When the Almond Tree Blooms

For the past week I've been on vacation, since the farm is closed for two weeks over the holidays.  I've spent most of my break so far up in Seattle, with family and old friends.  Amidst the busy holiday schedule I snuck away to my favorite Seattle food spot, Aladdin Falafel Corner, located on the 'Ave', the street I spent many hours wandering as a high school student.  Aladdin is one of the few businesses left from those days in the late 90's, and anyone who has tried their falafel knows why.  For those of you unfamiliar with falafel, it is a food of Middle Eastern origin made of ground chickpeas (garbanzo beans) and various spices that are formed into a ball and deep fried until the outside becomes deliciously crispy.  The falafel then gets wrapped in a pita along with lettuce, tomato, cucumber, tahini sauce, red onion and at Aladdin, a dusting of red sumac powder.  One can find Aladdin falafel at two outlets, the Aladdin Gyro-cery and the Aladdin Falafel Corner,

On Monday of last week I finally got around to harvesting the quince tree growing along a country road in South Sutter County.  I passed along this stretch of road many times on my way from one rice field to another and always found it pleasing because it is lined with walnut groves and homesteads whose yards abound with fruit trees.  I noticed the quince tree but never stopped to collect the fruit until that chilly December afternoon.  Quince Tree, Striplin Road Sutter County, CA For those of you unfamiliar with quince, it is a lumpy yellow-green fruit whose size ranges between apple and football.  Unlike most contemporary fruit, whose growers and buyers prize uniformity and perfection in appearance, every quince has a unique shape and is covered with a thin fuzz.  When eaten raw, quince has an astringent, mouth puckering taste, but when cooked it becomes very delicious.  Quince's popularity throughout the world in countries like Turkey, England, Spain, Iran and Mexico attest

Towards the end of last week, strong gusts of wind began to pummel the Sacramento Valle, clearing out the dense fog and the most of the leaves clinging to the trees on the farm.  The mulberries, willows, black walnuts, figs and the majestic valley oaks that dot the landscape of rice country are transforming into their skeletal winter forms.  The wind blew the thin white chaff off the corn being moved around the mill and it drifted like snow throughout the farm.  Like flakes that never melt it even settled on the dusty break table inside the machine shop.  I spent most of the past few days in the unheated shop, where I counted weeds in the rice samples I took from each field before harvest.  The work revealed striking differences in the weed populations of the fields, but grew tedious and made me realize that I wouldn't want to do this all the time, say, as a PhD student in an agriculture-related discipline.  Luckily, as the light faded over the Great Valley on Thursday, I finished