Please join us for another Sunday afternoon Fruit Tasting. We are located on Beard Rd. We will be offering for you to taste 20 or so items from the farm. Taste pomegranates, persimmons, guava, citruses… Look for signs at Beard and Winsor in Napa Sunday Dec 7th '14 at 3:00. $5

Our farm is hosting another Fruit Tasting this Sunday, Nov 30, 2014 at 3:00 if it is not raining. There should be around 20 fruits to taste such as 5 different pomegranates, fresh and dried persimmons, several citrus including Australian Finger Lime, Pineapple Guava. The $5 charge includes a partial farm tour of young and old fruit trees, demonstration of ecological farm practices, food grown in containers, backyard sized chicken coop and run made out of 2 discarded trampolines and more. Tell your fruit loving friends! We will try to hold this almost every week to learn and taste fruit and see how to care for and harvest year round by learning a little at a time and tasting what is ripe each week.

I love this time of year. I look forward to eating pomegranate arils and making dark red juice to store for months to come. There are some good tricks for juicing without making a red splatter mess. One is to pick them after they have started to crack open. If left on the tree long after that it will start to dry out or worse so get it picked. Pulling apart the fruit under water in a big bowl or pot is a great method because all the great fleshy seeds sink to the bottom and all the parts we don't eat, like the peel and spongy pulp, float so that makes them easy to separate. Eat them like this or rub them into a colander so the juice goes into a bowl. Then the seeds can be squeezed in cheesecloth to get the last bit of juice off of them. I put the juice into jars to store in the frige or freezer for later. What a treat. It takes a lot of time but to me it is worth it. Poms are very easy to grow, have great flowers in the spring, awesome fruit, yellow fall leaf color and no pests around here and have low water needs. It is more of a shrub or bush than a tree and it can be kept small. Some people train it to be a tree by always cutting off the extra trunks and get less fruit that way.

Here in Napa at our suburban farm we grow apple trees. We have new varieties, common varieties and heirloom varieties. One of the oldest is probably Ashmead's Kernal Apple from 1700. I'm sure it never won a beautiful fruit award but it is a high scorer in taste tests. Click to the apple page on the website to see our list including Gravenstein 1669, Waltana 1910, Golden Russet 1845, Bramley's Seedling1813, Belle de Boskoop 1856, Northern Spy 1800. It is no wonder that the heirlooms have been preserved when you taste them. Worth growing because they taste great.

Gardeners who are spreading the fruit ripening over more of the year can have flowers on one tree and ripe fruit on another. These Trovita Oranges ripen in the spring and summer when the winter ripe varieties are in flowers. The fruit is great tasting and there are few seeds, thin skin and they are easy to grow. Even the peels can be used to flavor excellent beverages and foods especially if you avoid using pesticides that can collect in the skin oils. The trees can be grown as a shrub if winter covering is needed and that way the fruit is easy to reach. Oranges create year round beauty in your yard.