After a nice visit in San Diego with the family to celebrate my parents’ 50th Anniversary, I kicked around a month or so before scoring a job as Farm Manager for Chestnut Ridge Farm. The 160-acre farm is located up in Anderson Valley, an area known for exquisite pinot noirs coddled by the cool marine air, apple orchards, and the delicious, happy hoppy Boont Ale from Anderson Valley Brewery. In Anderson Valley’s much earlier years, meandering sheep and lumber mills harvesting [now treasured] redwood trees were the chief economy drivers. Chestnut Ridge Farm is next door neighbors with John Scharffenberger, who had a well known winery and later started Scharffen Berger Chocolates after he was diagnosed with cancer with a prognosis of 10 years to live. I can literally sit on a hill at lunchtime, snacking on an apple, and look down at the rolling hills belonging to a maker of small-batch chocolate and wine. California is pure magic!

Farmer Tom and his wife Pam were lovely hosts. The land nutures 250 chestnut trees, a small family vineyard (Chardonnay, Syrah. Pinot Noir, and Zinfandel), over 50 varieties of fruit and nut trees including apples, grapes, lemons, pears, figs, plums, pluots, peaches, pomegranates, cherries, almonds, hazelnuts, and hickories… and tons of flowers to keep the bees busy! It’s a beautiful homestead! The entire property is offgrid and water is provided by a deep well drilled into the property in the late 90s.

As a farm manager, I worked with a couple different teams of farmhands [some migrant workers who supplement their income from the off season of grape picking, some younger and enthusiastic WWOOFers passing through town] to rake chestnuts down the steep hillsides [this helps keep trees’ feet from getting too wet] and collect them into 55-gallon buckets. We load these large garbage-sized buckets into the back of trucks and drive up to the barn to run through a contraption that Farmer Tom [an engineer in a past life] created to split and pull the prickly hulls off the chestnuts. **Side note: by far, this has been the hardest farm job….chestnut hulls are painful AF! And the needles embed into your boot linings and wool socks for a lifetime, I swear. One thing I learned in this particular job is how differently people handle stress and hard work. You think you can gauge a person by their personality upfront, or even after a couple of days of work, but they often express different temperaments under ongoing hot conditions or stress. I find it fascinating to watch how folks choose to persevere–or do not– under such challenging conditions. This is where you realize how important comraderie becomes to push through those tough moments and balance the need to complete a task without surrendering your love and passion for farm life.

Most of our haul was sold at the BiRite in San Francisco, along with the farmer’s market in Boonville. I made some chestnut pie crusts, pomegranate smoothies, and lemon-fig bread to also sell at the farmer’s market. I love the challenge of creating new recipes in order to use up food before it can go to waste and it’s just so satisfying to cook and bake with the things you pluck from just outside your door. I can’t underscore how truly decadent that feels! I ended up staying for a month after the chestnut season ended to do various odd jobs on the farm and work on some photography and design projects, and learn some woodworking in Tom’s barn.