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 we have enough heat to really ripen pomegranates. The flavor is tangy and the color of the arils ranges from clear to very dark red. I prefer the darker color and a balance between sweetness and tartness. I like to use the trick of removing the arils in a bowl of water to speed things up and keep the juice from getting where is it not desired. Pomegranates are just becoming ripe and are well worth all the work to squeeze out the juice to use or store in the freezer in a canning jar to enjoy at another time of the year. The tree does not require a lot of water once it is established and there are no pests to the tree or fruit in this part of the world. The origin of the pom is the Middle East so plenty of heat and lots of sun is required to fully ripen the fruit but not much water. Plant soon to enjoy juicy fruit arils to add to salads, to eat out of hand or to make a dark red drink. I have tasted many varieties and our nursery carries the darkest colors with the best sweet/tart balance because these are the ones that win the taste tests.

Coast Live Oak tiny trees are growing into their gray tree tubes. Air pruning and ribs will keep the roots in the best condition for easy transplanting. Acorns are carefully collected from choice trees and sorted to remove those that don't make the cut. Store them in a secure package in the fridge until it is time to plant them. Watch them carefully because nature's critters would love to swipe your seeds before you know it. Coast Live Oaks, also known as Quercus agrifolia, are a real favorite native tree to plant. It is an evergreen so leaves are present year round and can give a nice sense of privacy and security. Oaks are a valued tree and this one grows in many different soil types and in many locations in Napa.