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The Abundant Walnut Orchards of Yesteryear
By Pat Murphy

Editor's Note: One of the most appealing aspects of the Santa Ynez Valley to both residents and tourists alike is the sight of neatly-tended fields of fruits and vegetable, groves of trees and rolling vineyards. These farms and ranches surround the towns like patchwork quilts which cover the ground to the edge of the wilderness areas of the Los Padres National Forest. This article reminisces about one of the once abundant walnut orchards that have been largely replaced by other farms of agriculture, or by houses.

Bob Gleason recently explained that he named his walnut ranch "La Querencia," which means "The Beloved" in Spanish. The original wrought-iron sign by Walter Christiansen, and some of the trees the Gleasons planted in 1949 can still be seen from Alamo Pintado Road near Ballard.

  Way back in 1949, Bob Gleason and his wife Ellen planted a twenty-five acre grove of English walnuts on their property on Alamo Pintado Road. Soon, row upon row of glorious leafy walnut trees could be admired from the road and produced walnuts of such fine quality that they were sold to the famous Diamond Walnut Company.
  "When we started, there was really no help here for maintaining a walnut grove, so we imported a Mexican couple from an agency in Los Angeles," recalls Bob. "Angelo Najera worked for us for many years and at harvest time he would bring his entire extended family to work. Sometimes the immigration service would swoop by and everyone would drop what they were doing and run down the creek bed and hide until they were gone."
  "There were no automated tree shakers at that time and the workers wielded 25-foot long aluminum poles to shake the branches so that the ripe nuts would fall to the ground. Later, we had automated booms that were attached to a tractor and they shook the whole tree! And sometimes, we would have to go through the grove three times, if the ripening process was strung out. We always hoped for cool weather from about the tenth of September to November first, as that would cause the green outer hulls to crack and the nuts could be picked up from the ground."
"We didn't get rich growing walnuts," said Bob with a smile. "But they paid for our taxes and our help. After the

first frost we would prune and during the summer we would have to irrigate. We were going along pretty well until some equipment was brought in from another location without having been fumigated. This was in the 1960s and suddenly we were infected with the black husk fly. We didn't get a single nut that year! So from then on we had to spray by helicopter every fall."

The quality of the Gleason's walnuts was so high that Diamond gave them a grade of 100% a number of times. "They always wanted the top quality walnuts for the Christmas season," explained Bob. "They would test them by cracking open exactly one hundred nuts and evaluating them. Some years they found every one of our nuts perfect and we were very pleased."
Unfortunately, growing walnuts on a small scale became less and less profitable as automation required expensive equipment. "Most of our old grove is gone now," said Bob, who now lives elsewhere in the Valley. "Most walnuts come from a few big growers up north these days. But we sure had a lot of fun back then, when we did pretty much everything by hand."

Walnut harvesting - circa 1950's
Bob Gleason (right) looks on as Frank Felix pours bags of walnuts into the husking machine in the 1950's photo. In the background, two women work at a table sorting the husked walnuts to place them on drying trays which were then stored in the drying shed behind them for a few days before the nuts were sent to Goleta for shipping.

Bob has had a long and interesting life in the Valley, being one of the founders, along with the late-Vince Evans, of the Vikings organization in 1974. He is still an active participant of this benevolent order. Bob and Vince were also partners in the Danish Inn. Bob and his late-wife Ellen were also instrumental in the founding of the Santa Ynez Valley Historical Society. "That was really Ellen's baby," says modest Bob. "Jeanette Davidson and Grace Lyons were also dedicated to seeing it happen."