back to the United States to select varieties that would be adaptable to California's climates. It has taken about 15 years of breeding, selection, and growth for John's trees to produce fruit that is ready for market.
John was careful to select for apricot varieties that his customers would like. He conducted taste-tests at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market as a way to get first-hand opinions. He was surprised to find that people gravitated to the most complex and intense flavors, and ultimately decided to produce varieties exhibiting those traits for market.
Photo by Charissa Luke of Zest Bakery.
John currently has two varieties of CandyCots in production to sell at farmers markets: Anya and Yuliya. The Anya variety came into production about a year before the Yuliya, which should be reaching peak production next year.
The orchard used to be certified organic, but John encountered problems with bacterial canker and lost half of his trees. The farm is no longer certified organic, but he says that chemical pesticides are only used lightly.
Photo by Bowerbird Photography.
CandyCot trees are pruned into a V-shape to maximize the amount of sunlight that hits the wood. The pruning process allows him to select for wood with a smaller diameter, which tends to flower more. The trees are grafted on peach rootstock. Grafting seedlings onto a different rootstock selects for certain types of growth specific to that rootstock, as well as resistance to diseases. John chose peach rootstock specifically because it comes into production a bit earlier than apricots.
Don't let looks deceive you! The sweetest apricots are the ones with slight discoloration and wrinkled skin. These apricots are sticky sweet and have a flavor profile more complex than the standard apricot varieties sold in the U.S. CandyCots measure between 26 and 32 on the Brix scale of sweetness, whereas most varieties register in the teens.
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CUESA (Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture) is dedicated to cultivating a sustainable food system through the operation of farmers markets and educational programs. Learn More »