A Great Spot Under The Mulberry Trees To Ponder
Pause to ponder, all of the wonderful things in your life, and where you are in this moment. How far you have truly come. Take a moment, pat yourself on the back. It can be anything that is especially meaningful to you. I think many of us don’t take the time to pause, reflect, remember, and pat ourselves on the back. Life itself often gets in the way, but the journey is really where the riches in life lies.
Twenty five years ago, my husband John and I, had just acquired our Encinitas property with an open field of nothing but foxtail. I remember vividly visualizing and wanting a property with two Adirondack chairs facing towards a view and water. Something similar I had seen on Cape Cod vacation.
After a good stab at starting a garden and failing in this field, I quickly realized it had to be a more serious concerted effort to successfully grow something here. Ironically, struggling to figure out what, I happened to see an issue of a Bon Appétit magazine’s “Back of the Napkin” article featuring Peggy Fleming, the endearing 1968 U. S. Olympic gold medalist figure skater, describing her Los Gatos, California, backyard vineyard. A spark of an idea to do the same was started. What about a vineyard as a landscape solution? It had many pluses. Beautiful to look at and onto the ocean, four season interest, drought tolerant, genuinely using the land, and possibly growing a good grape.
Finding a vineyard consultant, and expertise to plant a vineyard in Encinitas took many years. Backyard vineyards are prolific now in San Diego County, but back then I was a little ahead of the times. Finally, in 2006, everything seemed to align. We found a local consultant. Mira Costa College offered a Vineyard Management & Production class. Work finally began. Our field was leveled, measured, staked, planted and irrigated with the help of the entire class. it was a big experiment, a leap of faith, and the rest is history. Next year, our vineyard will be 20 years old.
Our west property backed up to a working nursery originally, early in our time here. I chose and planted a long row of ‘Little Ollie’ olive trees, to aesthetically buffer our view and property line. I chose fruitless olives trees because I wanted the wonderful Mediterranean look, and thought the grapevines were enough to grow and manage, without adding harvesting and pressing olives in the mix. It was a good decision.
Ten years later, I decided to create a nice alfresco seating area close to the vineyard. A social area for entertaining, possibly cooking, and overall enjoying the vineyard. Borrowing from my travels in Provence, where I saw fruitless mulberry trees commonly used as shade trees in courtyards, I thought to plant three fruitless mulberry trees. Fruitless because fruiting mulberry trees, although the fruit is divine, are messy, easily stain, and are not best for social areas.
Not easy to find, Village Nurseries near UTC at the time, said they had fruitless mulberry trees in their retail inventory and could have them transferred to San Diego from their Sacramento growing area. I remember driving up Highway 5 with my precious trees filling and hangin off the bed of my truck, hoping that the trip home would be uneventful. At first the newly planted trees struggled a bit, then a gopher nearly killed one, but, the trees came around and started growing nicely. In fact they need a good yearly trim, to keep them in check. I have shaped them to easily reach and cover the alfresco area with wonderful shade.
Around 2016, the nursery property in front of us sold, and is destined to be developed. Knowing that there was to be a development coming, I searched for taller trees for a west hedge that would work nicely with the view, horizon, existing olive trees, and the vineyard. I choose the Arizona Cypress, because it is a tall cypress that can be trimmed to a suitable height, is drought tolerant, has a lovely gray-green foliage that would work beautifully with the horizon and sky, and it has a fairly long life span. In short, it has the capability to hide what I want, and complement the existing landscape.
When I look out at this view, I do have to pause to ponder and remember it all. The challenges, the unknown, the triumphs, the appreciation.
Bon Appétit et Bon Weekend…Bonnie
