Flying Disc Ranch

Description

Robert Lower founded Flying Disc Ranch in 1979. He started growing dates nearby (leasing palms) in 1974. Robert cleared, plumbed, and planted the ranch from scratch. The rows were desert before 1979. He feels like a pioneer. Flying Disc Ranch has always been a direct market enterprise. From the beginning, we trucked our produce to food cooperatives in San Diego, Laguna Beach, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, and Portland. When many of the food cooperatives dissolved, we sold to health food stores and buying clubs. When they faded, we started farmers markets (our first was in Riverside, in 1972). Robert’s techniques spring from experience and observation. He like says to say he has a relationship with each palm. Throughout the year we interact with the palms several times, climbing up into them with ladders to prune, de-thorn, pollinate, bag and tie, and harvest. When we thin the medjhool date palms (if we did not thin medjhool clusters, the dates would be one-quarter of the size!), we spend up to six hours in just one tree. Robert has been working with date palms for the longest and he can point out the idiosyncracies of each palm. The soil at Flying Disc Ranch never gets cultivated, therefore the garden floor always stays green. The ranch is covered with a living mulch which protects it from harsh sunlight and drying conditions and also provides habitat for all the beneficial insects. Robert mows the grass about once a month with a flail mower (a tractor with a mowing implement). The living mulch absorbs sunlight more slowly, causing the dates to take longer to ripen. This makes the fruit sweeter, softer, and more nutrient-dense. The farm has a high insect count per cubic foot above and below the soil. The insect population includes black widow, vinegar rune, brown recluse, and wolf spiders and several types of ants and wasps. The first foot of soil is alive with micronutrients. Others that help out on the ranch are owls, bats, rattlesnakes and other snakes, scorpions, hawks and peregrine falcons.

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