Native Planter Episode Two: Sharing the Landscape

Mike’s been farming Churchill Orchard for 12 years now!

He’s developed his own game… Mike talks about learning how to farm with nature and still bring in a delicious harvest in this 3-minute video.

Mike: “The oak trees take what, 5% of the space of the orchard?  Maybe.

I guess I would argue that we take up a lot more space than the oak trees do. Whether it’s roads, cars, citrus trees, etc…. the least we can do is carve out a little bit for what has been here for eons.

We don’t need to fill every square foot with citrus. The hope is to find it some balance, right? We look for that balance because we think it makes for better farming. We think that having more habitat for birds, more habitat for certain insects, promotes what we’re trying to do agriculturally. We can we can have a successful orchard and give up that space and have a magnitude healthier environment for the orchard.”

Video: Churchill Orchard’s Native Planter: Mike Sullivan

Since Mike came to Churchill Orchard 13 years ago, he has steadily embroidered its citrus and avocado groves with a crazy quilt of native plants. There is a method to this madness.

Meet our resident plant freak and deep thinker.

When we saw it, we just went ga-ga over Rintaro’s citrus parfait.

We were consumed with longing to taste it.

Yes that’s some of our fruit in there.

Sometimes it seems like the fruit leads a more glamorous life than we do.

That’s only fair, the fruit has got all the talent.

Estimating crop size – it’s necessary, but tricky, especially in a year with a light crop.
Jim Churchill runs it down…. a 3-minute short video.

We just noticed – January 2024 is the 20^th Anniversary of the birth of our little “Little Wonder” Kishu mandarin brand. It kinda snuck up on us. But we thought we would take a moment and celebrate the little guy.

Kishu mandarin has a history far older than its rebranding as “Kishu” in 1880s Japan.

We encountered the Kishu in 2000 on a tour of Citrus Variety Collection conducted by Ottillia Biehr. We thought it was cute and might make a nice little Christmas snack.

So we planted 50 Kishu trees (special order, because no one was growing the Kishu), and waited for them to grow.

 

 

 

 

As soon as we had fruit, we took the  first Kishus to Bill Fujimoto at Monterey Market.

Bill had introduced our Pixie tangerines to his customers, and we thought we had another great mandarin to share.

Things went well. We planted more Kishus.

Chez Panisse took up the Kishu and people who dine there started to write nice things about it.

Things got a little out of hand. People started calling the house, wanting shipments.

We built a primitive system for taking orders (ht Formdesk!), and the Little Wonder was born.

 

 

 

Our first mail order was packed on the dining room table (no barn yet).

 

 

 

 

 

 

We entered the Logo Era, the short-lived Recipe Era (Ham a la Kishu?), the Kishu Merch Era (that Kishu apron was fire), and the Meme Era (surfing Kishu bear!)

And people kept writing nice things.

Things went (mostly) well. And here we are.

It’s time to do a little roundup of the nice articles that have made us a part of the fruit lover’s world. We’re grateful to these writers and editors. Some of you are here because of them.

Shoutout to David Karp, Ruth Reichl, José Andres, Lisa Morehouse, Kit Stolz, Sarah Henry, Alejandra Borunda,  and Russ Parsons (!)

Mandarin Oranges, Rising Stars of the Fruit Bowl

https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/dining/a14751523/kishu-miniature-tangerines/

https://joseandres.substack.com/p/hey-mr-tangerine-man

https://www.bonappetit.com/story/kishu-oranges

https://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=53643

Pixie People

Will the Ojai Pixie Survive?

We had a block of Pixie trees that turned out to be growing on the wrong rootstock.
Turns out that the wrong rootstock for Pixies is a good rootstock for Kishus.
So we are grafting – or “topworking” – them over to Kishus.
Yes, more Kishu trees.
Grafting? Yes – here’s a brief introduction.

Grafting is an ancient horticultural practice where tissues of two plants are joined so that they grow together as a single plant.

The top part of the grafted plant is called the scion; the lower part is called the rootstock.

The rootstock provides the roots, anchorage, and support for the scion. Rootstock can also provide resistance to pests and diseases, or tolerance to specific environmental conditions.

The scion provides the desired characteristics of the tree, such as fruit variety, flower color, or growth habit.

The bud union is the point where the scion and rootstock are joined.

In a successful graft, the vascular tissues of the two plants grow together.

If the bud union fails, the graft will not be successful.

To topwork our Pixies into Kishus, Sam Garibay, the skilled artisan who does the actual grafting, will “scaffold” or prune the Pixie tree back, leaving only a few branches of 2-3 inch diameter or smaller. He does this some weeks before the actual grafting, and leaves at least one branch to serve as a “nurse limb”, with leaves to keep the water and nutrients flowing up into the parts of the tree what will receive the grafts.

Using a very sharp grafting knife, he then slips 1–3 pieces of Kishu budwood under the bark – so it makes contact with the Pixie cambium layer on the upper side of the remaining scaffold limbs. Paint with sealer, and cover with paper cones to protect the tender buds.

Then wait.

A few months later, we have 40 takes out of 53 trees grafted. That’s with Sam coming back to regraft two times. Some of the little sprouts are so wee and tiny that they might not make it.

If the topworking is successful, we’ve switched the tree to produce a different variety of citrus. The mature root system can push a lot of energy into those new branches, so we could be seeing more Kishus in a couple more years. It’s not an instant makeover, but puts these trees back in production in 3-4 years.

Our friends at Ventura Spirits have been incorporating our Pixies into their excellent Wilder Gin for some time now.

We’re delighted to be an ingredient in the Wilder.

Ventura Spirits has just released a Pixie Collins – you can see their handiwork here: https://venturaspirits.com/products/pixie-collins

 

When creeks rise in southern California, dry beds become turbulent torrents.

We put together a little video to show how storm flows look in the East End of Ojai.

https://vimeo.com/788758343

Nikos, born in the drought, gets his first glimpse of Ojai’s waterways in full flood.

The Ojai Valley is 100% reliant on what falls from the sky. Some folks have wells, many of us rely on the Bureau of Reclamation dam that created Lake Casitas. Either way, whether aquifer or the lake, the sources of pumpable supply have gotten dangerously low since 2005, having dipped to 29% of capacity at Lake Casitas immediately before the rains.
At Churchill Orchard, the rain fills us with contradictory emotions. We need the water, and it is truly thrilling to experience the rains. Also we have many tons of mulch on the ground and the orchard is covered with what we call “resident vegetation” (outsiders call it weeds!), so we gloat (just a little) about having very little run-off.

On the other hand, the rains are falling in the middle of kishu season, when we need to harvest the little kishu tangerines and manage our harvest volume to give ourselves the 5-6 week season we need to supply mail order, the farmers market, and wholesale.
Climatologists have been saying that average rainfall taken over a number of years is likely to remain roughly the same in southern California as it was before climate change – say, about 14″ per year in the Ojai Valley – but that the rain will come in fewer, more intense storms. And here we are: the current set of storms, while causing grief in many areas of California, including the Ojai Valley, is performing the incredibly useful service of filling up the aquifers and the creeks which are the sources of Ojai’s water.

Standard practice is to get the fruit off before the rains. Standard practice is to harvest the entire orchard in one go, then pack it and move it out. Our business model is different – we wait until the fruit is fully ripe, then we pick over the course of weeks, and pack to order.
You can’t send crews out to harvest soaking trees – getting soaked from picking is awful for the harvest crews. Also, we can’t pack wet fruit.

So we take measures: we cover the trees as best we can, to provide pickable trees in the intervals between storms.

When we do have wet fruit, which we inevitably do, we store it in the barn and run fans to dry the fruit out.

Bon appetit! We hope to be able to serve you.

A week of serious storms approaches from the Pacific.
Winter rain looms large in our history. We need it, and yet…
A very very hard rain can end Kishsu season just by beating the delicate skins until they bruise or break.

We get a lot of exercise trying to preserve the tender fruit from pounding rain and wind.
Early in the season—like now in January—we have a shot at saving the fruit.

We use these portable carports as shelters to keep the rain off.

When we run out of carports – black plastic.

And we are still in a Stage 3 drought.