“Joy of harvest belongs only to those who endure the pain of sowing." ~ Sunday Adelaja


It's a busy time at the rancho, but satisfying.  The rose garden Stuart planted to represent all the members of the family has blossomed into a fragrant, beautiful area of our courtyard, and it is a highly luxurious moment when I can put aside my other responsibilities and sneak out to cut some roses to grace our home.  Their fragrance is a beautiful reminder to take time to enjoy life, even if it's only for a moment.

The fig tree has produced like a champ this year.  Almost too many figs to eat.  How do we know this?  Because whenever we are going anywhere, the host or hostess prefaces the sentence with, "And no, we do not need figs." So what do we do with all these figs?  We make fig jam, strawberry-fig jam, dehydrate figs, make fig appetizers with goat cheese wrapped in prosciutto, drizzled with olive oil, and grilled -- and on and on -- and it's still producing.  Perhaps a sign of El Nino to come?  We hope.



We also harvested our Petite Sirah.  It's a very early time for harvest, but the grapes were ready, so despite the ranch manager being a bit dented (and we mean dented), some of our very generous neighbors pitched in and helped us to harvest the grapes.  We were able to hold at bay the coyotes by covering the vines with netting, tying them shut, and placing electric netting over this.  We can only hope that, at some point during the winter of 2017, on a cold, rainy night, we're sitting enjoying a sip of our 2015 Petite Sirah and thinking to ourselves that this is revenge for what the coyotes did to us in 2014.
Thank you to our neighbors and family!

The grapes were cold soaked for almost seven days and fermentation was begun a week ago and is nearly complete.  What's on the horizon, you ask (besides lots of smokey air?)  Well, Cabernet harvest, which won't be much this year.  The Cab ripened unevenly, and while it is usually our slow, dependable grape, it will not look as good as the Petite Sirah and there will not be a quarter of the the Petite Sirah.  

And, since I always say it, I'll go ahead and say it once more for good measure, hope springs eternal, and things are looking very good for a very large crop of olives this year.  Attendant with that is the annual problem of finding someone to sell us bottles in what they consider a small quantity (less than 3,000 bottles).  The ranch manager is still working on that perpetual problem, but on the lemons to lemonade scale, we're glad that we have a lot of olives this year that we need a lot of bottles.  We have a picking crew reserved, the last two pieces are the ripening before storms set in and the mill.  

At harvest, we're always more cognizant of the good things in life -- our health, family and friends, and the bounty our ranch is beginning to produce.  Thank you so much to everyone who has helped us in the last few weeks.  We're looking forward to sharing with you the fruits of our labors.

Happy harvest!


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