Last Sunday, we decided to try out the farmers' market in nearby Campbell to stock up on fresh fruit and local produce. It was a like a vignette of life in the Valley of Heart's Delight before technology arrived and displaced the fruit orchards and, it appears from the provenance of most of the market's produce, bumped them down the road to the central valley.
The earth is certainly bountiful here. We bought:
Blueberries
Apricots
Locally grown pistachios
... as well as strawberries, cherries and raspberries.
The pistachios were a particular novelty. I associate them almost entirely with the Middle East - getting pistachio-flavored ice-cream in Middle-Eastern restaurants, eating food with pistachios ground over it, even the color pistachio puts me in mind of Arabia for some reason. Not here though: these pistachios were from down the road, from a farm in Merced. It's a real treat for me to get some of my favorite foods locally grown, rather than imported by air or ship from somewhere hot, and therefore far away.
Where I come from, it rains about 8 days a week, 500 days a year so the main crops are potatoes, turnips, cabbage, parsnips, onions and other blandnesses that are perfect if you want to re-create an early modern European peasant diet. Pistachios and apricots, by contrast, are the kinds of foods mentioned in the Bible and in Arabian fairytales.
It's wonderful to be somewhere that has such rich, fresh food grown locally. I do wonder how on earth they do it in such a dry climate though. Even exotic fruit trees need water to really produce well. Just how much irrigation does California need? It seems like it should be a water-stressed environment due to the lack of rain (it has rained properly for a total of about 5 days in 5 months) but the land is clearly producing and producing well, if the farmers' market is anything to go by.
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