Take a Hike … with Mike Monroe: Enjoy the fruits of your labor on a fun tour of MH’s Andy’s Orchard

A visit to Andy’s Orchard will be time well spent — a chance to look back and to look forward.

By Mike Monroe

Mike Monroe

Everyone should take advantage of a fun agricultural adventure. Pause for a moment, allocate some time, and absorb the experience of Andy’s Orchard. A selection of amazing tree-ripened fruit awaits you.

For three summers, we have been unable to walk the orchards and learn from Andy and his team of stone fruit aficionados. But now, with COVID-19 requirements relaxed, savor the moment and feel what the Valley of Heart’s Delight was all about.

Leave the challenges, the changes, the commotion of the world behind you when you step into the orchard. I always start at the tasting tables, where I sample the various fruits that Andy has harvested that morning at the peak of their flavor. Then I select which varieties that I intend to pick and bring home. Sometimes I feel like a kid in a candy store, rushing from one sample to another. I think the better approach is to slow down and really compare Bing cherries with Black Tartarians or the flavor nuances between a Silver Logan peach and a Suncrest.

These two tours and tastings are high quality family time — a chance to learn about where our food comes from, the skill sets necessary to produce delicious and nutritious fruit, and gain an appreciation of our local agricultural history.

Photo courtesy Visit Morgan Hill

Not too long ago, the Santa Clara Valley was a vast orchard of plums, apricots, peaches and vineyards.  Blossom Hill Road deserved its name as the trees in bloom were a sight to behold.

Imagine the valley with more than 100,000 acres planted in orchards and vines in the late 1940s. Packing houses, canneries, and communities like Morgan Hill and Gilroy thriving based upon an agricultural economy.  School calendars were even designed to accommodate the prune harvests.

Today, we can point to the many aspects of our modern progress with the ever increasing deployment of super technologies. Yet there is an aspect of our rapid paced lifestyles and unsatiated development that has relentlessly overwhelmed our landscapes and agricultural heritage.

I believe a visit to Andy’s Orchard will be time well spent — a chance to look back and to look forward. And perhaps a moment of reflection is requisite about the resource gift we have inherited. One thing is for sure though — I’m going to line up some Golden Transparent Gage Plums for jamming this summer. You will never find that variety at the grocery store — and the taste is beyond scrumptious.

See you at Andy’s Orchard!

Mike Monroe is an amateur historian and naturalist who enjoys all the wonders of the southern Santa Clara Valley. Mike and his family have resided in Gilroy since 1986.