The Tulare walnuts in this week’s box come from Haag Farm just to the north of Esparto. Jim Haag, a farmer trained in mathematics, has been known to take on such questions as “where’s the start of the Capay Valley?”

In a thorough essay on his website, Jim considers more views than a 20-sided icosahedron revealing the complexity of such a seemingly simple question. After visiting post offices, attending community meetings, and climbing Berryessa Peak, Jim’s “ramblings” end where one might expect from a scientifically-trained farmer—it’s just not quite the answer one would expect:

“We now scientifically conclude that California is primarily composed of Pacific Ocean bottom scrapings piled up over millennia and jammed onto the Western margin of the North American Plate. Said process extending our coast westward from its original Nevada location, as the adjoining Pacific Plate subducts under us in its roughly North-Northeastern motion over the molten magma covering out inner iron core. Zeroing in to our locality, just one of the long roughly North-South oriented puckers in these bottom scrapings is indeed our cherished Capay Valley. An inglorious unexpected birth indeed for such a wondrous place in which to live and work, full of fun people, vistas of promise, bounteous crops, wildlife and nature galore, and adventures ahead! Even wild pigs. Our beloved valley is indeed at its essence a blossoming of bottom scrapings!”

Excerpted from Ramblings, Recipes, & Reflections by James N. Haag

For decades, Haag Farm has specialized in growing nutritious, insecticide-free walnuts “as close as feasible to the old natural way of your grandparents!” Haag Farm uses a biologically integrated approach that includes both mulching walnut leaves over the tree rows and mild herbicides, spreading chipped walnut prunings over the entire orchard floor, and conventional fertilizer to create “a very, very squeaky clean orchard” which is important for harvest and pest control.

For more information about Haag Farm or to purchase walnuts directly visit http://walnuts.us/.

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