Olinda · Shasta County · California
A small working place.
Twenty-some acres in the oak country of southwestern Shasta County, where the spring runs green to the horizon and the wildflowers come on heavy from February into June. We grow a few things, raise a few things, and try not to take any of it for granted.
Spring grass
Wildflower season
Oak shade
Quercus douglasii
Cream linen
Summer light
Red soil
Iron and copper
Blueberry
Three hundred bushes
The land
A long spring, a soft autumn.
Olinda sits in the foothills west of Redding, where the Sacramento Valley starts climbing toward the Trinity Alps. The rains come in November and stay through April. By February the hills are green, by April the wildflowers are everywhere, and it holds like that into early summer. Late summer warms up and the wild oats turn gold. The oaks keep their shade year-round.
The animals
Two horses, the chickens, the dogs.
The horses have opinions. The chickens have a routine. The Airedales mediate. Puppies are raised right alongside all of it — the rooster going off at four in the morning, the horses thumping the fence at feeding time, the slider opening and closing a hundred times a day. By the time they leave, almost nothing rattles them.
The garden
Eclectic, by design.
Three hundred blueberry bushes, a row of grapes, a pink pomegranate that gets bigger every year, a fig tree that out-produces what we can eat, lemons heavy enough to bend the branches, and garlic going in every fall. Jim and I run it together — he helps train and watch the puppies, picks blueberries with me through the season, and handles the hundred small jobs that keep a place like this going. The grandkids show up when they’re around. The result is what a small working farm tends to be: a little of this, a little of that, all of it on purpose.
From the ranch
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