El Dorado County Farm Trails

On Wednesday evenings from June through October, the Main Street Farmers’ Market sets up at 574 Main Street in Placerville, across from Sweetie Pies. It opens at 4 p.m. and runs, rain or shine, until dusk, “8pm ish” by the organizers’ reckoning. Tables carry locally produced fruit, vegetables, jams and cottage wares, and there is music. Shoppers paying with EBT trade their benefits for tokens that every farmer and food vendor accepts. Under the Market Match program, a grant lets the market double CalFresh benefits spent on fresh fruits and vegetables, so $10 in benefits brings another $10 to spend. Seana Hartsell, who sits on the board of El Dorado County Farm Trails, manages the market.

The market is the in-town stop of a network that spreads across El Dorado County. Farm Trails lists over 120 members: farms, ranches, orchards, artists and businesses. Its roster runs from Abel’s Apple Acres on Carson Road to Alpacas of El Dorado on Boo Bear Lane in Somerset, Jollity Farm Goat Dairy in Garden Valley, Windmill Creek Olive Oil at Mt. Aukum, Goldenwood Bee Company, Lotus Bonsai Nursery, Gold Bug Park & Mine, Gold Trail Grange #452 in Coloma, and Wakamatsu Farm on Cold Springs Road. Members grow cherries, berries, peaches, apples, pears and oranges, along with wine grapes, flowers and Christmas trees. The wineries pour from the foothill appellations of El Dorado and Fair Play. The association’s own calendar runs from French lavender in summer to wine grapes, pumpkins and olives in fall, when cider, barbecue, pastries and pies come out of Apple Hill. In December come Christmas tree farms and holiday fairs.

Three trails on paper

The association divides its members into self-guided routes, each with a printable map. The U-Pick Trail covers farms where visitors harvest their own fruits, vegetables and flowers, from strawberries in spring to squash in fall. Its members include 24 Carrot Farm on Jacquier Road, American River Cherry Co., Bluestone Meadow Lavender Farm, Hangtown Kid Apple Orchard on Mace Road in Camino, Harris Family Farm in Pollock Pines, Historic Fausel Ranch on Hanks Exchange Road, Rustic Dream Farmstead in Garden Valley, Smokey Ridge Farmstand & Winery, UpCountry Ranch on Mt. Aukum Road, and Rainbow Orchards. Picking days and hours vary, and the association asks visitors to call each farm before they come.

The Ale & Cider Trail links brewers and cider makers:

• El Dorado Brewing Company in Diamond Springs
• Geartooth Alewerks on Green Valley Road
• Gold Hill Vineyard & Brewery
• Hwy 50 Brewery and Hidden Star in Camino
• Jack Russell Farm Brewery on Larson Drive
• Boa Vista Orchards
• Rainbow Orchards

The third route, the Quilt Trail, follows painted quilt squares mounted on barns, historic buildings and gardens. Some of its stops are farms: Boeger Winery, Fudge Factory Farm, Lava Cap Winery, Larsen Apple Barn. Others belong to the county, including the Veterans Memorial Building on Placerville Drive and the Public Safety Complex on Industrial Drive.

A grant from the supervisors

According to the association, El Dorado County’s farming dates to the gold rush of the 1800s. The group became a non-profit in 1992, through a grant from the county Board of Supervisors, to promote agriculture and agri-tourism. A University of California guide for farm marketing groups places the founding in a wider movement of the 1990s. In those years boards of supervisors in several foothill counties helped growers build farmers’ markets and regional marketing groups, and El Dorado County Farm Trails, Farms of Amador County and PlacerGROWN all started that way. The same guide traces Apple Hill to the early 1960s. A pear blight had destroyed crops in the Sierra foothills, and the growers visited Oak Glen to study retail apple marketing. They then formed the Apple Hill Growers Association to sell together to visitors from the Sacramento region.

Farm Trails says UC Davis has called it one of “two premier farm trails in the state.” Its board is drawn from its members:

• Mike Owen of Crystal Basin Cellars, president
• Ruth Carter of Hangtown Real Estate, vice president
• Wendell Smith of Irish Creek Ranch, past president
• Jane Harris of Harris Family Farm, treasurer
• Gordon Helm of Madrone Tree Hill, secretary
• Nancy Malik for the Quilt Trail
• Christa Campbell of Rainbow Orchards

An apple barn and a cider mill

Two of those board members keep stops on the Quilt Trail, and a Farm Bureau article in the Mountain Democrat of May 19, 2015, gave the history of both.

Harris Tree Farm sits on 100 acres of forested land in Pollock Pines. In 2015 sisters Jane and Pam Harris ran it. Their great-great-grandfather Matthew Blair homesteaded the place in the 1850s, and with his son Matthew he built and ran a lumber mill there. The article counted seven generations over 160 years. The farm sells apples, pears, berries, beans, greens and eggs, with pumpkins and Christmas trees in season. Its barn quilt hangs on the apple barn and pie shop, a building at least 100 years old. Jane painted it in the Scottish Cross pattern for the family’s heritage.

Rainbow Orchards in Camino was founded in 1977 by Christa Campbell and Tom Heflin. Heflin grew up in a pioneer farming family in the county, and the couple raised three sons on the place. Their farm stand is a barn built in the late 1930s for sorting and storing apples and pears. The barn also houses the farm’s original cider mill, which still presses fresh, unfiltered, unpasteurized cider. The orchards began with heritage pears and apples and later added blueberries, blackberries, plums, peaches, nectarines and winter squash. The bakeshop sells pies, tortes, crisps, cobblers, jams and hot apple cider donuts.

The barn carries the Rainbow Donut-Fan quilt, designed by Jane Harris from two traditional patterns. Its rainbow arch stands for the farm’s fruit and its donut border for the donuts. Inside the barn hangs an old fan quilt, pieced with squares made by a Great-Grandma Hattie in rural Nebraska and handed down through a Grandma Mimi.

Quilt squares on wood

Visit El Dorado traces the barn quilt movement to Donna Sue Groves, who began it in Ohio in 2001 to honor her mother. The El Dorado County project began, in Linda George’s telling, “when Suzi Parron, author of ‘Barn Quilts and the American Quilt Trail Movement’ gave a presentation to the Placerville Gold Bug Quilt Guild.” Visit El Dorado dates the start to 2014. George and her quilter, painter and photographer friends then took the idea to the Farm Trails association.

The sources differ on when the association took the project in. The association’s own account says March 2015. The Mountain Democrat article of May 19, 2015, says April. In that article, board president Dr. John Roe said, “It was the natural thing to do. It combines agri-tourism, art and adventure.”

The squares are boards painted to look like quilt blocks. The association describes them as 3- and 4-foot wooden squares. Visit El Dorado says they are typically about 8 feet tall and wide, and it counts 23 designs around the county. In 2018 a Quilt Block event at the Big Red Barn at Rainbow Orchards gathered artists and their designs. On June 3, 2021, the same barn hosted a class in which each painter began with a primed 24-by-24-inch board and went home with a finished block.

The first quilt story the project told came from quilter Janet Kanter-Purcell. “The quilt block design ‘On the Oregon Trail’ fit my pioneer heritage perfectly,” she said. “Ezra Meeker, my great, great grandfather, brought his young family to the Pacific Northwest by way of the Oregon Trail in 1852.” In 1906 Meeker set out to mark the trail’s route, walking beside an oxen-drawn wagon and planting monuments along the way. He reached Washington, D.C., in 1907 and met President Theodore Roosevelt about preserving the trail. Kanter-Purcell’s block appears on no map. The association says only that she lives high up in Camino, on a winding road in the trees.