Love Apple Farms: Homegrown gets hard core
HOME & GARDEN Art of farming classes branch out to raising livestock, making yarn
Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Santa Cruz -- Annette Truong works full time in marketing for a Silicon Valley firm, but when she plays Farmville, it's the real McCoy. After work, in her cozy mountain home, Truong devotes her second life to home crafting, making hard cider from homegrown apples, grafting fruit trees, baking bread and spinning artisan yarn with wool from her "urban sheep" - an Angora rabbit named Cloudy Day.
Truong lives and teaches at Love Apple Farms, a working biodynamic farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains with a do-it-yourself mission and an evangelistic bent.
The farm's basic classes on canning, cheese making and organic gardening draw students from urban and suburban neighborhoods throughout the Bay Area. New this year are courses aimed at the self-sufficiency movement's geeky fringe - growing grains for home baking and raising organic fiber for spinning and weaving.
"This is going to be the first season we'll have homegrown flax and cotton to work with," said Truong, whose daylong Artisan Yarns class shows students how to transform fibers into yarn using a homemade drop spindle.
"We hope to have (the first crop) ready for the June class, so we can send students home with enough seeds to grow some flax and cotton of their own," she said. "Even if it's just a little container on the patio, it'll be enough to experiment with."
For Truong, honing the skills of a farm wife provides balance to a career in high tech. And the homemade brew and delicious meals are only two of the many rewards of a self-sufficient lifestyle.
"I love collecting information and satisfying my curiosity," Truong said. "If I can make my own bread, I wonder, 'What would it take to grow my own grain?' There's a fascination with getting closer to the source, learning how things work and passing that information along to others."
Founded in the '90s by owner Cynthia Sandberg, Love Apple Farms has expanded its repertoire from heirloom tomatoes and artisan produce (the farm supplies Manresa, the Michelin-rated restaurant in nearby Los Gatos) to pastured meats and an ever-widening curriculum of the farming arts. The exploding popularity of urban agriculture has allowed the Love Apple community to branch out into such esoteric topics as gopher trapping, beer making, beekeeping, goat husbandry and caring for backyard chickens.
Just this month, Sandberg inked a deal to lease an adjoining 58-acre parcel, more than tripling the farm's current 22-acre footprint, which will allow for demonstration plots of grains and fibers as well as a small herd of heirloom-breed pigs.
Headed for the kitchen
The pigs are destined for the kitchen at Manresa, along with the pastured hens and goats already being raised at the farm. "We hope to soon be teaching classes on heirloom meat production and home butchering," Sandberg said, noting that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has raised public interest in the topic by vowing to eat only humanely raised meat from animals that he has killed himself for one year.
"Some people want to learn (home butchering) for financial reasons," she said. "And for some, it's a political statement."
Today's so-called urban homesteading movement is a direct descendant of the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and '70s. But where the hippie farmers flocked to the countryside and turned their backs on the urban rat race, today's back-to-the-landers are staying put, using the resources at hand and working to make their cities and lifestyles more sustainable.
They are taking classes at places like Love Apple Farms or the Institute of Urban Homesteading in Oakland, then going home and replacing lawns with organic vegetable gardens and backyard chicken coops. Urban hipsters are learning skills at A Place for Sustainable Living in Oakland or BioFuel Oasis in Berkeley and transforming rooftops, balconies and vacant lots into kitchen gardens.
"It's a natural progression," Sandberg said. "People learn to cook, then they want to use fresh vegetables out of their own garden. Then they find themselves with 100 pounds of tomatoes, and they want to can them and make the perfect pasta sauce.
"I know a gal who came to our goat-keeping class last year, and now she's looking for a property to buy so she can start her own artisan cheese-making operation," Sandberg said. "She got inspired, and now she's on a mission."
Love Apple Farms: On-site classes in the Santa Cruz Mountains, 2317 Vine Hill Road, Santa Cruz. (831) 588-3801. For schedule, go to www.loveapplefarms.com.
The Institute of Urban Homesteading: Classes at instructors' homes throughout the Bay Area. Spring semester begins March 15. For schedule, go to iuhoakland.com.
A Place for Sustainable Living: Workshops in homesteading, permaculture and other green endeavors. Various locations in Oakland. For class schedule, go to aplaceforsustainableliving.org.