10 minute read
IN THE ORCHARD
IN THE ORCHARD A Seasonal Life Suppliers of rare fruits and foraged ingredients to the finest restaurants, this couple is behind some of the Monterey Bay area’s most memorable meals
BY MARIA GAURA PHOTOGRAPHY BY CRYSTAL BIRNS
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Ellen Baker and Freddy Menge at their La Selva Beach homestead, also headquarters for Epicenter Avocado nursery.
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The warm fog enveloping Freddy Menge and Ellen Baker’s half-acre homestead in La Selva Beach will probably burn off by afternoon. But at 10am the misty swirls make you feel you’ve stepped into a wizard’s garden of fantastical fruits, beckoned by strangely delicious berries and oddly-shaped trees offering a different treat on every branch.
Menge deftly winds through the narrow garden pathways, brushing aside squash leaves and overhanging branches. He thrusts an arm into the canopy of a shaggy tree and brings forth a handful of perfectly sweet-tart mulberries. A few steps later there are soft-textured sour cherries, taut blue serviceberries, a green fig, a nectaplum, a “Steve Silva” green bean.
A short, craggy apple tree is crowned with more than 30 grafted branches, and lush avocado trees hung with fruits glow greenly in the bright mist. Most of the edibles are offbeat varieties—nothing you’d find at an everyday grocery store. When done tasting, you wing the pits into the bushes and wipe your hands on your jeans.
How many fruit trees are there? “I honestly don’t know,” Menge cheerfully admits. “I stopped counting. Lots and lots? Clearly, I’m pretty bad at drawing boundaries.”
Menge grew up in La Selva Beach, mostly on the same property he now shares with Baker. He began grafting fruit trees and growing heritage apples more than 30 years ago, learning the ropes from experts in the California Rare Fruit Growers (CRFG) network, including local orchardists Jim Ryder, Orin Martin, Joe Stabile and Gene Lester. Today, Menge forages mushrooms and wild plants, grows an expansive kitchen garden and trials a staggering number of apple varieties in a leased orchard in nearby Aptos. He runs an avocado nursery with Baker—Epicenter Avocado Trees and Fruit—and has organized annual apple tastings for the CRFG for more than 20 years.
He’s a plantsman to the core. But Menge’s path to agriculture was anything but direct. He played competitive golf in middle and high school, and graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in “some kind of anthropology” before taking a job designing golf clubs in Taiwan. He became fluent in Mandarin and the job allowed him to pay off his college debt. But the things he loved about China didn’t include golf. Instead, his passions were traditional agriculture, traditional medicine and the country folk’s deep knowledge of wild plants and mushrooms.
“I lived in Taiwan for three years and I’d avidly seek out people gathering mushrooms and snails and seaweed and whatever,” Menge says. “I tried all the strange local foods. I’d ride my bike 100 miles down the coast and every little town had different dishes, different edible plants, things you wouldn’t see anywhere else.
“It was really interesting, this dichotomy of rural people living like they lived 500 years ago, just 100 miles from the grossest, nastiest, industrialized city,” Menge says. “Even with modernization there was room for rural and rustic production systems, and the city people valued it. Their version of ‘organic’ was ‘grown in the mountains.’ I thought, why not do that at home in California?”
FREDDY THE FORAGER
A turning point came in 1989 with a visit home and a walk in the woods. “I discovered chanterelles,” Menge recalls. “I found my first ones shortly after the Loma Prieta earthquake. I started mushroom hunting and that was the end of my golf club career.”
A six-month transition out of his design job was followed by a headlong plunge into the seasonal life of foraging, husbandry, orcharding and local foods, both gathered and cultivated. Menge also helped his mother and brother take over the Par 3 Golf Course in Aptos, which his father had operated since the 1970s.
“It was fun, My mom and brothers and I were really close,” he says. “I worked at the golf course and on the garden, I gave up my car and just rode my bike everywhere and tended my own projects. I was doing life in a different way.”
Menge foraged wild mushrooms—chanterelles, porcinis, black trumpets, candy caps— and sold them to chefs at Carried Away, Chez Renee, La Posta and Bernardus Lodge in Carmel Valley. Over time, his client list expanded to include Pizzeria Avanti, Home, The Midway, Oswald, Bantam, Soif, Gabriella Café, Carmel Valley Ranch, Aubergine, Alta Bakery and Star Bene. He raised bees with his brother and sold the honey to Aptos Natural Foods. He raised vegetables and sold what the family didn’t eat.
Hiking and outdoor labor satisfied a lifelong physical restlessness, and the vast number
When he’s not foraging for mushrooms, Menge tends an apple orchard, where he constantly tinkers with new varieties.
of variables involved in farming provided grist for research and experimentation.
Menge began grafting new branches on elderly red and golden delicious apples trees in his mom’s garden—the same trees that now sport dozens of transplanted limbs. But helping a friend tend a 10-acre orchard of heritage apples was a revelation.
“It wasn’t the beginning but it was a kick in the ass because that little orchard in Corralitos had a lot of different apples. There were a lot of things I hadn’t tasted before,” Menge says. “It was the beginning of my awareness of all the interesting apples out there.
“At the time I thought, this is fun! This seasonal life, with mushrooms in the winter, honey in the summer, harvesting fruit in the fall—your activities vary with the season,” he says. “I thought I’d do it for three years then get a teaching degree or something, get a real job. But that never happened. I fell in love with it, maybe too much.
“It’s an idiotic profession, in a way, because you’re at the mercy of weather and changing climate,” he says. “But I physically need to be outside. And it’s mind-blowing in a really good year when the forest floor is painted in washes of chanterelles. Those big flushes of mushrooms, that’s something most people never get to see.”
Mushrooms and apples led to bees. And honeybees led to love, and marriage, when Menge’s beekeeping mentor—the late, legendary Ormond Aebi—handed him Ellen Baker’s phone number.
Baker was an active member of CRFG, adept at fruit tree grafting and a committed gardener. She hunted mushrooms, kept bees, had an aquaponics project going, studied medicinal and edible plants and made miso, tempeh and tofu from scratch.
“She took me into her little greenhouse and had galangal and turmeric growing,” Menge remembers. “And in her garage, she dropped my jaw with a wall of monstrously fruiting shiitake logs. Everything was done in a low-tech, home-brew, super frugal way that I found irresistible. She was way ahead of me in a lot of ways and did it all while keeping her car a lot cleaner than I managed to.”
Menge bought half of his mother’s oneacre property in La Selva Beach, where the couple built a home from salvaged cypress trees and doubled down on creating an organic kitchen garden, farm, apiary and tree nursery. There were also chickens and pigs and a well-loved milk cow.
Menge says Baker is the organizer who sequences the crops, plans annual production and manages their avocado tree nursery. “She’s also pretty good with a mattock and a manure shovel,” he quips. “She’s into this lifestyle too or she wouldn’t have touched me with a 10foot pole.”
APPLE CRAVINGS
But the home garden wasn’t big enough to contain a burgeoning apple obsession, and in the early aughts Menge began planting trees on a lovely parcel in Larkin Valley owned by Rich and DeAnne Hart. Menge credits his landlords as friends who support the preservation of heritage apples and the ongoing development of improved varieties.
“This orchard is a farfetched project and not super lucrative, but they’re happy to get some of the fruit and see the land being used,” he says. “It has become a friendship that’s valuable to all of us.”
Even after 15 years, the Aptos orchard is a shapeshifting work-in-progress. Scores of new saplings are planted for every one that produces promising fruit, and heirloom varieties that are celebrated in their places of origin don’t always thrive in Aptos. Failures are unsentimentally dealt with.
“I re-graft 5 to 10 percent of the orchard every year and take out a row and a half of apples,” he says. “I change varieties from things that don’t pan out to things I’m more excited about. A lot of heirloom apples don’t
Menge has been able to persuade cherries to grow in Aptos and rare red-fleshed apples.
work in our climate, or don’t fruit well, or it’s too hot for them, or they taste bad. They’re revered in their hometowns but here they’re kind of crappy.”
There’s a smattering of experimental pears, European plums and cherries alongside the apples, because the site’s microclimate seemed to suit them. But when the first planting of cherries drowned in the wet winter soil, Menge created a three-tier grafting scheme that used plum rootstock topped with a midsection of plum/peach/cherry hybrid wood, topped with the desired cherry branches.
“It worked,” he says with a rueful grin. “Now I can grow cherries here. But this is the first good crop I’ve had in 15 years of experimenting, so it’s not exactly a rational use of my time.”
If more evidence of contrariness were needed, it’s noteworthy that Menge and Baker began selling their hard-to-find apples at the farmers’ market in the fall of 2020—in the midst of a global pandemic. But apple lovers masked up to check out their wares.
“People are so appreciative, it just makes us want to cry,” he says. “We’re grateful that it matters, and that when given an opportunity, people recognize and appreciate real quality fruit. People really care about good food.”
The years have not faded Menge’s experimental zeal, except that he no longer bothers growing anything that he doesn’t personally find delicious. The hundreds of apple varieties in his orchard and garden are increasingly focused on the more-robust offspring of Cox’s orange pippins and red-fleshed apples such as pink pearl, grenadine, rubaiyat and pink parfait.
“I’ve grown and tasted maybe 500 types of apples, but there are more than 3,000 known varieties,” he said. “There’s plenty of room for experimentation in my future.”
Maria Gaura is a lifelong writer, journalist and gardener. She lives in downtown Santa Cruz with her family, two elderly cats and an ambivalent garden that can’t decide if it wants to be a vegetable patch, a flower bed or a miniature orchard.
IF YOU GO
Menge and Baker will resume selling heirloom varieties of pears, apples, European plums and more at the Westside Farmers’ Market in Santa Cruz on Saturdays from early September through November.
The date and location for this year’s California Rare Fruit Growers Apple Tasting was still uncertain at press time, so check the group’s website at mbcrfg.org or subscribe to the EMB newsletter for updates. 40 ROTATING TAPS
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