About Our Apples and the Orchard
Forest View Ranch is host to 20 varieties of various Heritage apples. To name a few:
Gravenstein: In 2005, Slow Food USA declared the Gravenstein apple a heritage food and included it in their Ark of taste. Slow Food USA reports that production in Sonoma County is currently 750,000 boxes (15,000 tons) of Gravensteins a year; a third of the fruit (250,000 boxes) is of premium market quality.
“It has often been said that if the Gravenstein could be had throughout the year, no other apple need be grown.” Luther Burbank
Golden Delicious: Very sweet to the taste with a delicate skin.
Jonathan: Medium sized and sweet. These apples ripen in the fall.
McIntosh: The fruit has red and green skin, tart flavor, and tender white flesh, which ripens in late September. These are all-purpose apples, suitable both for cooking and eating raw.
Roman Beauty: These apples are almost all red glossy, thick skin and firm flesh. Used for baking, as its flavor develops when cooked, and it holds its shape well. Late September they are ready.
Forest View Ranch is also home to pear, plum, peach and quince trees. There is as an abundance of seasonal flowers because you have to have bees and birds if you want apples!
Contact Us for more information or Call 707.479.5138
Paul’s ( “farm” spreads throughout Sonoma County and is owned by more than 100 different landowners. Talk about serving your community! Paul dubs himself a nomadic farmer. “I’m like and Indian going back to his annual harvest area,” he laughs.
By planting and tending organic orchards, Paul is doing his part to preserve open space, protect watersheds, promote agridiversity, shelter land from chemical contamination, nurture critters large and small, and animate the local economy. “Being able to work on properties all over the county gives me a strong connection to the people and the land” says Paul.
Like the winegrower, Paul believes that his distinctive fruit products are a reflection fo their Sonoma County terroir- that mysterious mix of soils, minerals, exposures and weather that converts a simple apple seed to magic by the bushel. Unlike many competitors, Nana Mae grows and harvests apples for the fullest expressions of each orchard’s unique sense of place.
Paul picks these heirloom fruits only at the very peak of luscious ripeness. What a difference there is between a merely ripe apple and a mature apple! Just another week on the tree can bring an apple to perfection!
