The fruit in my hand is 6 months old, but tastier than ever.
It’s a pink pomelo from Pearson Ranch in California, and the big orb’s fabulously thick rind—an inch or more—is better at preserving the integrity and flavor of the fruit than anything human invention can muster. Most commodity fruits these days are picked and stored in vast chilled warehouses—apple repositories bigger than football fields exist all over eastern Washington, for example—but rarely citrus.
Especially not at Pearson Ranch.
“The best place to keep the fruit once it ripens is on the tree,” Tony Marquez tells me, guiding us through a 30-year-old grove of Chandler pomelo trees 25 feet tall. Pearson workers pick fresh pomelos from these trees for 6 months, December through June, and though when first ripe they are eminently edible, as time passes, the flavor deepens and sweetens.
“Citrus fruit is its own storage device. Kind of wonderful, you know?”
Yes, indeed. Pomelos are very large, 1-pound fruits that are the ancestors of grapefruit; they have been grown for thousands of years as they spread around the world from their Southeast Asian origins. They have been little known in the United States, perhaps because grapefruit holds sway in the tart-eating-citrus universe, and that is at least in part because one must do a little work to extract the sections from the rind.
“It’s easy,” Marquez says, showing me how to start at one end of the section and peel away the membrane that holds the fruit vesicles within its thick package—an art I started working on several years ago, when I first discovered these splendid fruits on Pearson’s website.
Pearson offers cara cara, bergamot, Valencia, Seville, and navel oranges, not to mention juice-grade oranges; moro and sanguinelli blood oranges; Meyer, pink, and extra-juicy Santa Teresa lemons; melogold and oroblanco grapefruits; calamondins; kaffir and finger limes; and pomelos. Web visitors will also find “Farmer Tony’s” ruminations on agriculture, farming, and modern life in his blog.
But while citrus rind is a marvelous natural invention to preserve the fruit, oranges, lemons, grapefruits, mandarins, and such don’t continue to ripen once removed from the tree. That’s why almost all fresh-fruit citrus is picked and shipped right away, and fruits that stay on the tree just keep ripening.
“By the time summer rolls around, they’re so good you could squeeze ‘em right on pancakes instead of syrup,” Marquez avows of his navel oranges.
Citrus Country
Only navel oranges and pomelos are grown on Pearson’s 28-acre home orchard near Porterville, an hour south of Fresno. The rest of the citrus varieties they sell online are provided by other growers nearby in what’s known as the “citrus belt” along the Sierra Nevada foothills.Here, on the east side of the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys, there is adequate warmth and water to grow the fruits that have been central to human life for thousands of years. Aside from the wondrous flavor of citrus, all members of the family are high in vitamin C, and were treasured in centuries past as the antidote to scurvy. British sailors are called “Limeys” because they used to stop by Spain on their journeys, pick up limes, and carefully have a bite or two every other day as they spread the British empire worldwide.
Louise Ferguson, a professor at the University of California–Davis, one of the nation’s leading agronomic institutions, explains that “citrus are called non-climacteric.” Ferguson is coauthor of a history of citrus production in California, which dates back to the Spanish missions of the 18th century and really took off in the late 19th century with the introduction of navel oranges. Seedless, sweeter, and easier to peel than earlier varieties, navels quickly became popular in the consumer market and gained national renown as America’s new continental rail network brought them back east.
“That’s where California’s reputation as an agricultural paradise comes from,” Ferguson says.
Pearson’s fruit diversity mirrors the California agriculture industry as a whole. The Golden State is by far the leader in U.S. food production, with 400 different crops, from apples to zucchini, grown by almost 70,000 farms whose total sales reach $50 billion a year—double the next nearest state, Iowa, and more than the GDP of half the world’s countries.
Family Roots
Pearson Ranch is but a tiny microcosm of the golden whole, of course, but its unique character reflects that of its founders. Tony has a background in radio broadcasting, and is a third-generation member of a California farming family. Destiny Marquez, Tony’s wife and business partner, is the daughter of a Central Valley irrigation pump businessman, and it was her father who first planted the orchards they now shepherd.A friend convinced them in 1998 to try internet sales, making Pearson among the very first produce vendors online. Today in the United States, internet sales still represent just about 3 percent of total fresh produce sales. But it is far more significant to the Marquezes.
“Between our internet retail and wholesale direct and our partnership with the commercial packing houses, we have been able to become a year-round business,” says Destiny Marquez, who says that Pearson Ranch sells about 20 percent of its orange and pomelo crops online directly to consumers. “Making a living in farming in California gets harder every year, but at the end of the day, we feel good about what we do.”
While I favor Pearson’s pomelos, their oroblanco grapefruit are marvelous and, since they are my father-in-law’s favorite, solve that Christmas gift problem. The pink lemons are dandy for a summer-picnic lemonade; the Valencia oranges make amazing juice; blood oranges are a trendy fruit with a colorful bite. As they are picked and shipped pretty much on order, they are fresher than anything you’ll find at Safeway.
And while you are browsing, drill down to Farmer Tony’s philosophical musings, such as his take on January self-improvement.
“Look, if you want this New Year to be better and different, try the simple stuff first. Be kind, considerate, respectful, and most important, be yourself. Then, maybe you will find that with a few small ‘tweaks’ you’re really not so bad after all. I like you,” Marquez advises his blog readers.
How could I not want to patronize someone like that who, by the way, ships me the very best fruit I cannot grow myself? To further quote Marquez, who’s not overly serious about anything: “Orange you glad you visited?” Yes, I sure am.
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