The Fresh Taste of Southland Apple Country Is Only a Short Drive Away

First of all, before any of the other rich pleasures to come, there is the smell.

It is not the smooth, drowsy, sweet smell of summer; it has bite and tang and body, with a chilly woody edge. It is the smell that produces memories of crisp October mornings, leaves turned red and yellow, heavy Shetland sweaters, breath exhaled in small puffs.

It is a smell that can only be produced by very new apples resting in very old sheds. And at this time of year that smell hangs in Oak Glen like a delicious cloud, lingering in the mind as much as in the nostrils, an unmistakable harbinger of fall.

But the growers who operate the 12 orchards in mile-high Oak Glen, about an hour and a half from Los Angeles above Yucaipa, don’t grow the nearly 25 varieties of apples found there for their smell. They are meant to be eaten, and every year from September through December thousands of flatlanders come to the glen to do just that.

In the course of a day, visitors to the orchards, restaurants and shops can have apple nut bread with their breakfast, pour apple syrup on their pancakes, spread apple butter or apple-blossom honey on their bread, feast on apple pie, applesauce cake, apple turnovers, apple dumplings, apple chutney, apple jelly, candy apples and even apple burritos.

If they get thirsty, they can drink apple juice (which is pasteurized), apple cider (which is bottled raw and untreated), apple wine or apple tea. They can wash the dust from their hands with apple-blossom soap.

And if those byproducts still leave them unfulfilled, they can always go to the source and munch on a freshly picked Stark Gala, Lura Red, MacIntosh, Jonamac, Jonathan, Jonalicious, Ultra Red, Red Delicious, Old Fashion Delicious, Golden Delicious, Starking Delicious, Newtown Pippin, Rome Beauty, Standard Rome, Mutsu, Blushing Gold, Granny Smith, Gravenstein, Spartan, Red Gold, Staymen Winesap, Virginia Winesap or Arkansas Black.

The variety of tastes and appearances are dazzling, and what you eat in the afternoon may have been on the tree that morning.

Oak Glen, according to the Oak Glen Applegrowers Assn., is the largest apple-growing area in Southern California and the largest roadside selling operation of its kind in the United States. The apples grow on 360 acres of orchards that are bisected by a winding two-lane road. In a good year, more than 360,000 bushels of apples are sold and more than 200,000 gallons of cider pressed.

And none of it, the growers say, is exported. The apples, the cider, the pie--all of it is sold locally, mostly at roadside sheds that have stood for generations. The picking begins in early September and ends in late October, and the apples and their products are sold until the stock runs out, which can be as late as early January. During this season, the growers keep their roadside sheds open seven days a week.

Prices vary slightly from grower to grower, but most apples are sold at around 35 cents a pound--undercutting Los Angeles area supermarkets--and cider is going for about $4.50 a gallon.

But it is not the prices, or even the apples alone, that draw the crowds that line the sides of Oak Glen Road with their cars. It is, one grower said, less of a shopping trip than a sentimental pilgrimage.

“We have people coming up here now who remember coming up with their parents, and now they’re bringing their own kids,” said Jo Anne Wilshire, the owner of the 110-year-old Wilshire Ranch near the top of Oak Glen. “There are a lot of transplants in California, people who come from the East, and they’ll come here and say, ‘Oh, it reminds me of back home when we were kids.’ They have memories of fall, and of apple season, and a very good feeling comes over them and they like to take time to talk and reminisce.”

Back to Her Roots

Wilshire was born in Oak Glen, as were her three sisters, all of whom own part of the ranch. To her, the large, weathered packing shed filled with the sweet tang of apples and redolent of old, weathered wood, is like a home in the fall. She lived for 30 years in Los Angeles, she said, before “coming back to my roots” five years ago.

“My sisters and I knew how to drive a tractor, spray, operate a harvester and shoot a rifle a long time before we learned to be young ladies and not chew gum and cuss,” Wilshire said with a wide smile.

“People get excited,” she said. “They can see the seasonal change and they can feel the change in the air. And they love to pick apples. There’s a real electricity here.”

Occasionally, she said, the voltage gets turned up a bit when her niece, who was born in the glen, returns to help out at the shed. The niece is actress/singer Susan Anton.

Many visitors, Wilshire said, come specifically to pick their own apples at one of the three orchards in the glen that hang out the “U-pick” sign: Linda Vista Orchard, Riley’s Log Cabin Farm and Orchard and Apple Creek Orchard. However, she said, because of a cold snap early this growing season, the crops of the “U-picks” in the glen are too thin to allow the pick-your-own option this year. Most of the crop at those orchards, she said, is being converted to cider.

At the Four Oaks Ranch, 10 miles beyond the glen in Cherry Valley, the frost did not harm the crop extensively, allowing a “U-pick” operation to be mounted for the first time this year, said Shirley Hudson, whose family owns Four Oaks and operates a shed and cider mill at Snow Line Orchards in Oak Glen.

Mike Sather, a computer programmer from Los Angeles, was visiting the glen for the second time.

“I needed a break from work and this is perfect,” he said. “It’s relaxing and charming. Also I eat a lot of apples--two a day except on the days I eat three. I like the Golden Delicious and the best I’ve ever had are here.”

Julian and Tehachapi

Two other Southland apple-growing areas offer both “U-pick” operations and roadside sales. Nearly 60 miles northeast of San Diego, adjacent to the old mining town of Julian, are 332 acres of apple trees farmed by about 25 growers.

Most of the growers have small operations, said Woody Barnes, whose family has run the Manzanita Ranch since 1907, but all sell apples, cider and other apple products strictly at the roadside.

About a two-hour drive from downtown Los Angeles--just outside of Tehachapi--is Southern California’s third major apple-growing area, where more than 25 varieties of the fruit are grown. Tehachapi offers roadside sales and features craft shops, restaurants and other retail businesses. Some Tehachapi orchards sell strictly to commercial buyers; others cater to the public.

Tehachapi’s annual Applefest Weekend concludes today. According to Helen Pencille, a clerk who works for Patterson Orchards, on festival weekends the town is always filled and the cider flows.

As with Julian and Tehachapi, cider is perhaps the most popular apple byproduct in Oak Glen. Several of the orchards operate their own cider presses, in which blends of apples are pulped, then squeezed and the juice siphoned into jugs.

The non-pasteurized cider will ferment if not refrigerated and, the growers say, many customers who have not heeded warnings and left the cider capped and unrefrigerated have been surprised when the glass jugs explode as the fermentation accelerates.

Often the rooms containing the cider presses become coated with a film of cider and pulp. It is not tidy work, but the smell is luxurious.

“Hey, those people get to make a mess and not get yelled at,” one boy said as he peered through the visitors’ window at the cider press at the Los Rios Rancho orchard, the largest in the glen.

Mark Robertson, the manager of Los Rios, said his most popular apples, the Arkansas Blacks, appear in late October. Because of the high demand, he said, Los Rios will limit the dark, purplish apples to one box per customer.

“They ripen right around Halloween,” Robertson said. They’ve got a lot of sex appeal. We could make a fortune on them if we had more.”

Feast or Famine

Los Rios and the other growers in the glen could use the money. While they have become accustomed over the years to bumper crops followed by lean years, business has consistently eroded “because nobody comes up here to buy apples by the bushel like they used to,” Robertson said. He believes the reason is that, with so many two-career families, people aren’t doing the canning, preserve-making and other operations that required lots of apples. “We estimate we’ll have 40,000 bushels this year, but we haven’t made a profit in five years.”

“I love it, though,” he said. “I hope this isn’t our dying gasp.”

Wilshire said that the cost of materials like packing crates, along with insurance and other overhead “is eating people up around here.” However, she said, “We’re trying to make it work. We want this to go on.”

It is difficult to imagine Oak Glen existing for any reason other than producing apples. The open wooden sheds, the old farm tools, the ramshackle outbuildings that look as though they should be tucked deep in an Ozark hollow--all of it combines to produce a tableau that is cozy and familiar, even to those who have lived all their lives in the Southland.

“After living in the big city, I appreciate it up here,” Wilshire said. “There’s a lot of the old nostalgia. The people who live here have potlucks and square-dancing during the rest of the year.

“But now is the best time. It’s apple weather. It’s the weather when you can see your breath coming out. You can sit under an apple tree and just go back in time.”