Four generations have cared for this organic orchard

As the Prevedelli organic orchard in the Corralitos hills outside Watsonville approaches its 70th birthday, a new generation of consumers is coming to appreciate its harvest of heritage apple varieties.

There are 40 varieties of apples, and counting, on 80 acres of the orchard, and a half-dozen varieties each of pears, blackberries and raspberries.

When the family takes their fruit to a dozen farmers markets throughout the greater San Francisco Bay Area, some of the oldest apple varieties draw the most attention.

"People like the heirloom varieties. There may be some blemishes, but people are more interested in the flavor. We sell most of it at farmers markets, especially in the South Bay—Palo Alto, Mountain View, Fremont," said Sylvia Prevedelli, whose family has farmed the hillside orchard outside Watsonville since her father-in-law bought the ranch in 1945.

For Prevedelli, it's about the apples, and the love.

"I'm in the field. I pick and I drive a tractor. I'm totally involved. Farming is a gamble; we don't have to go to Las Vegas. But if it's in your soul, it's enough to get by," Prevedelli said.

When she talks with customers at markets in the Silicon Valley, Prevedelli invites them to come down to the Pajaro Valley to see where their apples are grown.

"I invite people to come out here. They come and they bring their kids because they want to see where their food comes from," Prevedelli said.

One of the heirloom varieties preserved at the orchard is the Hauer pippen, a late-season variety so prized that at harvest, Prevedelli's son-in-law Sam Lathrop sets aside a box for personal consumption.

"It was a chance finding in Aptos; Mr. Hauer found it on his property. It is a late-season apple that can stay on the tree until Christmas, so it's called the Christmas apple," Lathrop said.

A treasured berry at the hillside farm is the loganberry, a cross between a blackberry and a raspberry that is too fragile to market, but too delicious to ignore, and is named after its discoverer, Santa Cruz County judge James Harvey Logan, who died in 1928.

The large number of varieties makes for a long, steady harvest season for the Prevedelli family, now in their fourth generation at the farm, and for their five year-round employees.

But the variety of fruit also lets them get by with relatively modest cold storage facilities at the orchard.

"If we grew all one variety, we wouldn't have the room to store them. We have 80 acres of apples and we grow 40 varieties; it might be a couple more now. We start picking in July and run until December. We do one variety after another. We do six varieties of pears, and have a couple more coming in. We also do squashes and six varieties of berries," Lathrop said.

The apples are sorted by size on a decades-old machine as they are harvested, and then stored in one of the two coolers at the orchard.

"As we run our apples, we're able to sort nine different sizes. They are dumped into a bin, where they are washed. Then they are dried. When we harvest the apples, they go right into the large cooler. When we need them, we pack them and put them into the smaller cooler," Lathrop said.

This arrangement of coolers, and the long harvest, lets the family have at least some apple varieties to sell virtually all year long.

Apple and pear growers were the first to discover that they can control their most important pest, the codling moth, organically with a combination of pheromone mating disruption and monitoring, degree-day based flight predictions and selective use of organically approved insecticide.

"If you did nothing, eventually you would have an orchard with 80 to 90 percent damage. We work with Sean Swezey, a Cabrillo College entomologist and one of our neighbors. He tells us when a flight is coming. Once we know when a flight is coming, we will spray Entrust. We use the degree-day model to predict the moths, and now we hardly get enough moths in a trap to identify a flight. Last year we didn't have to spray at all, except on the edges," Lathrop said.

This year, however, increased pest pressure could be one more dismal consequence of the drought.

"The moth damage we've had the last few years has been 1 or 2 percent, or even less, but in this dry year we could have five flights. The drought has really hurt us. A lot of apple farmers watered their trees in January. This is unheard of. Normally, we wouldn't start watering until June, and we'd only water two or three times," Lathrop said.

There are also biological controls for the rodents that infest the orchard, but they have to be augmented by a vigorous trapping program.

"We do have natural predators out here; we have hawks and we have barn owls. But I've got a guy who spends four hours a day doing nothing but trap for gophers. We've got 80 to 90 gopher traps out here," Lathrop said.

As organic producers, the Prevedellis do not use chemicals for thinning, which must be done by hand one tree at a time.

"The thinning is all done by hand. We have five employees who work here all year long. With one guy on each side of the tree, it takes them 10 minutes to thin a tree, and they're really fast. We have great workers," Lathrop said.

Organic methods have been incorporated into the Prevedelli operation over the last three decades, but the decision to pay for certification was largely for marketing reasons.

"I didn't want to pay for the certification, but the new generation did; they wanted to give the money away. The consumers asked for the registration," Prevedelli said.

And she has a word of warning should her descendants ever consider selling the hillside orchard her ancestors started nearly 70 years ago.

"We're protecting the land for a new generation. I've been working on the farm for 44 years. I said I'd never drive a tractor, and never marry a farmer. I did both. If they ever try to sell the farm, I'll come back out of the ground to tell them what I think about that," Prevedelli said.

(Bob Johnson is a reporter in Monterey. He may be contacted at bjohn11135@aol.com.)