Life Is Sweet for Orchard Manager

Here in the high desert, where the Santa Anas are little more than breezes mussing the weary fruit trees, Ken Striplin waits for the last persimmon to be history.

That salutary moment will come today or tomorrow. A visitor’s hand will reach up and snap the fruit from its branch, and write finis to the 1997 harvest at Nessa Ranch.

Then life at the pick-your-own orchard, where Striplin is live-in manager, will become slow and desultory, sweeter than the sweetest die-hard hanging in the most patient tree on the place.

Striplin, a barrel-bellied, loquacious man who’s had 60 seasons of ripening, has been stewarding Nessa Ranch for a half-dozen years. In that time, he’s learned to fit his energies and expectations to the natural cycle that governs the lives of the orchard’s 3,000 trees.

Winter, for example, is pruning.

Memorial Day, the high point of the harvest for Nessa Ranch’s cherries, is loose caravans of the citified and suburbanized strung out on the road that twists up through dramatic Bouquet Canyon. “They’ve been cooped up in L.A. all winter, so they’re just dying to come out to the good country,” Striplin says.

High summer, when the sun sits on the desert like a fat man, is unflagging maintenance of the drip-irrigation system.

Labor Day is the apex of the harvest for the Asian pears and the peaches.

And autumn, the prime season for goofing off, can commence as soon as the 100 Fuyu persimmon trees are unburdened of their 1,000 pounds of low-acid fruit. By appointment, persimmon-lovers may take what they wish for $1 a pound (the telephone number is 805-270-1973).

For Striplin, life in the orchard is hardly arduous. Between chores, he has abundant time to ponder and tinker and indulge his love for designing and building small experimental aircraft, which he flies from the flat field adjoining the orchard.

Over the years, he has owned a music school in Las Vegas and a small, kit-airplane manufacturing firm in Lancaster, and worked as a car salesman. Although he also had experience growing pears and peaches, taking on Nessa Ranch meant learning to downshift from the high gear in which his businessman’s mind habitually ran.

“When I started, when I was checking the irrigation system, I found myself rushing from valve to valve, then found I had nothing much to do the rest of the day,” he says. “So I decided that I was going to take my time. I decided that every day I was going to stop at this one spot for 10 minutes and just look at the squirrels. Now I am in the groove.”

The change also has meant learning the difference between business trends and nature’s trends, the latter of which are more interesting to Striplin but also much less predictable. Birds, for example, can wreak havoc on the fruit yield. And two of the last three years, late frosts killed the trees’ blossoms, wiping out between 80% and 90% of the crop.

Fortunately, no one is counting on Nessa Ranch to grow large profits. The place is owned by two investors who paid big money for the land, speculating that the mammoth Ritter Ranch residential development project, now bankrupt, might eventually lead to water being brought to the area.

“This was going to be another San Fernando Valley,” Striplin says. “No one was going to be growing cherries here in that case.”

If the tepid real estate development market in the Palmdale area heats up again, the orchard might finally pay off for its owners. It is located on a ridge 3,000 feet above sea level. Nearby Bouquet Reservoir keeps the air relatively moist. The desert breezes, which, gathering force as they squeeze south through the canyons to become the dreaded Santa Ana winds in Los Angeles, here are playful and cooling.

The microclimate makes the Leona Valley one of the few places in Southern California where cherries can be grown. It also makes it a place a lot of people would find attractive to live in, assuming someone arranges for a sufficient supply of currently scarce water.

Until that time, Striplin’s job essentially is to hold the land, to generate enough money to pay his own small salary and the property taxes. The continuation of his idyll, he knows, “depends on whether one of these big development conglomerates puts one of its pins on the map, right on us.”

One thing is certain. No ordinary person could buy a patch of land like this in the area today, sink a well in it, plant trees and settle into a tranquil life.

“This is million-dollar land,” Striplin says. “And drilling a well would cost 25 thousand bucks, and it might be dry when you get to the bottom.”

Moreover, in an age of supermarket chains and big brokers, small fruit growers have little chance of making a livable profit on their produce.

Well, a person with a businessman’s mind-set can’t exactly root for a lame economy. Still, Striplin is hopeful the current real-estate stasis will continue for at least another five years. Five years of bumping between the tree rows in the old golf cart he’s rebuilt. Five years of long, talky breakfasts with other land-tenders at Jackie’s restaurant. Five years of overalls and looking at the squirrels.

“It’s perfect for a guy who doesn’t want to work hard and wants to enjoy life,” he says. “The whole country had this kind of life a hundred years ago, and it’s a shame we kind of chucked it away. It’s spoiled me big time--and I appreciate it.”