It's Gravenstein month in Gravenstein country

Sunset, August, 1984

Ripe Gravensteins are also outstanding-- some say incomparable--for cider. For help on making your own cider, see page 114 of the October 1983 Sunset. Or stop at one of the farms that sell Gravenstein cider (see our map).

Mini-destinations, by country roads

Occidental, for big dinners. Take Occidental Road about 10 miles west from State 116 to the tiny, redwood-shaded village of Occidental. Here, three surprisingly similar Italian restaurants serve family-style meals, specializing in home-made ravioli and a feather-light apple fritter that's a fitting conclusion to a day in apple country.

This cuisine is not a matter of artful little side dishes that might be mistaken for garnishes. What's involved here is pickup trucks in the parking lot, then a big feed, checkered tablecloths, and waitresses in tractor-tread shoes who really care whether you've had enough to eat and never quite believe you have.

Freestone, for a look or overnight. Folded into a green cup of pasture where apple country thins its way westward into sheep country, Freestone was once a stop on a narrow-gauge railroad and has a 100-year-old Greek Revival hotel to prove it (the building, though still evocative, now houses an antique store and a nursery).

Turning north from Bodega Highway on Bohemian Highway, you'll pass a new wool shop, a carpenter Gothic one-room school, the hotel, then a hushed but easy-going general store. Just past, set back from the road, is the Green Apple Inn, a bed-and-breakfast farmhouse with lots of casual porch.

Growing pains in apple country

Though favored by nature with a nearly perfect apple climate, Sebastopol is not Eden. The hilly undulations of its landscape make many orchards picturesque, but more difficult to service with farm vehicles than the straightforward agricultural tracts of the flat Central Valley.

Gravenstein apples don't travel or keep as well as tougher-skinned kinds, so most of the crop is sold for juice or processing; the fresh market for this premium apple has unrealized potential, but there's little money for promotion. A growers' co-op, successful for many years, has recently been abandoned, plagued by a combination of bad apple years and bad business years; its facilities are now owned by a large Oakland-based apple processor.

One way or another, the growers have got to get more tons per acre to earn a fair living from their farms. Currently, 20 tons per acre is the output considered necessary to grow apples competitively; Sonoma County's average production is only about 12. Why? Older trees more loosely planted, wet winters (and fungus infections in apple trees), no irrigation.

County farm advisor Paul Vossen feels that the only way Sonoma growers can compete effectively with year-round, high-volume suppliers from new apple regions in the U.S. and abroad is by irrigating. Apples grown on semidwarf rootstock promise denser, more profitable plantings, but so far such trees have not done well without irrigation.

It's in planting methods that grower Darrel Hurst of Twin Hills Ranch sees hope. He's experimenting with what he calls "hedgerow' plantings: he trains the main branches of his trees out and down, not up, for a bushier, downward-sprawling form. When trees are grown this way, tractors pass alongside (not under) them. He uses the hillsides to advantage, terracing trees so plantings can be closer still. As trees mature, he hopes to see them produce up to 30 tons per acre.