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Olives are one of the oldest foods known to man and their one of the tastiest as well.  Their rich history surrounds California’s roots and goes back to biblical days.  However, these delicious fruits have to be cured prior to eating.

If you have ever tasted an olive right off the tree you know the intense bitter flavors will coat your palate for hours.  For many families around the globe curing olives at home as a family is still a time honored tradition (often a multigenerational annual event), but it’s not something that gets shared with mainstream America all that often. 

This is unfortunate as the demand for olives is clearly there.  All over the country the canned olive section at grocery stores is growing and olive products are dominating gourmet food shows. 

On September 18th, 2010
Chaffin Family Orchards
will be hosting an Olive Curing Demonstration at the Chico Grange
(2775 Old Nord Ave, Chico, California 95973),
but we will start off in the afternoon here at our farm
(606 Coal Canyon Rd, Oroville, Ca 95965)
at 1:00 p.m. with a tour of our 100 year old olive orchards. 

The majority of our olives were planted originally by a group of UC Berkeley and UNR professors doing research on the Mission Olive.  Now considered an heirloom variety, California Mission Olives are listed on Slow Food’s Ark Of Taste as a threatened fruit that’s at risk of extinction.

The Mission Olive Preservation group is another organization that works tirelessly to restore old Mission olive groves at the California Missions where they were originally founded.  We have one of the largest and oldest Mission groves still in production for commercial sales. 

We’ll spend time walking under these old majestic giants and talking with a few olive experts about growing olives, farming organically, harvesting, olives for oil, etc. 

We’ll also be demonstrating how Chaffin Orchards has drastically cut their fuel and other inputs by utilizing livestock in the orchards.  The livestock provide desired impacts and produce more crops per acre. 

In the olives the sheep and cows can be used for mowing the orchard floor; the goats actually prune away suckers and lower branches as well as eat invasive weeds like poison oak, wild grape, Himalayan blackberry, and star thistle; then the chickens come in and eat downed fruit (harbors fruit fly larva), any other bugs or pests, and deposit their nitrogen rich manure under the trees.  Utilizing this method the farm uses about 85% less diesel than before having the livestock integrated into the orchards and we’ve been farming this way for about 10 years now. 

It also allows the farm to operate using organic farming methods, and it produces more crops per acre as the wool, meat, and eggs from the animals can all be marketed as well. 

Here’s a video demonstrating how the farm is able to accomplish all this.

We have 4 types of olives suitable for curing, Barouni, Manzanilla, Sevillano, and Mission, and we will discuss each variety and the nuances of each one.

Once we explore the history and intricacies of olives and the farm and then we’ll move over to the Chico Grange at 6:00 p.m. and put on a class for curing the olives yourself in your home kitchen without using any lye.  Lye is what the commercial olive canning industry as well as many home curers use to leach out the bitter flavors in the olives and to soften them. 

Lye is a toxic chemical that is used in many industrial applications and is the primary ingredient in most pour-in drain cleaners.  It’s a caustic substance that destroys most nutrients and can cause severe burns if it comes in contact with skin. 

Olives have been around for millennia as a staple food source in Mediterranean climates around the globe.  Some trees in the Middle East are literally thousands of years old. There are ways to cure without lye; they’ve just become somewhat forgotten in our modern fast food society. 

So we’re going to be hosting olive expert Don Landis to come demonstrate multiple old world natural curing methods that don’t use lye.  Don is a real renaissance man when it comes to olives.  He does everything meticulously, curing hundreds of pounds of delicious olives each year in his own home and then just giving it all away to friends and anyone interested in learning more. 

He loves to share his experiences and teach people about olives and he often consults with both novices and experts alike when they have curing questions.  As a natural public speaker and teacher, guests will go home feeling confident that they can cure olives at home and start their own family tradition.  At the end we’ll sample prepared olives from the multiple curing methods and enjoy some tapenade as well.

Here’s a video of Don at a recent event in
Sonoma doing what he loves best: talking olive.

September 18th, 2010
FREE and open to the public

1:00 p.m. Tour of our 100 year old Mission Olive Orchards
at Chaffin Orchards hosted
by Kurt Albrecht (farm owner) and
Don Landis (606 Coal Canyon Rd, Oroville, Ca 95965)

6:00 p.m. Natural Olive Curing Class
We’ll go over to the Grange building in Chico
(2775 Old Nord Ave, Chico, California 95973)

Don Landis will be demonstrating old world olive curing techniques including dry salt cure, water cured, and the Greek style brine cure.  All cured without using lye.  Samples of the cured olives and tapenade will be available at the end of the demonstration.

Raw organically farmed olives for home curing will be available for purchase or to be sure we’ll have enough email to pre-order

Email chris_kerston@chaffinfamilyorchards.com to RSVP – its not required that people RSVP to attend but it would help us tremendously to be able to prepare enough samples if we knew how many people were coming especially since it’s a free event.

Chris Kerston
Chaffin Family Orchards
606 Coal Canyon Road,
Oroville, Ca 95965
530-533-1676 (Ranch Office)
530-370-6432 (Cell)

The boys and I took a drive up to Kennedy Meadows yesterday. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen the forest quite so green. It was a lovely day, the temperature at Kennedy Meadows was a comfortable 79°, with intermittent sun and clouds.

I must admit that I had my doubts about even making it that far up the hill. The clouds that hovered overhead looked angry and threatened to send showers at any moment but the hard rains never came. A light sprinkle was all, then the sun came out to warm our faces once again. It was almost magical.

The traffic in Twain Harte is an entirely different matter. It’s almost as if we picked up and moved back to Modesto, okay, so I exaggerate just a little but let me tell you, the traffic is nasty. It is almost as if these bay area folks pack up their vehicles to make the drive up to the mountain and forget their brains at home. Can’t find a place to park, no problem. We’ll just park on the side of the road. Never mind that most streets have no “side of the road,” so these crazy folk, just park in the street anyway. I guess they figure no one will notice.

Don’t you just love getting behind that weekend warrior, who has decided to take the travel trailer out of mothballs. This is the guy who drives in the fast lane, down the mountain and refuses to let anyone go around him or better yet, just takes his half out of the middle of the road.

Their offspring of course follows close behind, riding their skateboards down the center of Fuller Road, around blind curves, with no regard to the deer and motorists who must also share the road.  I’ve seen several near-misses that made my heart skip a beat or two.

It broke my heart to see the tiny baby fawn laying dead in the middle of Twain Harte Drive. I wonder if the driver who hit the baby even bothered to check to see, if it was still alive? It was so tiny, probably only days old.

The boys were delighted to find a tiny little tree frog in the river, at Columns of the Giants, near Dardanelle. The tiny frog seemed to enjoy being held by my nephew. It was almost as if he was refusing to leave when he was set free. It’s been ages since I had seen any butterflies but we saw several up the mountain yesterday.

It was nice to see hikers in the woods and those who tent camp and take time to really enjoy their surroundings. The longer I live here, the more I hate to see the majestic mountains tamed by civilization. I have a great respect for the animals that make the Stanislaus National Forest their home. I watched in amazement as a group of fire ants scurried about their business, oblivious to the fact that I was so big and powerful that I could take several out with one firmly planted foot. I left them to their business all too aware that at least some of them would make a terrific meal for some hungry animal soon enough.

It was a lovely day and we learned a lot from the mountains and the rivers. We can’t wait to do it again.  October can’t get here soon enough. Give me a quiet fall day anytime.

“Whoever called it ‘the gold rush’ was wrong,” says Sam Sackett, author of “Sweet Betsy from Pike,” a novel about the gold seekers who swarmed to California in 1849-1850.  “There wasn’t anything like a ‘rush’ about it.

Sackett’s point is that travel in those days was very slow.  “Today you could go from St. Louis to San Francisco in a few hours by plane,” he says.  “But in a covered wagon pulled by oxen the trip took months.”  The heroine of his novel started from Pike County, MO, in August 1849 and arrived at tghe Hangtown mining camp the next spring.  “Covering 25 miles a day was good time,” according to Sackett.

The “Sweet Betsy” of Sackett’s novel is a minister’s daughter, 18 and pregnant.  To escape the shame, she and her lover join a wagon train for the Hangtown gold fields.  Her experiences help her grow into a strong, independent woman.  The story is based on the folk ballad of the same name, which is reproduced in Sackett’s book.

Sackett is a retired university professor and a former president of the Kansas Folklore Society.  His nonfiction books include “Kansas Folklore” and a children’s book, “Cowboys and the Songs They Sang.”  Most of his fiction appeared in science-fiction magazines.

When the Rev. Elias Potter refuses to let his eighteen-year-old daughter, Betsy, marry nineteen-year-old Ike McNab, the two young lovers take matters into their own hands. With a baby on the way, the two decide to leave Louisiana, Missouri, in 1849 and journey to California to join the Gold Rush.

Betsy and Ike have no idea what the passage will entail, and it is not an easy one. Joining a wagon train, the two face danger and hardship as they climb mountains, cross the desert, and ford rivers on the long and arduous journey to California. Betsy and Ike must not only survive the passage itself, but must learn to eke out a living in the rough-and-tumble gold mining camp of Hangtown.

An epic poem in prose, Sweet Betsy from Pike follows the famous frontier ballad of the same name in tracing the story of a sweet girl who leaves Missouri and grows into a strong woman who learns to take charge of her own destiny.