Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
My father’s cousin, Dick Holt, was the superintendent of a large agricultural operation 14 miles from Winters, California in the small town of Esparto. This little town of about 3,000 in Yolo County hasn’t grown much since we visited there on long summer weekends in the late 1960s and early 70s.
Dick and his wife Sylvia, and their son Danny, who was just a year younger than me, lived in a two-bedroom house in the midst of several hundred acres of almond trees. They had a couple of grapefruit trees, an orange tree, a tangerine tree, a couple of lemon trees, and a lime tree all growing next to the house.
Out front were a couple of large olive trees. Take it from me, olives are disgusting raw.
Danny and I had epic dirt clod and raw almond fights with neighboring kids. They were all Hispanic kids and I didn’t realize it then, but their parents were most likely semi-permanent workers with Green Cards.
In late summer, just before school started, the almond harvest began. It was the wildest thing I’d ever seen, and as a 12-year-old kid, it made quite an impression.
As the outer shell of the almond started to split, it was time to harvest.
Workers wrapped circular tarps, about 40 feet in diameter, with a hole in the middle around the trees. They looked like giant Christmas tree skirts. When the tarp was in place, a guy on a small Ford tractor backed a shaker up against the tree.
The shaker looked for all the world like a miniature Army howitzer. The rubber-cushioned jaw of the shaker was backed up firmly against the almond tree, halfway up the trunk and the operator hit a switch on the tractor that started violently shaking the tree. Almonds, bird nests, and an occasional squirrel came flying out of the tree and onto the tarps. After a minute of two, workers skillfully gathered the tarps and dropped the almonds into large bins towed by another tractor.
They did this all day. That’s how almonds are gathered in Northern California.
While this was fascinating, it paled in comparison to the tomato harvest taking place throughout the summer on thousands of acres west of the almond orchard.
As any gardener knows, different types of tomatoes can mature from 50 to 120 days. The corporate farmers who owned those thousands of acres of spaced the tomato harvest so they had produce to sell from May to October. Some of the shorter duration tomatoes were planted and harvested two or three times in a season.
Here’s the fun part, especially for a 12 or 13-year-old kid.
When they harvest tomatoes, they don’t pick the individual fruit but rip up the entire plant.
On one of our trips, Dick had an operator call in sick, and had to drive the D-7 Cat that pulled the tomato harvester.
If you’re familiar with a combine or corn chopper, think of one of these machines on steroids.
The tomato harvester pulled 18 rows of tomatoes out of the ground, funneled the plants up a couple of conveyor belts, then split those belts into four more rows of conveyors.
Along those four interior conveyors sat dozens of women, on both sides of the belts, in eight rows. As the tomato plants rolled by they pulled the ripe tomatoes, tossing them into another conveyor, and the plants, and the green or rotten tomatoes passed by and out of the back of the machine onto the ground.
Dick let me ride on the Cat with him on one mile-long pass through the field. I noticed he kept a shovel next to the driver’s seat but didn’t pay much attention to it. I was too busy watching the plants roll up the conveyors and the women’s hands that were moving so fast they were hard to see.
All was well in this noisy world until screams came from the gals on the harvester. Many of them jumped off the machine and ran a few dozen steps away, screaming and crying in Spanish as they fled.
Dick was a huge man, 6-3 and well over 300 pounds. He didn’t get excited too easily, but as the women flew off the machine screaming, he looked calmly at me as he shut down the equipment and said, “Snake.”
He stepped down off the Cat, grabbed the shovel and walked back toward the harvester. By then, all the women were off the machine and out in the field.
After a few minutes, I saw him swing the shovel a few times, then he walked back toward me.
In his left hand was a dead rattlesnake, a little over three feet long.
“We get a few of these rascals through the machine every year,” Dick said with a grin. “The gals don’t like them much.”
He cut off the rattles with his pocketknife and said, “Here, keep these for a souvenir.”
Before we moved from Sacramento in 1971, Dick gave me a single-shot, Iver Johnson, 12-gauge shotgun as a birthday gift. It was made in 1908 and I used that shotgun all through college and beyond, especially for geese.
Dick passed away while I was teaching in Lusk, 40 years ago, but his larger-than-life laugh, and happy outlook on the world have remained with me.
California produces almost 13 million tons of tomatoes a year. That’s a lot of ketchup, or catchup, or whatever you choose to call it.
Tomatoes are on my mind as if you couldn’t tell. I started three different varieties in potting trays during the first week in April. The plants are two to three inches tall now and are doing well in my dad’s portable greenhouse in the basement.
Soon, I’ll transfer some of them to my hydroponic system and replant the rest into larger pots to plant outdoors in early June.
They’re 50-, 65- and 75-day varieties with a few heirloom plants mixed in for good measure. Nothing tastes as good as an heirloom tomato, but they bruise easily, don’t store well, and have thin skins.
Don’t we all as winter comes to an end? Hopefully.