If you’re familiar with the local farm scene in Santa Cruz, you’ve probably heard of Jeff Larkey. Mr. Larkey is a seasoned farmer (no pun intended) that has a wealth of knowledge he shares with our community’s up and coming farmers. He owned Route 1 Farms and was a part of the first certified farmers market organization in town. What once was the Route 1 Farms warehouse is now home to us at Ocean2Table, Fogline Farms, and the Flower Hub. It’s huge!
In recent times Mr. Larkey has retired from big production farming, but he’s still farming for pleasure by Waddell Creek. The Monte Verde Orchard is where we harvest all of our CCOF dry-farmed citrus and stone fruit, and it’s a piece of land with a rich history we’re interested in knowing more about. Jeff gives us good insight into the land during the 80s.
What is your relationship to Monte Verde Orchard?
The Monte Verde Orchard is an orchard that had persimmons, avocados, chestnuts, and a few oddball things up until the early 1980s when I started managing it. I farmed other open land near Monte Verde on Ocean Street Extension. Mary Segarini was kind of the matriarch out there on Ocean Street Extension. Her and Pete were the first people I met there, and their nephew was trying to manage the orchard but found it harder and harder to keep up. They asked me if I would help out, so I did.
What do you know about the property during the times before you were managing it?
Just about its location and a little bit of the history. That piece of property has been an orchard pretty much since the 1910 era. I have a picture looking down on it from what is now Graham Hill Road, and it looked like it was a mixed orchard and truck garden going on in 1909. They hadn’t planted the persimmons yet… I think that happened around the 1950s or early 1960s. There’s chestnuts there that are 100 years old. Some of the first Hass avocados that were planted in Santa Cruz County were planted out there along with some of the early Hass avocados planted over on Hecker Pass, that road that goes over to Gilroy. They were in contact with some of the people up there and they did a lot of things together. Up until the 1940s a lot of Ocean Street Extension was cherries. There was a lot of cherry growing going on, but there were only a few cherry trees left when I started farming out there. I guess they had gotten some kind of blight root fungus disease. From the stories I heard, the whole valley was planting cherries at one time so it was kind of the last stop on the migrant cherry pickers’ circuit, so to speak. They would start over in the Central Valley where the season started a lot earlier. Then, they would migrate over to Santa Clara Valley, and then their final stop was Old San Jose Road Cherryvale Road –that's how it got its name, I think –and then Ocean Street Extension! They were telling me they had Italian migrant workers back in those days that would come to pick. Most of the Italians that settled on Ocean Street Extension were Genovese. They didn’t necessarily know each other before they moved there, but the climate was so much like the climate where they came from that they all just gravitated to the same place and ended up there even though they didn’t know each other ahead of time. And they’re the ones that got me to grow basil back when nobody knew what it was or what to do with it. Then I kinda became the basil king for a while. It became very popular almost overnight. Nobody knew how to make pesto in 1980 y’know? We were giving away half of the basil at the end of the farmer’s market because nobody knew what to do with it. We would literally bring 20 bunches of basil to the farmer’s market and give 10 away at the end, and then within just a few years… I don’t know what happened… Maybe a famous chef on TV made it popular, but then all of a sudden I would be bringing 20 cases of basil to the farmer's market and sell them all.
Then I kinda became the basil king for a while.
The term ‘organic’ has a definition that’s constantly being defined as farm practices become more regulated. Can you talk about your personal idea of organic as it relates to Monte Verde?
We were pretty early on in the evolution of defining what organic is and what you can and can’t do. I was in collaboration with a few friends of mine and a few of the people from UCSC. Jim Nelson up at Camp Joy had been involved in some of the maintenance of the old plum orchard up the road. He was actually the one to introduce me to that property owner, and he was a Chadwick student way back when that was going on. We just took a lot of information from other people and everybody that was an organic farmer in the area kinda knew each other at that point. A lot of it was trial and error in terms of what we wanted to do and what we could do. There was no book, y’know? The basic premise was that we were working with nature. We ended up just bringing in a lot of compost. Planting a diversity of crops. That was probably the #1 strategy for pest control for us in the early days. There weren’t even that many organic pesticides, so to speak. Now we have a lot of choices in terms of what you can use to control insects, not that it’s necessarily a good thing. We just tried to maintain a stable ecological system, and that was kind of our whole focus.
Can you explain what dry farming is?
At that particular orchard, there is no irrigation system. There is a small well on the property next to it that we had a little bit of access to because we were basically farming all the backyards along Ocean Street Extension in those days. So when we planted trees we needed to water them, of course, so we could get water without having to tap into the property owner’s city water. When we planted new trees that were so close to the river there, the water table was shallow enough that after the first year, the trees really didn’t need water. For a short time, we did a little drip system but the gophers just tore it up. We just abandoned that, but like I said, once the trees were established after the first year they were tapped into the water table underground.
What are the benefits of dry-farming?
The thing about irrigation, especially in an organic situation, is you don’t have access to herbicides. So any time you're going to water, you’re going to deal with weeds. One benefit about having a dry-farm situation is that you only need to weed once and then we don’t get any rain for 6 months. The only thing that’s going to bring up weeds is if there’s water, so in terms of labor saving, dry-farming is an easy way to control weeds. That’s kind of the battle for a lot of people irrigating orchards: every time you irrigate you get a new generation of weeds popping up.
Are there any downsides to dry-farming practices?
Your fruit size might not be as good. The yield can be impacted especially if it’s a drought year. Really the upsides outweigh the downsides because the fruits are going to taste better. The plants are only absorbing water as it needs instead of being over watered or over irrigated just to get large fruit size. Being an organic operation, there’s a natural absorption of nutrients and water going on whereas if you’re applying water soluble chemical fertilizers, the plant is trying to dilute those chemical salts by absorbing more water and that’s how you get large fruit really quickly. Not just fruit, it can be vegetables. It’s really just more water. If you take all the water out, the dry matter of organic produce is going to outweigh the dry matter of the same pound of conventional crop. They’ve actually done experiments about that. The cells are just bigger because the cells are full of water on those conventional crops.
I understand you planted some of the fruit trees yourself, can you share which varieties you opted for and why?
We ended up planting because I had already started doing an orchard up at the end of the road just past the property that's now owned by the Camerons. It was about a 12 acre piece that came open because the owner at the time, Maya Sapper, had bought it but then there was a flood in 1982 that made a mess out of her property. The flood of ‘82 is kind of interesting because it really was a huge flood. It damaged the Highway 1 bridge and took out half of the Soquel Street Bridge in downtown. It took out about 80 old plum trees. Just ripped them out of the ground and took them to the ocean. It was a major restoration project. It flooded the whole lower part of Maya Sapper’s property, and she was looking for someone to restore it. It was previously an old Santa Rosa and Mariposa plum orchard. We basically had to get a bulldozer out there and move the sand and stuff around that the river made a mess of. We ended up planting about 800 fruit trees on that piece of property and when the Segarini property came open, it was just an extension of planting more of the same: we did a mix of plums and citrus… Meyer lemons, Beurs lime, Eureka lemons… It was kind of just an extension of what was going on down the road.
Just ripped them out of the ground and took them to the ocean.
Can you estimate how many employees worked the land on Monte Verde during the time you managed it?
Well, we had a crew that rotated from other fields and crops that we were doing. It wasn’t like there was a dedicated crew just for that orchard. We would come in timely: weeding in the spring, pruning in the winter, and then harvest! It was sporadic, so I can’t say there was a dedicated number of people. Whenever things needed to happen, we could direct people to do the job that needed to be done. In the winter, there wasn’t much going on in the grow crop field because we did a lot of cover cropping. We could have 2 or 3 people pruning pretty full time for a whole month or more in that orchard just to get it done. That ladder work and pruning is time consuming.
It’s so funny you brought up cover crops because that was my next question here, so your team did plant cover crops at Monte Verde?
Even in the orchard we would try to establish a cover crop. Usually it was clover and vetch mixes, legumes basically. They are nitrogen fixers that would help with the fertilizer needs because legume cover crops can cut your nitrogen needs in half if you do it right.
Is it true that cover crops also help with pest control?
I will say we sometimes did an early or a late crop of buckwheat or something like the clover. The flowers attract beneficial insects, and we eventually planted a bunch of rosemary. I think there’s still remnants of it in the very back part basically to keep the pollinators around. We didn’t always have bees there. There were bees next door pretty regularly, and I think they still might be out there because James Cook is a beekeeper. We were basically trying to attract the pollinators, the beneficial insects with flowering crops just to keep them around. That can be a benefit of certain cover crops. With the mix of fruit that we had we really didn’t have pest problems. It was more birds than insects! We had birds eating the fruit. Or rats, or squirrels. Well, now the squirrels have figured out the avocados, and that was never an issue back then. That’s a recent thing that has evolved now because there’s places for them to hide and I don’t think anyone's trapping ‘em. We used to trap ground squirrels because they would hang down near the river. Our main pest was not insects, it was more animals. Birds and rodents!
What was your experience like managing Monte Verde while simultaneously running Route 1 Farms?
I was farming on my own until 1988 when Route 1 farms was established. I started out there in 1980 on my own solo farming, but yeah I joined up with John Steinburg in 1988 because he had land up at Wilder Ranch and I was looking to expand. We were starting to figure out how to make it work commercially because there wasn’t really any more open land on Ocean Street Extension to expand, so it made sense to join forces with tractor equipment and stuff like that just to make it more efficient. We also shared the labor force just to maintain a year round operation, and it was very complimentary because that land up the coast had a totally different climate than Ocean Street. It’s cold and windy there. It’s a whole different ball game up the coast, but in a way it’s cool because you can grow things that would get heat stress growing in the warmer places. Because it was warmer on Ocean Street Extension, we could get a head start on the main summer crops and then we would do more of the leafy stuff up the coast.
Anything to add?
I will say that the reason I was attracted to that location is because it really is like the Garden of Eden. For one, the soil is flood plain. They don’t make that kind of soil. That alluvial silt is the best soil you can imagine, and then combine it with the best climate you can imagine. It doesn’t get too hot and it’s not too cold. We could grow melons out there! It’s warm enough to grow melons, and you can’t really do that on the coast y’know? It’s just one of those perfect little valleys that just had the absolute ideal situation to be growing things for the community of Santa Cruz right next door. It’s not geared to ship out of the area, it’s geared more for local consumption, but still has an extremely wide range of different crops. Quite often we would count up the number of different crops we would grow in a year, and it was like 50-55 different things.
People have got to understand where they live and how lucky they are.
They don’t make that kind of soil.
Monte Verde is such a special gem out there on Ocean Street Extension. I’ve lived here in Santa Cruz for 6 years and I just drove down there for the first time on my first day working the orchard. I had no idea what was out there!
There are people that have lived here for 30 years and have never been out there. Unless you have business out there, why would you go out there?
It’s out by the cemetery, and most people don’t really go past the cemetery. Did anything spooky ever happen out there?
[Laughs] Well, I have a lot of stories about crazy stuff that has happened out there, but no ghost stories. One time a CHP Officer was murdered on Highway 9, and I was just living out there in a dome tent for a while –kind of a hippie camp y’know? And all of a sudden these helicopters are flying all around. I had just found this big cover crop and a big flock of doves had flown in and started eating my cover crop. So just as the helicopter flew over, I ran across the field waving my arms to scare these birds… and literally within a minute or two about 20 cop cars just showed up on the spot and started yelling at me to get down on the ground! I guess I resembled the guy that shot the CHP officer, and I was just like No, I live here. This is my dome tent. I’m just a hippie farming. [Laughs]. We need more farmers, and it’s not an easy thing to do for a living. Because farming can be such a monotonous hard thing to do, we try to make it fun. That was part of the reason to grow a lot of different crops. So we’re not doing the same thing all day every day. I’m still growing on an acre just ‘cause I like doing it. It looks awesome. I’ll experiment. Make something that’s normally not that fun, fun. I’m still connected to the warehouse there on Fair Street working mostly with the flower hub up the coast. My semi-retired garden is an acre [laughs]. It’s one acre, but I’m still doing tractor work for other farmers up there. Not all the farms can afford the equipment that they need, so my other job is doing tractor work for other people up the coast.
