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This Week’s Fruit:
Shinko Asian Pear
Hollow Farm, Brentwood, CA
The Shinko has a round shape which is slightly flattened. The skin is bronze with brown russeting and its juicy, creamy white flesh has a subtly rich flavor. One of the last pears to pick, it comes off the tree with a butterscotch note to its sweetness.
Pink Pearl Apples
Frog Hollow Farm, Brentwood, CA
Created in 1944 in California, the Pink Pearl have an orange flushed skin which opens to a delicate to vibrant pink flesh. This heirloom apple is delightful eaten out of hand but a great apple to use in salads and tarts to showcase its lovely
hue.
Warren European Pear
Frog Hollow Farm, Brentwood, CA
This is Frog Hollow Farm’s signature pear and for good reason. Too difficult to grow for most farmers to consider it’s never caught on commercially but Farmer Al has never shied away from putting the time and effort into a fruit that tastes so good. With a classic European texture, very soft and juicy with a silky sweetness that avoids the typical grittiness found in most pears.
Pomegranate
Frog Hollow Farm, Brentwood, CA
Native to the regions of Persia and the Western Himalayan range, pomegranates have been cultivated for several millennia. When sliced open a beautiful array of jewel-like seeds are displayed. The aril is the colorful casing that surrounds the edible seeds and has a sweet tart flavor.
Fuyu Persimmon
Frog Hollow Farm, Brentwood, CA
The Fuyu has a crisp texture with a rich honey sweet flavor. They have a beautiful orange to red hue when ripe, often with tiny brown speckles on the skin. They can be eaten out of hand with skin on or peeled.
…all varieties are subject to change…
A Note From Farmer Al:
After getting off to a slow start, the olive harvest gained momentum and finished with a flourish in record time
and record numbers. And amazing oil!
The real surprise for me was another record crop. It was the third straight year of record crops. 2015 was a record at the time; followed by another record crop in 2016; and now 2017 has given us 15 tons of olives per acre -yet another record. According to all the literature olive
are ” alternate” bearing, meaning good crops are usually followed by not so good crops. Frog Hollow does it again…setting new standards! My wife Becky loves it and has proclaimed it to be the best oil we’ve ever produced “fresh and bright with grassy zest and a pungent
finish”. I put it side by side for a taste test comparison with one of Spain’s finest olive oils and found it to be of similar excellence.
Right after harvest, the ground beneath the olive trees was looking pretty shabby, with pruned olive branches everywhere so, as the tree team went back to pruning apricots, my two ground teams moved in with tractor-drawn trailers to cleaned up the devastation. The strewn branches were gathered and piled into trailers for transport to the compost area where a team of men quickly pulled them off the trailer into a pile to be shredded. This mountainous pile of green branches was then quickly reduced to a much smaller pile of shredded green leaves. Next morning, this pile of shredded nitrogenous material was actually smoking it was so hot. So we quickly built it into three 100 foot long compost beds layered with horse bedding (manure) and wood chips. Yesterday these three new piles were turned and watered from olive laden tree branches to steaming hot compost: three days.
